I couldn't agree more. Peter Jennings, one of the staples of network news, started to cry on air when he was talking about contacting his own children. Katz has an opinion, and he molds the facts to support it.
While I agree that the ruling is absurd, the number itself is not illegal. If I understand the law correctly, the act of converting the number into the proscribed content or a device/program which allows you to do so would be illegal, not the number in and of itself.
While only slightly less absurd, this view at least makes a little more sense.
Seriously, give me a break. If they can pack all of this into the same size box without taking a major hit in either performance or price, I'm all for it. Why would you not want your PDA, which happens to be the same size as a MP3 player, to play MP3s?
What I really want is a PDA the size of the new Visor Edge with color, Bluetooth support, wireless video-conferencing, and streaming media from the web. Is that too much to ask? This thing from Sony is a step in the right direction.
If all you want to do is fiddle around with datebook and IR your business card back and forth, you should buy an M100. But please, don't complain about the cool gadgets.
1. Everybody here agrees, I'm sure, that something needs to be done to prevent errors in this type of database. Credit agencies need to be doing redundant cross checking on their data, rather than just entering it and forgeting it.
2. There needs to be some kind of coherent scheme to decide what kind of information credit agencies should have access to. If I'm 55, a vandalism conviction from my teens clearly shouldn't prevent me from getting a home improvement loan. In fact, the agency probably shouldn't even have that data. However, there has to be some sort of resource to allow reasonable background checks. Banks need to know if their customers have declared bankruptcy in the past before they are approved for a new loan, for example.
3. Once rules have been created to decide what information is allowable, there needs to be a system in place to enforce these rules. If a juvenile conviction should be sealed, it's out. If the information is more than seven years old, it's out. And so on. Unfortunately, that doesn't seem to be happening.
4. Lastly, banks, employers, and others who use to data from the credit agencies need to use that information responsibly. They shouldn't be able to reject you out of hand as soon as some blip shows up on your record. First, the users of the data need to check the information for accuracy. Second, the information should be used fairly, and only when rationally acceptable.
In summary, banks, employers, and insurance providers have to right to rationally reject an applicant based on their past. They should have some access to information and should be able to turn you down based on appropriate criteria. However, some information shouldn't be available at all, and the information that is available should be examined by a real person who can make a reasonable decision about the importance of that information.
Your response made perfect sense to me to start with. The part about refusing to pay for services or goods not rendered, I really like that. Too many companies in today's economy forget that the mainstay of good business is to provide good products and services, not to fool the customer into thinking the products or services are good when they're really not.
However, you really go downhill from there. You clearly have no conception of what is means to be a capitalist. You mispell the word, for goodness' sake. It's CAPITALISM, as in capital, as in transferable resources. Corporatism, which is the true target of your ire, is not synonymous with capitalism. The problem with the economy in the US is not that is is capitalist, but that it is less and less capitalist everyday.
In a capitalist economy, the proper function of the government is to provide and protect access to information. I should be able to find out that cigarettes are bad, Firestone tires will kill me, or whether the fruit I'm buying is genetically modified or not. Our government, however, fails to do that. I believe the failure is direct response to the entitlement mentality engendered by the government beginning with the New Deal. The government no longer protects our access to information, which means that AOL/Time Warner effectively controls what Americans believe and what information they have access to. It's a shame, really.
Corporations take advantage of that lack of information by providing shitty goods and services. That's why so many companies are intent on loading their products with new features instead of reliability. They know that more than likely, we won't be able to find out how reliable their product is before we buy it, but we sure will notice the pretty box with the big list of features.
The real answer to corporatism is not naive anti-globalism and an end to capitalism, the answer is to educate people to understand their alternatives and make reliable information freely available. End consumerism and you will end corporatism. End capitalism, and you will end freedom.
The last thing I want to see is a bunch of yuppie professional dot-commers flinging themselves through the airspace. Can you say product liability?
I'd much rather see some research into creating some sort of high speed air mass transit system. Maybe cities could buy and convert some old Chinooks. In any case, that seems much more efficient, and, um, safe than a personal airscooter.
D
Actually, most of the titanium dioxide used in Ti-diodes, pigments, and catalysts in various industrial processes are derived from petroleum coke calcining.
Actually, State AG's is correct, as what Hemos meant, I assume, was the State Attorney General's office, as in the specific Mass. Attorney General. Possessive, not plural.
-d
I don't think that anyone really wants to watch a feature length movie on their 17" monitor. I recently got a DVD drive for my computer, and to test it out, I watch the Matrix. It was pretty sweet in DVD, but I'd much rather watch it on my dad's 50" wide screen TV. What we really need to make a movie revolution is what we have with Napster; a way to share movies online for free. Before we can do that we need two things. First, we need more bandwidth. I'm stuck on a 56k connection, which is not really conducive to downloading mp3s, much less movies. Also, cheap DVD-R drives will make it possible to download movies, write them to disc, and watch them on you TV. Now that will really make a difference in the box office.
Here's the really interesting thing. Under recent decisions, the owner of a trademark or copyright or whatever can sue to get their domain name from someone else, even if the previous owner had otherwise legal possession of the name. (Think PETA) So let's say I get lucky in the upcoming auction and snap up amazon.com for a fraction of what it's probably worth. Amazon finds out and is pissed, rightfully so. So Amazon decides to sue me to get their name back. Now, they can easily afford to beat my poor self in court, but they aren't going to recover any damages for lost business as I have no money to my name. So they get clever and add NSI to the suit as a co-defendant to recover damages for illegally auctioning a trademark they don't own. That'd be pretty nifty, eh?
For those of you who don't have experience with this kind of recovery disk crap, let me fill you in. Last Christmas my parents decided to buy me a new computer. Let me tell you, I was ecstatic, as my current computer was almost five years old. Christmas morning, I opened the box to see a brand spanking new Compaq. Well, I was a little disappointed. Don't get me wrong, it's a free computer, so I can't complain to much, but let me finish the story. First, everything is embedded on the motherboard. Graphics, sound, everything. Wonderful. Second, no Microsoft Office, it comes with Microsoft Works. Now, I'm not a huge fan of Office, but it's easily a better office suite than Works. That, at least, was easy to remedy. I just burned a copy of my parents office CD.
Now the fun begins. I boot up, and I notice that the 8 gb HD is almost a 1/3 full! WTF? Compag has loaded my hard drive with almost 3 gb of useless crap. Well, uninstall, uninstall, uninstall. After using it for a while, I began to notice some video problems. Certain games, which should have run fine, were giving me the notorious BSOD. So I decide to reinstall Windows. I look in my box, and lo and behold, not a Windows install disk to be found. Instead, I find a cute little Compag recovery disk. Just great. In an attempt to avoid all the Compag complications on the disk, I wipe the drive and borrow my friend's Win98SE disk. Now this is the same version of Windows alledgedly on the recovery disk, mind you. I begin to install, and wtf?, it doesn't recognize my hardware. I try again, no dice. Well, at this point I give in and try the recovery disk. Apparently what the recovery disk has it not an installation version of Windows, but rather an image of Windows taken off a machine identical to mine. This time, hardware is no problem.
PLease take note here. The regular full version disk of Windows 98SE does not recognize the hardware on my Compaq. The version on the recovery disk does.
Well this just blows. It means that Compaq has used some funky hardware and drivers in order to tie me to their version of the OS. At this point I am pissed. I promptly run out and get me a copy of Red Hat. Guess what, no support for the hardware. Just wonderful. Now I'm stuck with Compaq's crap on my brand new computer. I uninstall everything I can, but still have problems occasionally. What's worse, when I have a problem with Windows, I can't just reninstall on top of it, because the recovery disk wipes the drive first. Now I have a bunch of zip disks with backups of everything I don't want ot lose, which is pretty much everything.
Microsoft is going to eat it if it insists on forcing this issue. This will revitalize the DIY market for computers and create an entirely new market of disgruntled users ready for a change. Next time, I'm building my own computer with top quality, standardized hardware that I can run Linux on.
Everybody seems to be assuming that without a settlement Microsoft will lose the case. That is far from a certainty. Several commentators have noted that Judge Jackson may be pushing these settlement talks because, while he may agree with the FoF, the result that really matters is the FoL. No matter how nasty he thinks Microsoft has been, if he disagrees with the FoL, his hands are tied. Also, it seems that Microsoft is confident enough to forego a settlement. We/.ers may be disappointed next week.
Space exploration will never take off, literally or figuratively, if we continue to stagnate in our current system of federally run and funded space programs. We no longer have leaders like Kennedy with the political will or vision to see what an asset, and indeed a necessity, space exploration will be in the future. No good scientific research, least of all space exploration, can survive random partisan budget cuts and political attitudes that change every four years with each administration. Do we really want some suit who has never launched even a model rocket or read a single science fiction book controlling what may become the only chance of human survival? If we want to really get somewhere, it's up to you and me, and all the other geeks on the planet, to find a way to get us off the planet. Private research and development is the only thing that will revitalize our dying space program.
Did anybody else notice the conspicuous difference between the Linux version of Canvas 7.0 and the Windows version? Namely, the version for Linux version will be free, and the Windows/Mac version is definately not, weighing in at $375. At first I thought it was only the beta version that was going to be free, but this is apparently not the case. According to the article, "At present, Hsu said, Deneba has no intention of charging for the software. "
It's amazing to me how companies appear to be compartmentalizing themselves. On one hand, they seem to be very interested in pursuing the free and open software movement when it comes to Linux, but when it comes to old platforms, like windows, the regular marketing rules prevail. This clearly shows that these companies are not interested in the movement behind Linux, but rather simply on capitalizing in a new market. I've got news for Deneba and other companies with Linux strategies, free and open software is good for any platform, not just Linux. In fact, free and open software is needed more on the Windows platform now than ever, if we have any hope of convincing Microsoft to consider similar behavior.
In my estimation, there are three possibilities here concerning Deneba. Either they don't understand the free software movement, or think Linux is to small a market to lose money on by giving away free software, or think Windows and Mac users are too stupid to notice that they're shelling out mucho dinero for a program that is completely free on another platform. In any case, that's no good strategy.
I know that what I am about to say has been said before, but I feel compelled as a future patent lawyer to put my two cents in. A fundamental distinction must be made between software and business method patents. This is the one critical concept that Jeff Bezos and others overlook in this discussion. Bezos, at almost every point in his open letter, groups the two patents as if they cover identical subject matter. This is not the case.
Software patents are important because they govern the ownership and usage of actual bits of code, rather than a vague idea of what a computer program should do or how a business should behave. The business method patents, on the other hand, purport to lay ownership to a behavior or idea rather than the actual method itself.
I would not take issue with amazon.com patenting the actual code required to execute their particular implemention of a one-click style program, assuming that there is no prior art. On the other hand, it would seem that the patent in question covers simply the idea of the one-click program. Not a good idea. First, even if the business method patent was valid, there is substantial prior art among the catalog and mail order companies. Second, the idea that a business or a person can own a behavior or vague idea is at best flawed, and at worst morally reprehensible. Imagine if Ford attempted to patent selling cars. Admitedly, this is an extreme example, but not by much.
The patent law does not need to be reformed, necessarily, but some modicum of intelligence needs to be applied in order to determine which patents are good and which are not.
Mr. Sterling seems to misunderstand why fluctuations in the market exist. His analysis seems to imply that flucuations are present only because we don't understand the market. This is not true. While it is the case that buying behavior in the market is controlled to a certain extent by people's perception of the economy, that perception is rooted fundamentally in performance of corporations. If companies are doing well, making good decisions, and producing efficiently, the economy is strong. On the other hand, if companies make bad decisions and subpar products, the economy does poorly. We can analyze the market all we want, but just because we might understand how it works does not mean that all companies will perform equally well all the time. Some companies perform well, some poorly, and the sum total of performance is the single biggest control on market behavior.
I find it highly ironic that you refer to this age of plagarism as the "marketplace of ideas," an idea first coined by John Locke and later used by Adam Smith in the seminal treatise on capitalism. What you propose is forcibly depriving creators of the product of their work, nothing more, nothing less. As I said above, one must be wary of the thin line between the open source movement and juvenile plagarism. Freely disseminated information is a great idea, don't get me wrong, but only on a voluntary basis. That elective cooperation is the key to this whole debate. If cooperation and dissemination is not at the discretion of the author of a work, the author is being deprived of his or her fundamental right the product of his or her work. Remember, most of the propaganda spread by the mandatory open source zeolots has all been used before. Remember 1917?
Here's the problem with your response: you assume that the only motivation for writing or otherwise creating content is to let other people view and/or use it. I know from experience that most writers write out of a motivation to do something good, not to seek external approval.
In addition, remember that an author owns the content of his or her work, in the same way that you own the things in your home. Do people get to use the things in your home without consent? I think not.
People must be very cautious today about differentiating between the good faith open source movement that still respects intellectual property, and what amounts to outright plagarism.
If you want a better insight into the ethical and philosophical issues surrounding intellectual property read The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand. Excellent read.
The problem with this discussion is that everybody is looking at the issue from the point of view of economics and advertisement. The real issue is intellectual property. The network created, and in some cases, purchased the content they broadcast. They own the programs they send out. By rebroadcasting the content without consent, iCrave is, in effect, stealing the content. And while Canadian law is inappropriately lax on this subject, this is an international law suit, and must be considered as such.
To make the situation more understandable, consider this analogy. If an author has published a book, and you subsequently photocopy the book and distribute the photocopies you have made, you are violating the intellectual property rights of the author and publisher of the book. This is the same situation.
It's not hard to figure out what is does when they've got all the specs on the site along with screenshots of nearly all its functions. Notice also that what I'm criticizing in particular is not the hardware, but rather the GUI, which is easy to see in the pix. It simply doesn't appear to fit the needs of a true PDA user. On the other hand, if you can customize and/or replace the interface, I may change my opinion.
Samsung is falling into the same pitfall as the manufacturers of WinCE devices before them. Trying to cram an entire desktop operating system into a handheld is simply ludicrous. Admittedly, Linux is pprobably better suited for these purposes than CE, but it doesn't look Samsung did a whole lot to tune the interface for a PDA. As a user of both Palm and CE devices, I much prefer a simplified GUI like the Palm. It seems like this would have been possible with Linux, but the screenshots still show the dreaded Start menu. Alas, a good idea shot down by poor implementation.
Slashdot Mirror
I couldn't agree more. Peter Jennings, one of the staples of network news, started to cry on air when he was talking about contacting his own children. Katz has an opinion, and he molds the facts to support it.
So basically you're saying that stacking a bunch of trash in your cubicle is cool because it's tech related? No thanks.
While I agree that the ruling is absurd, the number itself is not illegal. If I understand the law correctly, the act of converting the number into the proscribed content or a device/program which allows you to do so would be illegal, not the number in and of itself. While only slightly less absurd, this view at least makes a little more sense.
"Waaahhhh! My PDA does too much stuff!"
Seriously, give me a break. If they can pack all of this into the same size box without taking a major hit in either performance or price, I'm all for it. Why would you not want your PDA, which happens to be the same size as a MP3 player, to play MP3s?
What I really want is a PDA the size of the new Visor Edge with color, Bluetooth support, wireless video-conferencing, and streaming media from the web. Is that too much to ask? This thing from Sony is a step in the right direction.
If all you want to do is fiddle around with datebook and IR your business card back and forth, you should buy an M100. But please, don't complain about the cool gadgets.
1. Everybody here agrees, I'm sure, that something needs to be done to prevent errors in this type of database. Credit agencies need to be doing redundant cross checking on their data, rather than just entering it and forgeting it.
2. There needs to be some kind of coherent scheme to decide what kind of information credit agencies should have access to. If I'm 55, a vandalism conviction from my teens clearly shouldn't prevent me from getting a home improvement loan. In fact, the agency probably shouldn't even have that data. However, there has to be some sort of resource to allow reasonable background checks. Banks need to know if their customers have declared bankruptcy in the past before they are approved for a new loan, for example.
3. Once rules have been created to decide what information is allowable, there needs to be a system in place to enforce these rules. If a juvenile conviction should be sealed, it's out. If the information is more than seven years old, it's out. And so on. Unfortunately, that doesn't seem to be happening.
4. Lastly, banks, employers, and others who use to data from the credit agencies need to use that information responsibly. They shouldn't be able to reject you out of hand as soon as some blip shows up on your record. First, the users of the data need to check the information for accuracy. Second, the information should be used fairly, and only when rationally acceptable.
In summary, banks, employers, and insurance providers have to right to rationally reject an applicant based on their past. They should have some access to information and should be able to turn you down based on appropriate criteria. However, some information shouldn't be available at all, and the information that is available should be examined by a real person who can make a reasonable decision about the importance of that information.
Your response made perfect sense to me to start with. The part about refusing to pay for services or goods not rendered, I really like that. Too many companies in today's economy forget that the mainstay of good business is to provide good products and services, not to fool the customer into thinking the products or services are good when they're really not.
However, you really go downhill from there. You clearly have no conception of what is means to be a capitalist. You mispell the word, for goodness' sake. It's CAPITALISM, as in capital, as in transferable resources. Corporatism, which is the true target of your ire, is not synonymous with capitalism. The problem with the economy in the US is not that is is capitalist, but that it is less and less capitalist everyday.
In a capitalist economy, the proper function of the government is to provide and protect access to information. I should be able to find out that cigarettes are bad, Firestone tires will kill me, or whether the fruit I'm buying is genetically modified or not. Our government, however, fails to do that. I believe the failure is direct response to the entitlement mentality engendered by the government beginning with the New Deal. The government no longer protects our access to information, which means that AOL/Time Warner effectively controls what Americans believe and what information they have access to. It's a shame, really.
Corporations take advantage of that lack of information by providing shitty goods and services. That's why so many companies are intent on loading their products with new features instead of reliability. They know that more than likely, we won't be able to find out how reliable their product is before we buy it, but we sure will notice the pretty box with the big list of features.
The real answer to corporatism is not naive anti-globalism and an end to capitalism, the answer is to educate people to understand their alternatives and make reliable information freely available. End consumerism and you will end corporatism. End capitalism, and you will end freedom.
The last thing I want to see is a bunch of yuppie professional dot-commers flinging themselves through the airspace. Can you say product liability? I'd much rather see some research into creating some sort of high speed air mass transit system. Maybe cities could buy and convert some old Chinooks. In any case, that seems much more efficient, and, um, safe than a personal airscooter. D
Actually, most of the titanium dioxide used in Ti-diodes, pigments, and catalysts in various industrial processes are derived from petroleum coke calcining.
Actually, O is the most abundant element in the crust, followed in order by Si, Al, Fe, Ca, Na, K, Mg.
Actually, State AG's is correct, as what Hemos meant, I assume, was the State Attorney General's office, as in the specific Mass. Attorney General. Possessive, not plural. -d
I don't think that anyone really wants to watch a feature length movie on their 17" monitor. I recently got a DVD drive for my computer, and to test it out, I watch the Matrix. It was pretty sweet in DVD, but I'd much rather watch it on my dad's 50" wide screen TV. What we really need to make a movie revolution is what we have with Napster; a way to share movies online for free. Before we can do that we need two things. First, we need more bandwidth. I'm stuck on a 56k connection, which is not really conducive to downloading mp3s, much less movies. Also, cheap DVD-R drives will make it possible to download movies, write them to disc, and watch them on you TV. Now that will really make a difference in the box office.
Yeah! While were on the subject, why are there all those pesky computer manufacturers out there? We only need one good one, right?
law school as life
NFI is right. A string of amino acids is a protein. Glucose is a monosaccharide sugar, C6H12O6.
Now the fun begins. I boot up, and I notice that the 8 gb HD is almost a 1/3 full! WTF? Compag has loaded my hard drive with almost 3 gb of useless crap. Well, uninstall, uninstall, uninstall. After using it for a while, I began to notice some video problems. Certain games, which should have run fine, were giving me the notorious BSOD. So I decide to reinstall Windows. I look in my box, and lo and behold, not a Windows install disk to be found. Instead, I find a cute little Compag recovery disk. Just great. In an attempt to avoid all the Compag complications on the disk, I wipe the drive and borrow my friend's Win98SE disk. Now this is the same version of Windows alledgedly on the recovery disk, mind you. I begin to install, and wtf?, it doesn't recognize my hardware. I try again, no dice. Well, at this point I give in and try the recovery disk. Apparently what the recovery disk has it not an installation version of Windows, but rather an image of Windows taken off a machine identical to mine. This time, hardware is no problem.
PLease take note here. The regular full version disk of Windows 98SE does not recognize the hardware on my Compaq. The version on the recovery disk does.
Well this just blows. It means that Compaq has used some funky hardware and drivers in order to tie me to their version of the OS. At this point I am pissed. I promptly run out and get me a copy of Red Hat. Guess what, no support for the hardware. Just wonderful. Now I'm stuck with Compaq's crap on my brand new computer. I uninstall everything I can, but still have problems occasionally. What's worse, when I have a problem with Windows, I can't just reninstall on top of it, because the recovery disk wipes the drive first. Now I have a bunch of zip disks with backups of everything I don't want ot lose, which is pretty much everything.
Microsoft is going to eat it if it insists on forcing this issue. This will revitalize the DIY market for computers and create an entirely new market of disgruntled users ready for a change. Next time, I'm building my own computer with top quality, standardized hardware that I can run Linux on.
Thanks alot, Microcrap.
Everybody seems to be assuming that without a settlement Microsoft will lose the case. That is far from a certainty. Several commentators have noted that Judge Jackson may be pushing these settlement talks because, while he may agree with the FoF, the result that really matters is the FoL. No matter how nasty he thinks Microsoft has been, if he disagrees with the FoL, his hands are tied. Also, it seems that Microsoft is confident enough to forego a settlement. We /.ers may be disappointed next week.
Space exploration will never take off, literally or figuratively, if we continue to stagnate in our current system of federally run and funded space programs. We no longer have leaders like Kennedy with the political will or vision to see what an asset, and indeed a necessity, space exploration will be in the future. No good scientific research, least of all space exploration, can survive random partisan budget cuts and political attitudes that change every four years with each administration. Do we really want some suit who has never launched even a model rocket or read a single science fiction book controlling what may become the only chance of human survival? If we want to really get somewhere, it's up to you and me, and all the other geeks on the planet, to find a way to get us off the planet. Private research and development is the only thing that will revitalize our dying space program.
Did anybody else notice the conspicuous difference between the Linux version of Canvas 7.0 and the Windows version? Namely, the version for Linux version will be free, and the Windows/Mac version is definately not, weighing in at $375. At first I thought it was only the beta version that was going to be free, but this is apparently not the case. According to the article, "At present, Hsu said, Deneba has no intention of charging for the software. "
It's amazing to me how companies appear to be compartmentalizing themselves. On one hand, they seem to be very interested in pursuing the free and open software movement when it comes to Linux, but when it comes to old platforms, like windows, the regular marketing rules prevail. This clearly shows that these companies are not interested in the movement behind Linux, but rather simply on capitalizing in a new market. I've got news for Deneba and other companies with Linux strategies, free and open software is good for any platform, not just Linux. In fact, free and open software is needed more on the Windows platform now than ever, if we have any hope of convincing Microsoft to consider similar behavior.
In my estimation, there are three possibilities here concerning Deneba. Either they don't understand the free software movement, or think Linux is to small a market to lose money on by giving away free software, or think Windows and Mac users are too stupid to notice that they're shelling out mucho dinero for a program that is completely free on another platform. In any case, that's no good strategy.
I know that what I am about to say has been said before, but I feel compelled as a future patent lawyer to put my two cents in. A fundamental distinction must be made between software and business method patents. This is the one critical concept that Jeff Bezos and others overlook in this discussion. Bezos, at almost every point in his open letter, groups the two patents as if they cover identical subject matter. This is not the case.
Software patents are important because they govern the ownership and usage of actual bits of code, rather than a vague idea of what a computer program should do or how a business should behave. The business method patents, on the other hand, purport to lay ownership to a behavior or idea rather than the actual method itself.
I would not take issue with amazon.com patenting the actual code required to execute their particular implemention of a one-click style program, assuming that there is no prior art. On the other hand, it would seem that the patent in question covers simply the idea of the one-click program. Not a good idea. First, even if the business method patent was valid, there is substantial prior art among the catalog and mail order companies. Second, the idea that a business or a person can own a behavior or vague idea is at best flawed, and at worst morally reprehensible. Imagine if Ford attempted to patent selling cars. Admitedly, this is an extreme example, but not by much.
The patent law does not need to be reformed, necessarily, but some modicum of intelligence needs to be applied in order to determine which patents are good and which are not.
Mr. Sterling seems to misunderstand why fluctuations in the market exist. His analysis seems to imply that flucuations are present only because we don't understand the market. This is not true. While it is the case that buying behavior in the market is controlled to a certain extent by people's perception of the economy, that perception is rooted fundamentally in performance of corporations. If companies are doing well, making good decisions, and producing efficiently, the economy is strong. On the other hand, if companies make bad decisions and subpar products, the economy does poorly. We can analyze the market all we want, but just because we might understand how it works does not mean that all companies will perform equally well all the time. Some companies perform well, some poorly, and the sum total of performance is the single biggest control on market behavior.
I find it highly ironic that you refer to this age of plagarism as the "marketplace of ideas," an idea first coined by John Locke and later used by Adam Smith in the seminal treatise on capitalism. What you propose is forcibly depriving creators of the product of their work, nothing more, nothing less. As I said above, one must be wary of the thin line between the open source movement and juvenile plagarism. Freely disseminated information is a great idea, don't get me wrong, but only on a voluntary basis. That elective cooperation is the key to this whole debate. If cooperation and dissemination is not at the discretion of the author of a work, the author is being deprived of his or her fundamental right the product of his or her work. Remember, most of the propaganda spread by the mandatory open source zeolots has all been used before. Remember 1917?
Here's the problem with your response: you assume that the only motivation for writing or otherwise creating content is to let other people view and/or use it. I know from experience that most writers write out of a motivation to do something good, not to seek external approval.
In addition, remember that an author owns the content of his or her work, in the same way that you own the things in your home. Do people get to use the things in your home without consent? I think not.
People must be very cautious today about differentiating between the good faith open source movement that still respects intellectual property, and what amounts to outright plagarism.
If you want a better insight into the ethical and philosophical issues surrounding intellectual property read The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand. Excellent read.
The problem with this discussion is that everybody is looking at the issue from the point of view of economics and advertisement. The real issue is intellectual property. The network created, and in some cases, purchased the content they broadcast. They own the programs they send out. By rebroadcasting the content without consent, iCrave is, in effect, stealing the content. And while Canadian law is inappropriately lax on this subject, this is an international law suit, and must be considered as such.
To make the situation more understandable, consider this analogy. If an author has published a book, and you subsequently photocopy the book and distribute the photocopies you have made, you are violating the intellectual property rights of the author and publisher of the book. This is the same situation.
It's not hard to figure out what is does when they've got all the specs on the site along with screenshots of nearly all its functions. Notice also that what I'm criticizing in particular is not the hardware, but rather the GUI, which is easy to see in the pix. It simply doesn't appear to fit the needs of a true PDA user. On the other hand, if you can customize and/or replace the interface, I may change my opinion.
Samsung is falling into the same pitfall as the manufacturers of WinCE devices before them. Trying to cram an entire desktop operating system into a handheld is simply ludicrous. Admittedly, Linux is pprobably better suited for these purposes than CE, but it doesn't look Samsung did a whole lot to tune the interface for a PDA. As a user of both Palm and CE devices, I much prefer a simplified GUI like the Palm. It seems like this would have been possible with Linux, but the screenshots still show the dreaded Start menu. Alas, a good idea shot down by poor implementation.