Xerox, Canon, Ricoh, and several other companies knowingly manufacture devices that facilitate not only identity theft but copyright violation and child pornography. They're called "copy machines". Several companies knowingly manufacture devices that facilitate copyright violations, namely "DVD recorders".
Oh come on. That's bullshit. You know as well as I that the intended use standard applies. Copy machines are not intended to be used for kiddie porn or counterfeiting. Conversely, meat is meant to be eaten, and smart phones are meant to be used on the internet. There's a very obvious difference.
That's great. And I don't mind you having that choice. But the company should be giving you that choice, by clearly labeling their product as "NOT SECURE."
Instead they're shipping this shit out, telling customers "oh it's great, you can shop and bank with this thing from anywhere!" without telling them "oh and by the way when you do anyone who wants it can steal your info and also shop and bank with your account."
Exactly. No, I don't think more on-site monitoring is necessary, provided the penalties for *knowingly* dicking around with safety/security are severe.
That DC10 crash you're talking about happened because of company stupidity. Douglas had told them to remove the engine, and then the pylon from the wing when performing maintenance. Some airlines, including AA, figured they could save time if they removed the engine/pylon as one unit rather than taking 2 steps to do it. It was tricky, but saved money. On this particular plane, ground maintenance didn't get it right, and rammed the pylon into the wing. Then they re-attached everything, didn't make sure there was no damage (there was) and as a result the engine fell off. There were also problems with the crew's action during the disaster (the DC10 can take off just fine with 1 engine dead, but the aircrew tried to climb too fast, there was no stick shaker on the copilot's controls, and the pilots controls had been knocked out by the engine falling off, and the flight engineer failed to hit the switch that would have brought the pilot's side back online) but the primary cause was corporate penny pinching in violation of the (for want of a better term) service manual.
AA should have been fined so heavily that it would have damn near gone out of business as a result of this crash. Instead, they were fined half a million dollars, which to an airline is beer money, and meanwhile people were dead and Douglas's business was badly hurt as a result of undeserved animosity toward the DC-10.
If AA had been fined as heavily as it should have been, I think industry would have taken the lesson more to heart. "If I'm gonna try to pull shenanigans with safety, I'd better be damned sure I can get away with it or I might just lose my whole company." That's a pretty good incentive to make sure you're not cutting corners.
There's a big difference between selling jelly at the farmers market and knowingly releasing devices that facilitate identity theft, or knowingly selling meat that was contaminated with feces when the guy working in the factory cut too deep.
Start fining the hell out of companies for knowingly exposing their customers to risk (any risk, whether security or e-coli) and companies will clean up their acts.
Yes, regulating companies makes (sometimes) the end product cost more. That was true when airlines were regulated. We also didn't have incidents like Valujet when airlines were regulated. Safety/security costs more up front, but costs less in the long term.
I'll agree with you on the gaming example if you can tell me how you'd cool a tablet that's powerful enough to run with a gaming PC. I think what people (and mostly the media) forget when they're jumping up and down predicting the death of the big-box PC is that compared to even an average PC, a tablet is a plodding, slow thing. It only appears fast because the apps it's running are simple and not all that demanding. We're not asking them to render 3d-accelerated physics games on the fly. Try to get a tablet to run MSFS or a racing game and it'd fail utterly. And the more powerful you make them, the more heat they're going to generate, which means eventually you're gonna have to resort to active cooling and then they're gonna be bigger, bulkier, and you might as well buy a laptop.
I'd say I think it far more likely that in such situations the tablet would become the monitor, while letting the "real" computer do the heavy lifting, but I personally don't want to game on a 10 inch, or even a 15 inch (assuming tablets get that big) screen, so I don't see it even doing that.
I don't think I'm really all that limited by the Vic 20, vinyl records, and rotary dial phone paradigms I grew up with;) I just see a different vision of the wireless future than you do. I would say (and prefer) that we'll see a big, very powerful central computer in the house. It talks wirelessly to the pads, and phones, and workstations (what we used to call dumb terminals), and even the appliances, lights, HVAC, etc throughout the house. It does the high-load computing, passing its output on to the devices that are using it. Some of the attached devices -the pads, etc, will have their own processors as they do today, and so will be capable of operating standalone, but will still run to the master computer when an operation would take too long to carry out.
In many ways, this has already happened. (iPad + x10 + main computer) but the integration isn't all that good. Really, we're only waiting on someone to bridge the small gaps before this is a reality.
So sure, the "desktop PC" might not be on your desktop anymore (though people will still want big screens and non-tiny input devices, and so we'll still have workstations that look very familiar) but the idea that mobile devices are going to do all of our computing for us is a very long way from fruition.
And? My current box is an awfully long way from the tape-diskdrive Vic 20 I cut my teeth on. And what I use it for has also changed dramatically and completely. Doesn't change that I have a box hooked up to a monitor that I use as a computer, which is what the article is arguing will vanish.
I never said we won't use PCs differently in the future, or that mobile devices won't continue to gain users. But the PC as we know it (computer / monitor / keyboard / GUI input device of some sort) is not going anywhere for a good while yet.
So far you've described the Atari mind control system, the NES Powerglove, and a scavenger hunt.;)
The augmented reality gaming might be amusing for awhile, but eventually people are going to want to be able to play games whenever they want (not a real good idea to be playing an AR FPS at 1am on city streets with cops roaming about, yeah?) and so in-home gaming is going to continue to have a market.
Oh BTW, remember that when the TV started to become commonplace, people were absolutely convinced that radio was "going the way of the dinosaur." Everyone was going to want pictures with their sound. None of this old-fashioned clunky ears-only crap.
Well, it's still here, and so profitable that companies think they can make money by spending jillions getting satellites into space to transmit it.
The PC, as we used to know it - a big box that runs an OS and is not very portable and ties you to specific data storage locations and programs, is on teh way out. It is being replaced by smaller, portable devices that perform the same functions (which still are important) but using different technologies and in some ways a completely different a paradigm of ow we accomplish a task.
In some areas, yes. But this "the PC is DOOOOMED!" football that the media kicks around seemingly every 2 weeks misses the point pretty spectacularly. The reason iPads and Droids and the other mobile devices are useful is because they're connecting to "oldschool" computers, whether dedicated webservers or your home PC.
Off the top of my head I can think of a whole lot of PC-based things that it would be difficult, and in some cases impossible, to replicate on a tablet:
Word processing - if you think RSS is an issue with a standard keyboard that has moving keys, try tapping away on a pad for 8 hours a day. Plus, without the physical 3-diminsional keys to provide tactile position feedback, typing speed would plummet. So anyone that needs to write anything more than brief emails and calendar entries is going to require a PC. (and don't come back with the "but you can hook keyboards up to tablets" argument, because once you do that, you have a laptop that you have to disassemble before you take it anywhere. I'll take the normal laptop, thanks). And really, this is inclusive of anything that requires any peripheral other than a stylus.
Any sort of "real" gaming. Sure, you can do Angry Birds, Tetris, and maybe even management simulations (Sims/Sim City/etc) on a tablet, but have fun with a driving game, a flight simulation, or a FPS. I've actually seen pathetic attempts at driving games on Android, where you tilt the whole device to replicate a steering wheel. That's neat, except that when I drive the whole world generally doesn't suddenly roll 45 degrees off kilter every time I hit a corner.
Anything where you want your data to be reasonably secured, and don't want to leave a faceless corporation in charge of securing it. I'm looking at you, Cloud.
And plenty of other crap that might be doable on a tablet, but is a whole lot more convenient and comfortable to do on a standard PC (video editing - as an editor I would be pissed if someone took away my dual 24" screens and replaced them with a tiny 10" tablet - Photoshop, etc)
I see tablets as becoming mobile extensions of the home PC, but the home PC will still be around, even if much of the time it basically acts as a server for the family's mobile devices.
Yeah, I just read that. I meant 100 years, not hundreds OF years. That'll teach me to type fast and not review.
You're right, a month ago we were at 1981 space technology. I wasn't happy with that either - I always thought the shuttle should have been considered what it was designed for - to prove that space shuttles work, and then we go build the cheaper, better production model - but it was still better than anything else out there as far as getting us to LEO and the ISS. And it was ours, not the Russians'.
Now I'm not saying we absolutely had to keep the shuttle forever. Certainly not. But it would have been nice if we had kept it until we had something, whether commercial or NASA's, to replace it.
I agree completely with you that eventually spaceflight should be (mostly) privatized. (I say mostly, because we don't privatize all air travel either. The government has its own fleet of airplanes that are nothing like what the civilians get because it has needs we don't. The same will undoubtedly hold true for space).
But we've been doing sub orbital since 1961. To go back to the level of capability we had then is pretty pathetic. Especially since we have (yes we, because we paid for and hauled most of it) a space station up there and can't get to it without crawling to other countries for a cab ride. I find that to be pretty stupid. If you haven't noticed, relations between the US and Russia are. . Strained. It doesn't take a giant leap of the imagination to conclude that some day Medvedev or Putin might just decide they don't like us anymore and tell us to pound sand when we want to get to or from the ISS.
Yes I know private companies have promised they'll get us a ride there real soon now, but look at how long the 787 was delayed. And that's an airplane. Private companies have been building those for hundreds of years. They're real good at it. Anyone who seriously thinks the private space companies are going to stay on schedule is deluding himself.
But hey. We're back to 1961 space technology. We can get to not-quite-orbit. I say again, go us.
"Oh yeah, go buy a '73 Land Cruiser! Mine's great!"
Buying a '73 anything is fraught with risks. You (Cosgrach) have obviously taken care of your vehicle. That puts you in the minority. Most people treat their car the same as they treat the washing machine. They use it, never performing maintenance except MAYBE oil changes, and then when it breaks they bitch about how unreliable that brand is and go buy something else. Just because you take care of your car does not mean someone who takes your advice and looks for a "simple older car" is going to have anything close to the same reliability.
For what it's worth, I have a 91, 93, and 07. The 07 is a TL and is complicated as hell. The only thing any of them has been in the shop in the last year for was a tire puncture and a repair to the 93's air conditioner because I caught a rock in the condenser. "newer than Nixon" and "complicated" does not necessarily mean "unreliable."
As to your problems with the Forester... It's a Subaru. What did you expect? They're pretty well known for being one of the least reliable Asian cars, and with their AWD systems are of course going to be more expensive to maintain.
I think the Interplaq electric toothbrush I used back in 5th grade when I had braces (1980's here) had inductive charging. I remember always wondering how it charged, because there wasn't any exposed metal anywhere on the whole toothbrush or charger. Of course, we didn't have the internet back then, and my 5th grade teacher taught us that evolution was "something made up by people who aren't real Christians" (why yes this was in the Bible belt, why do you ask?) so she wasn't going to be any help in figuring it out;)
exactly. Android does have apps with ads in it, but if it's a pay app you can bet your reviews will be in the tank if you have ads flashing around in it.
And I doubt Amazon would play ball with the "sure, run a free day, but use this version instead of the normal version of the app" plan.
I've always thought it was a butt-covering method. "Yeah, we had a data breach but we're taking proper security measures. We make them change their password every month!"
You're right - it makes it less secure. Everyone at my office writes their pw down and stores it somewhere around their desk.
There's also the issue that security is annoying. Whether it's changing your password monthly or something non-IT related like checking badges at the lobby, security is a pain in the ass, and a lot of people would rather install the security infrastructure and then bypass it. Hell Feynman used to tell the story of the general at Los Alamos who ordered a zillion dollar uber-safe to store the secrets of the bomb in, and then never bothered to change the factory combination.
One reason UAC and the other recent ideas don't work is because they bug the shit out of the end user. Windows is especially annoying because when it decides it needs admin approval to do something, it pops up a dialog, and *locks the rest of the system from doing anything until you handle the question.* That's asinine. Lock the program in question from doing anything, but don't stop the video I have going in the second monitor. Stupid little irritants like that make me want to turn that crap off, and I know better. Most users wouldn't hesitate to make their system stop pissing them off on a daily basis.
The underhanded bit is that they represent to the public that they compensate the devs for their work even when Amazon chooses to give it away for free, and then underhandedly tell the dev that he's not getting paid, and he's not allowed to tell anyone.
And apparently, since Amazon can set the prices on the apps, they have pretty good leverage to get away with it:
In other words, "Ey. Yous gonna agree ta put da app on da store for free or Louie here's gonna bust it down ta 5cents a copy."
Slashdot Mirror
Xerox, Canon, Ricoh, and several other companies knowingly manufacture devices that facilitate not only identity theft but copyright violation and child pornography. They're called "copy machines". Several companies knowingly manufacture devices that facilitate copyright violations, namely "DVD recorders".
Oh come on. That's bullshit. You know as well as I that the intended use standard applies. Copy machines are not intended to be used for kiddie porn or counterfeiting. Conversely, meat is meant to be eaten, and smart phones are meant to be used on the internet. There's a very obvious difference.
That's great. And I don't mind you having that choice. But the company should be giving you that choice, by clearly labeling their product as "NOT SECURE."
Instead they're shipping this shit out, telling customers "oh it's great, you can shop and bank with this thing from anywhere!" without telling them "oh and by the way when you do anyone who wants it can steal your info and also shop and bank with your account."
Exactly. No, I don't think more on-site monitoring is necessary, provided the penalties for *knowingly* dicking around with safety/security are severe.
That DC10 crash you're talking about happened because of company stupidity. Douglas had told them to remove the engine, and then the pylon from the wing when performing maintenance. Some airlines, including AA, figured they could save time if they removed the engine/pylon as one unit rather than taking 2 steps to do it. It was tricky, but saved money. On this particular plane, ground maintenance didn't get it right, and rammed the pylon into the wing. Then they re-attached everything, didn't make sure there was no damage (there was) and as a result the engine fell off. There were also problems with the crew's action during the disaster (the DC10 can take off just fine with 1 engine dead, but the aircrew tried to climb too fast, there was no stick shaker on the copilot's controls, and the pilots controls had been knocked out by the engine falling off, and the flight engineer failed to hit the switch that would have brought the pilot's side back online) but the primary cause was corporate penny pinching in violation of the (for want of a better term) service manual.
AA should have been fined so heavily that it would have damn near gone out of business as a result of this crash. Instead, they were fined half a million dollars, which to an airline is beer money, and meanwhile people were dead and Douglas's business was badly hurt as a result of undeserved animosity toward the DC-10.
If AA had been fined as heavily as it should have been, I think industry would have taken the lesson more to heart. "If I'm gonna try to pull shenanigans with safety, I'd better be damned sure I can get away with it or I might just lose my whole company." That's a pretty good incentive to make sure you're not cutting corners.
There's a big difference between selling jelly at the farmers market and knowingly releasing devices that facilitate identity theft, or knowingly selling meat that was contaminated with feces when the guy working in the factory cut too deep.
Note the key word "knowingly."
Done in 1. (I don't count the troll above you)
Start fining the hell out of companies for knowingly exposing their customers to risk (any risk, whether security or e-coli) and companies will clean up their acts.
Yes, regulating companies makes (sometimes) the end product cost more. That was true when airlines were regulated. We also didn't have incidents like Valujet when airlines were regulated. Safety/security costs more up front, but costs less in the long term.
I'll agree with you on the gaming example if you can tell me how you'd cool a tablet that's powerful enough to run with a gaming PC. I think what people (and mostly the media) forget when they're jumping up and down predicting the death of the big-box PC is that compared to even an average PC, a tablet is a plodding, slow thing. It only appears fast because the apps it's running are simple and not all that demanding. We're not asking them to render 3d-accelerated physics games on the fly. Try to get a tablet to run MSFS or a racing game and it'd fail utterly. And the more powerful you make them, the more heat they're going to generate, which means eventually you're gonna have to resort to active cooling and then they're gonna be bigger, bulkier, and you might as well buy a laptop.
I'd say I think it far more likely that in such situations the tablet would become the monitor, while letting the "real" computer do the heavy lifting, but I personally don't want to game on a 10 inch, or even a 15 inch (assuming tablets get that big) screen, so I don't see it even doing that.
I don't think I'm really all that limited by the Vic 20, vinyl records, and rotary dial phone paradigms I grew up with ;) I just see a different vision of the wireless future than you do. I would say (and prefer) that we'll see a big, very powerful central computer in the house. It talks wirelessly to the pads, and phones, and workstations (what we used to call dumb terminals), and even the appliances, lights, HVAC, etc throughout the house. It does the high-load computing, passing its output on to the devices that are using it. Some of the attached devices -the pads, etc, will have their own processors as they do today, and so will be capable of operating standalone, but will still run to the master computer when an operation would take too long to carry out.
In many ways, this has already happened. (iPad + x10 + main computer) but the integration isn't all that good. Really, we're only waiting on someone to bridge the small gaps before this is a reality.
So sure, the "desktop PC" might not be on your desktop anymore (though people will still want big screens and non-tiny input devices, and so we'll still have workstations that look very familiar) but the idea that mobile devices are going to do all of our computing for us is a very long way from fruition.
And? My current box is an awfully long way from the tape-diskdrive Vic 20 I cut my teeth on. And what I use it for has also changed dramatically and completely. Doesn't change that I have a box hooked up to a monitor that I use as a computer, which is what the article is arguing will vanish.
I never said we won't use PCs differently in the future, or that mobile devices won't continue to gain users. But the PC as we know it (computer / monitor / keyboard / GUI input device of some sort) is not going anywhere for a good while yet.
So far you've described the Atari mind control system, the NES Powerglove, and a scavenger hunt. ;)
The augmented reality gaming might be amusing for awhile, but eventually people are going to want to be able to play games whenever they want (not a real good idea to be playing an AR FPS at 1am on city streets with cops roaming about, yeah?) and so in-home gaming is going to continue to have a market.
good point. I actually thought of that, but figured some wiseass would say "well the pad would be resting on an inductive charging mat." ;)
Oh BTW, remember that when the TV started to become commonplace, people were absolutely convinced that radio was "going the way of the dinosaur." Everyone was going to want pictures with their sound. None of this old-fashioned clunky ears-only crap.
Well, it's still here, and so profitable that companies think they can make money by spending jillions getting satellites into space to transmit it.
The PC, as we used to know it - a big box that runs an OS and is not very portable and ties you to specific data storage locations and programs, is on teh way out. It is being replaced by smaller, portable devices that perform the same functions (which still are important) but using different technologies and in some ways a completely different a paradigm of ow we accomplish a task.
In some areas, yes. But this "the PC is DOOOOMED!" football that the media kicks around seemingly every 2 weeks misses the point pretty spectacularly. The reason iPads and Droids and the other mobile devices are useful is because they're connecting to "oldschool" computers, whether dedicated webservers or your home PC.
Off the top of my head I can think of a whole lot of PC-based things that it would be difficult, and in some cases impossible, to replicate on a tablet:
Word processing - if you think RSS is an issue with a standard keyboard that has moving keys, try tapping away on a pad for 8 hours a day. Plus, without the physical 3-diminsional keys to provide tactile position feedback, typing speed would plummet. So anyone that needs to write anything more than brief emails and calendar entries is going to require a PC. (and don't come back with the "but you can hook keyboards up to tablets" argument, because once you do that, you have a laptop that you have to disassemble before you take it anywhere. I'll take the normal laptop, thanks). And really, this is inclusive of anything that requires any peripheral other than a stylus.
Any sort of "real" gaming. Sure, you can do Angry Birds, Tetris, and maybe even management simulations (Sims/Sim City/etc) on a tablet, but have fun with a driving game, a flight simulation, or a FPS. I've actually seen pathetic attempts at driving games on Android, where you tilt the whole device to replicate a steering wheel. That's neat, except that when I drive the whole world generally doesn't suddenly roll 45 degrees off kilter every time I hit a corner.
Anything where you want your data to be reasonably secured, and don't want to leave a faceless corporation in charge of securing it. I'm looking at you, Cloud.
And plenty of other crap that might be doable on a tablet, but is a whole lot more convenient and comfortable to do on a standard PC (video editing - as an editor I would be pissed if someone took away my dual 24" screens and replaced them with a tiny 10" tablet - Photoshop, etc)
I see tablets as becoming mobile extensions of the home PC, but the home PC will still be around, even if much of the time it basically acts as a server for the family's mobile devices.
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/3/33/MiG-31_Firefox.jpg
Your nerd card is hereby suspended for 2 weeks. ;)
-laughs-
Yeah, I just read that. I meant 100 years, not hundreds OF years. That'll teach me to type fast and not review.
You're right, a month ago we were at 1981 space technology. I wasn't happy with that either - I always thought the shuttle should have been considered what it was designed for - to prove that space shuttles work, and then we go build the cheaper, better production model - but it was still better than anything else out there as far as getting us to LEO and the ISS. And it was ours, not the Russians'.
Now I'm not saying we absolutely had to keep the shuttle forever. Certainly not. But it would have been nice if we had kept it until we had something, whether commercial or NASA's, to replace it.
I agree completely with you that eventually spaceflight should be (mostly) privatized. (I say mostly, because we don't privatize all air travel either. The government has its own fleet of airplanes that are nothing like what the civilians get because it has needs we don't. The same will undoubtedly hold true for space).
I never said sub orbital is pointless.
But we've been doing sub orbital since 1961. To go back to the level of capability we had then is pretty pathetic. Especially since we have (yes we, because we paid for and hauled most of it) a space station up there and can't get to it without crawling to other countries for a cab ride. I find that to be pretty stupid. If you haven't noticed, relations between the US and Russia are. . Strained. It doesn't take a giant leap of the imagination to conclude that some day Medvedev or Putin might just decide they don't like us anymore and tell us to pound sand when we want to get to or from the ISS.
Yes I know private companies have promised they'll get us a ride there real soon now, but look at how long the 787 was delayed. And that's an airplane. Private companies have been building those for hundreds of years. They're real good at it. Anyone who seriously thinks the private space companies are going to stay on schedule is deluding himself.
But hey. We're back to 1961 space technology. We can get to not-quite-orbit. I say again, go us.
Agreed. And sub-orbital? Great. We're back to Mercury/Redstone. Go us.
I'm always amused by advice like this.
"Oh yeah, go buy a '73 Land Cruiser! Mine's great!"
Buying a '73 anything is fraught with risks. You (Cosgrach) have obviously taken care of your vehicle. That puts you in the minority. Most people treat their car the same as they treat the washing machine. They use it, never performing maintenance except MAYBE oil changes, and then when it breaks they bitch about how unreliable that brand is and go buy something else. Just because you take care of your car does not mean someone who takes your advice and looks for a "simple older car" is going to have anything close to the same reliability.
For what it's worth, I have a 91, 93, and 07. The 07 is a TL and is complicated as hell. The only thing any of them has been in the shop in the last year for was a tire puncture and a repair to the 93's air conditioner because I caught a rock in the condenser. "newer than Nixon" and "complicated" does not necessarily mean "unreliable."
As to your problems with the Forester... It's a Subaru. What did you expect? They're pretty well known for being one of the least reliable Asian cars, and with their AWD systems are of course going to be more expensive to maintain.
I think the Interplaq electric toothbrush I used back in 5th grade when I had braces (1980's here) had inductive charging. I remember always wondering how it charged, because there wasn't any exposed metal anywhere on the whole toothbrush or charger. Of course, we didn't have the internet back then, and my 5th grade teacher taught us that evolution was "something made up by people who aren't real Christians" (why yes this was in the Bible belt, why do you ask?) so she wasn't going to be any help in figuring it out ;)
Point taken. ;)
Spoken like someone who's never moderated anything on the internet. Oftentimes you're labeled a dick just for deleting some asshole's link to goatse.
Does this statistic count the signups of "fake" names that were banned?
exactly. Android does have apps with ads in it, but if it's a pay app you can bet your reviews will be in the tank if you have ads flashing around in it.
And I doubt Amazon would play ball with the "sure, run a free day, but use this version instead of the normal version of the app" plan.
I've always thought it was a butt-covering method. "Yeah, we had a data breach but we're taking proper security measures. We make them change their password every month!"
You're right - it makes it less secure. Everyone at my office writes their pw down and stores it somewhere around their desk.
There's also the issue that security is annoying. Whether it's changing your password monthly or something non-IT related like checking badges at the lobby, security is a pain in the ass, and a lot of people would rather install the security infrastructure and then bypass it. Hell Feynman used to tell the story of the general at Los Alamos who ordered a zillion dollar uber-safe to store the secrets of the bomb in, and then never bothered to change the factory combination.
One reason UAC and the other recent ideas don't work is because they bug the shit out of the end user. Windows is especially annoying because when it decides it needs admin approval to do something, it pops up a dialog, and *locks the rest of the system from doing anything until you handle the question.* That's asinine. Lock the program in question from doing anything, but don't stop the video I have going in the second monitor. Stupid little irritants like that make me want to turn that crap off, and I know better. Most users wouldn't hesitate to make their system stop pissing them off on a daily basis.
You'd have more of a point if Amazon had paid these guys for the apps that they *did* sell.
The underhanded bit is that they represent to the public that they compensate the devs for their work even when Amazon chooses to give it away for free, and then underhandedly tell the dev that he's not getting paid, and he's not allowed to tell anyone.
And apparently, since Amazon can set the prices on the apps, they have pretty good leverage to get away with it:
In other words, "Ey. Yous gonna agree ta put da app on da store for free or Louie here's gonna bust it down ta 5cents a copy."