Attacking the ABM initiative on technical merit is not effective. People are very skilled at developing magic technologies at great expense to kill one another. It will happen. Guaranteed.
I never said it wouldn't. I was however disproving GP's assertion that such a kill vehicle is trivially simple. It is incredibly difficult, but you are correct that it isn't impossible.
Yeah, I would immediately classify any error that caused deaths to be more important.
Another interesting case was the Patriot Missile failure. The system clock counted in 1/10th second increments. However, it added 0.1 to a floating point number. Unfortunately, 0.1 in binary is a repeating number, similar to 1/3rd in binary being 0.333333333...
So, ten times every second the time drifted just the tiniest bit. The missile that missed had been running for days, so its clock was one third of a second off, and a Scud travels a long way during that time.
Let that be a lesson to all of you: use an integer counter, and divide by 10 to get the time in seconds.
Google makes jack shit from Android "sales" because it's a free operating system.
Advertising money from the built-in applications. Also, money from the official Android Marketplace and Google Checkout. And that's all beyond the typical 'Google makes money the more you surf the internet.
Keep in mind, Android is not a phone. It's an operating system.
And so is iPhone OS. All the iPhone numbers are the overall OS, combining iPhone, iPhone 3G, and iPhone 3GS sales. So let's compare apples to apples, Android OS to iPhone OS.
Let's be clear here: There is no "killing enemy combatants and not civilians".
First, there's no way for us humans to be sure we're firing on combatants and not civilians much less our targeting systems, and second because you're going to always need ordinance at least big enough to destroy the target and that means unless all targets are in remote desert locations there's going to be collateral damage, i.e. people dead you didn't directly intend. Explosions are non-discriminatory.
Higher quality sensors can give you a much better idea, though. If you can tell whether that man walking towards you on the road is carrying a weapon or rigged with explosives before you are in danger, the situation can be remedied more easily. Either they are non-hostile and one less civilian is shot, or they are hostile and can be handled from a safe distance. And from a human standpoint, being comfortable that a suspicious person doesn't have a weapon means you don't need to ride through a peaceful village with weapons drawn, and the situation is less tense for everyone involved.
And, as you said, we don't always need to use explosives. However, when we do, having the option to implode a single building is a good one to have.
As a contrary point, though, having "surgical strike" weapons that people think we can fire without killing any civilians can make the idea of starting a war more appealing to the populace.
I think that's a good point, but the hypothetical (or maybe not so in the case of Iraq II) wars that might be prevented by not having precision weapons doesn't even come close to outweighing the case of the wars we can't avoid if we had to resort to carpet bombing.:P
I think the US populace as a whole is already resigned to civilian casualties in war zones, which is terrible. I don't forsee us getting into more wars if we didn't cause as much collateral damage, just those wars being completed more quickly and with less heartbreak.
Or killed, that happens too. The idea of the taser is that it's to be used only when a pistol would have previously been used. That rule is out the window, they're pain devices now. Don't bet against human nature.
Obviously you've chosen differently than I have. Since I can't reasonably predict the misuse of anything I make, whether it be military hardware or process control sensors (my old job). Maybe someone is using pressure and temperature sensors that I worked on in a chemical weapons facility. I do not believe that makes me morally culpable.
In the taser example, the moral conundrum would come from the company not admitting that they can cause lasting harm or death in some circumstances, and encouraging their expanded use. So to clarify, I would build shock devices for self defense, but probably would not feel morally comfortable working for Taser International.
Again, it's a utilitarian argument and ignores human nature - politicians with weapons that cause less PR backlash will make more war. If you're invading are the defenders combatants or collateral damage? I guess it depends who writes the history books - those are usually the people who had the best weapons and thus conquered.
We have plenty of war now, and that's with endless stories of civilian casualties. The US is actively involved in two wars right now, and the reason they have dragged on is because civilians become militants as they are disenfranchised by all the times we claim to be helping, then kill women and children.
Again, I can't change when and if wars are waged (though I can certainly try), but if I have the opportunity to reduce civilian casualties by even a single man, woman, or child, you can bet your ass I won't hesitate one second.
The digital distribution that locks it to my account prevents this type of sharing from going on, which has always been part of the gaming experience, and I consider it a right. I did understand that they would limit this to a small number to prevent it from becoming piracy and spreading beyond a network of friends, and this is what made me originally think this form of DRM was fair. However, they don't get to remove this right from me, while still convincing me to part with my money, so no more.
That's entirely reasonable and I understand completely. You are doing as the thread title says: 'if you don't like it, don't buy it'.
It's also the reason that I also base the price I'm willing to pay on the fact that I can't lend the game. Personally, I rarely did so (since they were hard to get back), and by the time I would have sold the game, its price had dropped so far as to be negligible.
But it was complicated by exchanging money for possession of the phone. As they say, possession is 9/10ths of the law. If they only took possession the phone, or only paid the guy for a story they would probably be in the clear.
I'm not saying Gizmodo intended to be malicious, or that they caused grave harm to Apple. What I am saying is that it does appear that they likely committed a felony according to CA law.
The Nexus one alone might not, but there are multiple other Android phones each with over a million sales. And, since you can get an Android phone for nearly every carrier, Google is capitalizing on a market that Apple is leaving behind.
Apple has (for all intents and purposes) one phone on one carrier. Google has many phones at various price points on many carriers. There's a big Android phone release more frequently than an iPhone release, meaning users are more likely to find one they want. Also, Android (overall) sales may eclipse iPhone in the next 2 years.
The actual moral decision shouldn't be "I only want my weapons used for righteous causes", it should be "how many intentional deaths from my creation can I live with?".
Here's a theoretical for you: would you build a taser? The primary usage is to provide a less-likely to be lethal alternative to a firearm, to be used in self defense situations. However, as we know, they are also frequently used to force compliance.
Which moral responsibility outweighs the other: that of saving the lives of police officers, or that of those who would be intimidated or injured through an unjustified tasing?
Similarly, wouldn't creating weapons which cause less collateral damage, or less likely to cause unintended death, be a moral imperative as it would reduce the number of deaths?
While I don't work on weapons themselves, I do work on systems used in conjunction with weapons used in war.
My belief: advanced sensors, radars, targeting, intelligence, etc saves more lives than it costs. If the military has a cost-effective way to ensure when they fire a weapon that they are killing enemy combatants and not civilians, and before the enemy can get a shot off, it's a good situation for all but our enemies. It's good for civilians who have a reduced fear of accidentally being bombed or shot. It's good for our servicemen (of which I have 2 cousins and several friends) who can rest more easily knowing that they no longer need to walk a razors edge between killing innocents and waiting to be fired upon first.
At the end of the day, I can't stop a war. I can make that war safer for our troops and civilians around the world, though, so you can bet your ass that's what I'm going to do.
Actually, that's not completely accurate. If you can get an accurate read on the velocity and trajectory (shouldn't be too hard due to the massive amount of heat the missile is putting off) you just launch your ABM at the place the missile will be by the time the ABM reaches intercept altitude. That's how ABMs work against the ballistic missiles that are available presently.
We've seen how well that has worked in the past... (not very well)
Besides, a ballistic missile defense system is designed to either target the launch phase (the missile is still moving relatively slowly) or the ballistic phase (not rockets firing, a simple parabolic trajectory). A decently designed missile could simply avoid the ABM with 0.5 degree course changes. Within one minute at mach 4 (2884mph @ 1500 feet of altitude) that half degree change puts the course of the missile about 1/2 mile off the projected course. The more time you have, the more course changes you can make. Even if you only need to be accurate to 100 meters for the explosion to disable the missile, you only have 78 milliseconds between when the missile enters your (perfectly aimed) kill zone and when it leaves it. Make your missile faster or fly higher, and it's even safer from shoot-down.
Shooting down a missile is hardly a simple task, especially at these speeds.
This type of concern isn't new, either. Russia was worried that Reagan's Star Wars missile defense shield would allow America to attack with impunity, but we never had good reason to bomb anyone, much less Russia.
That assumes that:
1) The political leanings of our federal government do not change.
2) The political leanings of their government do not change.
3) We wouldn't ever attack a Russian ally with nuclear force.
4) That the reason we didn't attack Russia to begin with was something other than MAD.
5) That a weapon (or defense) whose primary target is a specific nation is non-threatening.
Good luck convincing a nation of that. At that point, it become as issue of not bringing a knife to a gun fight. No nation where politics is taken into account (and that's all of them, even the dictatorships) would allow themselves to be so militarily vulnerable, no matter how good of friends you are.
"The power to destroy a thing is the absolute control over it." - Paul-Muad'Dib Atreides
As to it being stolen, until they had it they didn't KNOW it was an apple iphone prototype. It could have been some chinese knockoff. Indeed, odds are higher than not that "some random person trying to sell an lost iphone prototype" is passing a scam.
And once they knew it was an iPhone (they themselves pointed to its well-laid-out internals that it was almost certainly Apple), they lost that excuse. Note that they only broke the story after they were certain it was an iPhone. The courts would need to decide if they made a sufficient effort to return the phone at that point.
All they did was purchase a phone, which might might have been lost, might have been stolen, or might have not been an iphone at all, and then reported on it, and returned the device to the owner once it had been confirmed genuine.
If that were all they did, we also wouldn't be talking about it. They also blogged about finding it, even disassembling it and posting the internals. I think that loses them their good faith protection of claiming 'we bought your phone, but we just wanted to return it to you'.
No the 'realizing benefits from' angle is interesting, but this case is has another wrinkle, the 'benefit' they realized is shielded by the 'freedom of the press'. Which in some respects is stronger than 'freedom of speech'. After all ALL news sites report crime, directly "realizing benefits" from everything from murder to theft to rape in terms of selling advertising around it.
The difference being that in your examples, the media is a 3rd party reporting on external events. In this example, this is a media outlet as an accessory to the crime. If a newspaper reporter were to commit a murder, theft, or rape in order to create a story, do you think they would be protected?
While the 1st ammendment would protect them publishing the story, it may not protect them from fencing stolen goods in the process of pursuing the story. We would need to look at case law to determine if that's the case. I expect the distinction may occur between 'publishing information from a 3rd party, who obtained it through a crime' and 'committing a crime to obtain information to publish'. For example, the Pentagon Papers were leaked, not purchased or pursued by the press, and therefor legal.
If someone wants to take something classified out of a top secret military compound, he might have to secrete it on his person and deliberately sneak it past a guard who searches briefcases and purses. He might be committing a crime by doing so...
Are you joking? Try losing their security clearance, being court marshaled and a probable investigation into 1) what motive you had removing classified material 2) where it was going and 3) how many other violations you knowingly committed.
Probable? Disseminating classified information is a felony, as well as a federal crime. If you sneak it out (and it's not likely one would 'accidentally' leave a site with classified info) you can be well assured that losing your security clearance is the least of your worries...
Also, afaik, you can only be court martialed if you are an active service member. Not everyone with access to that kind of stuff is military (contractors, consultants, non-military agencies, politicians).
Meh.. in most cases I would agree with you, but Gizmodo made it known that they had the property (after the finder himself tried to contact Apple), and returned it to the rightful owner when asked.
After disassembling it, and posting the disassembly photos on their website, earning a huge wad of cash from advertisers in the process.
Purchasing the property may have been an offense within the letter of the law, but it's a very weak chain of events for claiming damages when the property was promptly returned.
Actually, the letter of the law prohibits the user from any use (I believe the statute says 'realizing benefits from') of the solen property as well. If they purchased the iPhone in order to funnel it directly to Apple to preserve their confidentiality, you would be right. However, they made money off the prototype, putting them clearly in violation of the law.
That said, I doubt Apple will press charges, but it seems they are clearly within their rights to do so.
Ignoring, of course, that this is only reimbursing the private-use of the program. As of now, the corporations who were affected quite severely financially (for following suggested security measures) are still out in the cold.
Maybe it's because other phone OSs have had multi-tasking for years, while iPhone is just catching up.
The killer-app of multi-tasking? I use an Android App called Locale, which is infinitely useful even though it's expensive as hell at $10. It uses the phone location and state to modify phone settings. It turns on my ringer and Wi-Fi when I reach my home, and puts it on vibrate when I leave. It changes my Google Talk status to 'Asleep' when I plug the phone into the wall for the night. It puts my phone on silent Sunday mornings while at church.
To the iPhone users, maybe you'll finally be able to enjoy something similar. Better late than never, right?
Give me a break. There is absolutely no reason why a console vendor couldn't publicly release the SDK and allow a programmer to turn the console into a development device in the same way the iPhone SDK does for the iPhone.
No technical reason. Most of the reasons have to do with money, security, and DRM. Not that there's particularly anything wrong with that, as long as it's expected.
That said, if you think the consoles are hopelessly locked down, check Microsoft's XNA Creator's Club. You get access to developer tools, a marketplace to sell games, and release is handled by peer review (both to rate quality and content). Tada, Indie Development, with only mild oversight by MS to prevent any significant abuses (illegal content) from slipping through.
Of course, if you also think nobody complains about the console method of gaming, then you must have missed the ongoing console v. PC debate. The iPhone v. open platform (like Android) debate is a carbon copy of console-PC.
All of this resulted in our sharing network buying more and more games, leading to more profit for Sony.
But only one copy of each game. So while it may be the same money for Sony, the game's developer/publisher may think they're getting a raw deal. One company may think their game was the best and that they should have had 5 sales, rather than getting one sale along with 4 other developers.
And that's why this publisher decided that Sony's DRM (which, as you stated, protects their own interests) was insufficient for their needs. The other issues you mention are more related to disk-based piracy.
So you have to have servers distributed near to the clients to maintain a nice low latency and make the system work well.
That's exactly their plan.
My only problem with OnLive is their pricing. I was assuming a monthly rate for 'all you can game' access, but it's actually a monthly fee for the service PLUS another fee to 'purchase' each game you want access to. I'll stick with my current strategy of 'buy one game and play it to death so it's cheaper per hour of entertainment than movies', until OnLive makes it cost-effective to play a larger number of games.
Also, many devices like the iPad do not require new certifications because they will simply integrate a pre-existing radio module that has already been though the process.
While this can happen, depending on the enclosure of the device the FCC can still elect for full testing. You still need to submit, and they can approve purely on similarity, but all the little metal bits can cause a compliant radio to become non-compliant. Think of a parabolic reflector, and that's a simple way to make a compliant device non-compliant.
I'm pretty sure that with Apple's R&D budget and their limited space, the iPad probably didn't use an off-the-shelf radio module.
As a side note: with the quantity of sales on Steam, I would guess Valve is quite content with selling significantly below the 'standard' price points. How much do you think they save on shipping and manufacturing? By making a larger profit margin from those who buy at full price, they can afford to take a narrower one from you. And, since it's such a sharp price break, they move more units, and their immense profitability keeps the authentication servers running. Win-win for everyone involved.
In the case of Valve's Steam for instance (which actually works well so far) I might spend a maximum of 20 Euros for a game with DRM instead of 50 Euros without DRM. I doubt Valve is happy with that.
I've been unfortunate enough to lose several game disks to scratches (in one incident the disk was in the drive when the ejection mechanism died), so the value of the game for me is roughly equal to one on a physical disk. I actually expect my games on Steam have a longer lifetime than those on physical media, since there's a higher likelyhood of my media being rendered unusable than of Steam going kaputt.
You also assume that a regular full price game has no DRM. What about disk checks and SN verification? Aside from a few companies like Stardock, you're just replacing disk-based DRM for Steam's.
But I suspect the remedy is the same regardless of how your game becomes inoperable: you 'aquire' a method to continue playing the game you paid for.
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Attacking the ABM initiative on technical merit is not effective. People are very skilled at developing magic technologies at great expense to kill one another. It will happen. Guaranteed.
I never said it wouldn't. I was however disproving GP's assertion that such a kill vehicle is trivially simple. It is incredibly difficult, but you are correct that it isn't impossible.
Yeah, I would immediately classify any error that caused deaths to be more important.
Another interesting case was the Patriot Missile failure. The system clock counted in 1/10th second increments. However, it added 0.1 to a floating point number. Unfortunately, 0.1 in binary is a repeating number, similar to 1/3rd in binary being 0.333333333...
So, ten times every second the time drifted just the tiniest bit. The missile that missed had been running for days, so its clock was one third of a second off, and a Scud travels a long way during that time.
Let that be a lesson to all of you: use an integer counter, and divide by 10 to get the time in seconds.
Google makes jack shit from Android "sales" because it's a free operating system.
Advertising money from the built-in applications. Also, money from the official Android Marketplace and Google Checkout. And that's all beyond the typical 'Google makes money the more you surf the internet.
Keep in mind, Android is not a phone. It's an operating system.
And so is iPhone OS. All the iPhone numbers are the overall OS, combining iPhone, iPhone 3G, and iPhone 3GS sales. So let's compare apples to apples, Android OS to iPhone OS.
Let's be clear here: There is no "killing enemy combatants and not civilians".
First, there's no way for us humans to be sure we're firing on combatants and not civilians much less our targeting systems, and second because you're going to always need ordinance at least big enough to destroy the target and that means unless all targets are in remote desert locations there's going to be collateral damage, i.e. people dead you didn't directly intend. Explosions are non-discriminatory.
Higher quality sensors can give you a much better idea, though. If you can tell whether that man walking towards you on the road is carrying a weapon or rigged with explosives before you are in danger, the situation can be remedied more easily. Either they are non-hostile and one less civilian is shot, or they are hostile and can be handled from a safe distance. And from a human standpoint, being comfortable that a suspicious person doesn't have a weapon means you don't need to ride through a peaceful village with weapons drawn, and the situation is less tense for everyone involved.
And, as you said, we don't always need to use explosives. However, when we do, having the option to implode a single building is a good one to have.
As a contrary point, though, having "surgical strike" weapons that people think we can fire without killing any civilians can make the idea of starting a war more appealing to the populace.
I think that's a good point, but the hypothetical (or maybe not so in the case of Iraq II) wars that might be prevented by not having precision weapons doesn't even come close to outweighing the case of the wars we can't avoid if we had to resort to carpet bombing. :P
I think the US populace as a whole is already resigned to civilian casualties in war zones, which is terrible. I don't forsee us getting into more wars if we didn't cause as much collateral damage, just those wars being completed more quickly and with less heartbreak.
Or killed, that happens too. The idea of the taser is that it's to be used only when a pistol would have previously been used. That rule is out the window, they're pain devices now. Don't bet against human nature.
Obviously you've chosen differently than I have. Since I can't reasonably predict the misuse of anything I make, whether it be military hardware or process control sensors (my old job). Maybe someone is using pressure and temperature sensors that I worked on in a chemical weapons facility. I do not believe that makes me morally culpable.
In the taser example, the moral conundrum would come from the company not admitting that they can cause lasting harm or death in some circumstances, and encouraging their expanded use. So to clarify, I would build shock devices for self defense, but probably would not feel morally comfortable working for Taser International.
Again, it's a utilitarian argument and ignores human nature - politicians with weapons that cause less PR backlash will make more war. If you're invading are the defenders combatants or collateral damage? I guess it depends who writes the history books - those are usually the people who had the best weapons and thus conquered.
We have plenty of war now, and that's with endless stories of civilian casualties. The US is actively involved in two wars right now, and the reason they have dragged on is because civilians become militants as they are disenfranchised by all the times we claim to be helping, then kill women and children.
Again, I can't change when and if wars are waged (though I can certainly try), but if I have the opportunity to reduce civilian casualties by even a single man, woman, or child, you can bet your ass I won't hesitate one second.
The digital distribution that locks it to my account prevents this type of sharing from going on, which has always been part of the gaming experience, and I consider it a right. I did understand that they would limit this to a small number to prevent it from becoming piracy and spreading beyond a network of friends, and this is what made me originally think this form of DRM was fair. However, they don't get to remove this right from me, while still convincing me to part with my money, so no more.
That's entirely reasonable and I understand completely. You are doing as the thread title says: 'if you don't like it, don't buy it'.
It's also the reason that I also base the price I'm willing to pay on the fact that I can't lend the game. Personally, I rarely did so (since they were hard to get back), and by the time I would have sold the game, its price had dropped so far as to be negligible.
But it was complicated by exchanging money for possession of the phone. As they say, possession is 9/10ths of the law. If they only took possession the phone, or only paid the guy for a story they would probably be in the clear.
I'm not saying Gizmodo intended to be malicious, or that they caused grave harm to Apple. What I am saying is that it does appear that they likely committed a felony according to CA law.
Yep, Android has Apple quaking in its boots.
The Nexus one alone might not, but there are multiple other Android phones each with over a million sales. And, since you can get an Android phone for nearly every carrier, Google is capitalizing on a market that Apple is leaving behind.
Apple has (for all intents and purposes) one phone on one carrier. Google has many phones at various price points on many carriers. There's a big Android phone release more frequently than an iPhone release, meaning users are more likely to find one they want. Also, Android (overall) sales may eclipse iPhone in the next 2 years.
Yes, they probably should worry.
The actual moral decision shouldn't be "I only want my weapons used for righteous causes", it should be "how many intentional deaths from my creation can I live with?".
Here's a theoretical for you: would you build a taser? The primary usage is to provide a less-likely to be lethal alternative to a firearm, to be used in self defense situations. However, as we know, they are also frequently used to force compliance.
Which moral responsibility outweighs the other: that of saving the lives of police officers, or that of those who would be intimidated or injured through an unjustified tasing?
Similarly, wouldn't creating weapons which cause less collateral damage, or less likely to cause unintended death, be a moral imperative as it would reduce the number of deaths?
While I don't work on weapons themselves, I do work on systems used in conjunction with weapons used in war.
My belief: advanced sensors, radars, targeting, intelligence, etc saves more lives than it costs. If the military has a cost-effective way to ensure when they fire a weapon that they are killing enemy combatants and not civilians, and before the enemy can get a shot off, it's a good situation for all but our enemies. It's good for civilians who have a reduced fear of accidentally being bombed or shot. It's good for our servicemen (of which I have 2 cousins and several friends) who can rest more easily knowing that they no longer need to walk a razors edge between killing innocents and waiting to be fired upon first.
At the end of the day, I can't stop a war. I can make that war safer for our troops and civilians around the world, though, so you can bet your ass that's what I'm going to do.
Actually, that's not completely accurate. If you can get an accurate read on the velocity and trajectory (shouldn't be too hard due to the massive amount of heat the missile is putting off) you just launch your ABM at the place the missile will be by the time the ABM reaches intercept altitude. That's how ABMs work against the ballistic missiles that are available presently.
We've seen how well that has worked in the past... (not very well)
Besides, a ballistic missile defense system is designed to either target the launch phase (the missile is still moving relatively slowly) or the ballistic phase (not rockets firing, a simple parabolic trajectory). A decently designed missile could simply avoid the ABM with 0.5 degree course changes. Within one minute at mach 4 (2884mph @ 1500 feet of altitude) that half degree change puts the course of the missile about 1/2 mile off the projected course. The more time you have, the more course changes you can make. Even if you only need to be accurate to 100 meters for the explosion to disable the missile, you only have 78 milliseconds between when the missile enters your (perfectly aimed) kill zone and when it leaves it. Make your missile faster or fly higher, and it's even safer from shoot-down.
Shooting down a missile is hardly a simple task, especially at these speeds.
This type of concern isn't new, either. Russia was worried that Reagan's Star Wars missile defense shield would allow America to attack with impunity, but we never had good reason to bomb anyone, much less Russia.
That assumes that:
1) The political leanings of our federal government do not change.
2) The political leanings of their government do not change.
3) We wouldn't ever attack a Russian ally with nuclear force.
4) That the reason we didn't attack Russia to begin with was something other than MAD.
5) That a weapon (or defense) whose primary target is a specific nation is non-threatening.
Good luck convincing a nation of that. At that point, it become as issue of not bringing a knife to a gun fight. No nation where politics is taken into account (and that's all of them, even the dictatorships) would allow themselves to be so militarily vulnerable, no matter how good of friends you are.
"The power to destroy a thing is the absolute control over it." - Paul-Muad'Dib Atreides
As to it being stolen, until they had it they didn't KNOW it was an apple iphone prototype. It could have been some chinese knockoff. Indeed, odds are higher than not that "some random person trying to sell an lost iphone prototype" is passing a scam.
And once they knew it was an iPhone (they themselves pointed to its well-laid-out internals that it was almost certainly Apple), they lost that excuse. Note that they only broke the story after they were certain it was an iPhone. The courts would need to decide if they made a sufficient effort to return the phone at that point.
All they did was purchase a phone, which might might have been lost, might have been stolen, or might have not been an iphone at all, and then reported on it, and returned the device to the owner once it had been confirmed genuine.
If that were all they did, we also wouldn't be talking about it. They also blogged about finding it, even disassembling it and posting the internals. I think that loses them their good faith protection of claiming 'we bought your phone, but we just wanted to return it to you'.
No the 'realizing benefits from' angle is interesting, but this case is has another wrinkle, the 'benefit' they realized is shielded by the 'freedom of the press'. Which in some respects is stronger than 'freedom of speech'. After all ALL news sites report crime, directly "realizing benefits" from everything from murder to theft to rape in terms of selling advertising around it.
The difference being that in your examples, the media is a 3rd party reporting on external events. In this example, this is a media outlet as an accessory to the crime. If a newspaper reporter were to commit a murder, theft, or rape in order to create a story, do you think they would be protected?
While the 1st ammendment would protect them publishing the story, it may not protect them from fencing stolen goods in the process of pursuing the story. We would need to look at case law to determine if that's the case. I expect the distinction may occur between 'publishing information from a 3rd party, who obtained it through a crime' and 'committing a crime to obtain information to publish'. For example, the Pentagon Papers were leaked, not purchased or pursued by the press, and therefor legal.
If someone wants to take something classified out of a top secret military compound, he might have to secrete it on his person and deliberately sneak it past a guard who searches briefcases and purses. He might be committing a crime by doing so ...
Are you joking? Try losing their security clearance, being court marshaled and a probable investigation into 1) what motive you had removing classified material 2) where it was going and 3) how many other violations you knowingly committed.
Probable? Disseminating classified information is a felony, as well as a federal crime. If you sneak it out (and it's not likely one would 'accidentally' leave a site with classified info) you can be well assured that losing your security clearance is the least of your worries...
Also, afaik, you can only be court martialed if you are an active service member. Not everyone with access to that kind of stuff is military (contractors, consultants, non-military agencies, politicians).
Meh.. in most cases I would agree with you, but Gizmodo made it known that they had the property (after the finder himself tried to contact Apple), and returned it to the rightful owner when asked.
After disassembling it, and posting the disassembly photos on their website, earning a huge wad of cash from advertisers in the process.
Purchasing the property may have been an offense within the letter of the law, but it's a very weak chain of events for claiming damages when the property was promptly returned.
Actually, the letter of the law prohibits the user from any use (I believe the statute says 'realizing benefits from') of the solen property as well. If they purchased the iPhone in order to funnel it directly to Apple to preserve their confidentiality, you would be right. However, they made money off the prototype, putting them clearly in violation of the law.
That said, I doubt Apple will press charges, but it seems they are clearly within their rights to do so.
Ignoring, of course, that this is only reimbursing the private-use of the program. As of now, the corporations who were affected quite severely financially (for following suggested security measures) are still out in the cold.
Your analogy is as incomprehensible as your sig...
Maybe it's because other phone OSs have had multi-tasking for years, while iPhone is just catching up.
The killer-app of multi-tasking? I use an Android App called Locale, which is infinitely useful even though it's expensive as hell at $10. It uses the phone location and state to modify phone settings. It turns on my ringer and Wi-Fi when I reach my home, and puts it on vibrate when I leave. It changes my Google Talk status to 'Asleep' when I plug the phone into the wall for the night. It puts my phone on silent Sunday mornings while at church.
To the iPhone users, maybe you'll finally be able to enjoy something similar. Better late than never, right?
Give me a break. There is absolutely no reason why a console vendor couldn't publicly release the SDK and allow a programmer to turn the console into a development device in the same way the iPhone SDK does for the iPhone.
No technical reason. Most of the reasons have to do with money, security, and DRM. Not that there's particularly anything wrong with that, as long as it's expected.
That said, if you think the consoles are hopelessly locked down, check Microsoft's XNA Creator's Club. You get access to developer tools, a marketplace to sell games, and release is handled by peer review (both to rate quality and content). Tada, Indie Development, with only mild oversight by MS to prevent any significant abuses (illegal content) from slipping through.
Of course, if you also think nobody complains about the console method of gaming, then you must have missed the ongoing console v. PC debate. The iPhone v. open platform (like Android) debate is a carbon copy of console-PC.
All of this resulted in our sharing network buying more and more games, leading to more profit for Sony.
But only one copy of each game. So while it may be the same money for Sony, the game's developer/publisher may think they're getting a raw deal. One company may think their game was the best and that they should have had 5 sales, rather than getting one sale along with 4 other developers.
And that's why this publisher decided that Sony's DRM (which, as you stated, protects their own interests) was insufficient for their needs. The other issues you mention are more related to disk-based piracy.
So you have to have servers distributed near to the clients to maintain a nice low latency and make the system work well.
That's exactly their plan.
My only problem with OnLive is their pricing. I was assuming a monthly rate for 'all you can game' access, but it's actually a monthly fee for the service PLUS another fee to 'purchase' each game you want access to. I'll stick with my current strategy of 'buy one game and play it to death so it's cheaper per hour of entertainment than movies', until OnLive makes it cost-effective to play a larger number of games.
Also, many devices like the iPad do not require new certifications because they will simply integrate a pre-existing radio module that has already been though the process.
While this can happen, depending on the enclosure of the device the FCC can still elect for full testing. You still need to submit, and they can approve purely on similarity, but all the little metal bits can cause a compliant radio to become non-compliant. Think of a parabolic reflector, and that's a simple way to make a compliant device non-compliant.
I'm pretty sure that with Apple's R&D budget and their limited space, the iPad probably didn't use an off-the-shelf radio module.
The reason people want alternatives (inferior as they may be) is Apple's tyrannical control over the platform.
That's like saying a Ford F-150 full-size pickup is inferior to a Mercedes S-class luxury sedan.
It all depends on what you use your car for.
As a side note: with the quantity of sales on Steam, I would guess Valve is quite content with selling significantly below the 'standard' price points. How much do you think they save on shipping and manufacturing? By making a larger profit margin from those who buy at full price, they can afford to take a narrower one from you. And, since it's such a sharp price break, they move more units, and their immense profitability keeps the authentication servers running. Win-win for everyone involved.
In the case of Valve's Steam for instance (which actually works well so far) I might spend a maximum of 20 Euros for a game with DRM instead of 50 Euros without DRM. I doubt Valve is happy with that.
I've been unfortunate enough to lose several game disks to scratches (in one incident the disk was in the drive when the ejection mechanism died), so the value of the game for me is roughly equal to one on a physical disk. I actually expect my games on Steam have a longer lifetime than those on physical media, since there's a higher likelyhood of my media being rendered unusable than of Steam going kaputt.
You also assume that a regular full price game has no DRM. What about disk checks and SN verification? Aside from a few companies like Stardock, you're just replacing disk-based DRM for Steam's.
But I suspect the remedy is the same regardless of how your game becomes inoperable: you 'aquire' a method to continue playing the game you paid for.