You certainly can. Just because you can't conceive of a plan to do so does not make it impossible.
Uh, right. And I have a giant bunny named Harold in my back yard. He has no mass and is invisible. Just because you can't find him doesn't make it impossible.
Get real. How exactly would you implement such a foolproof system? You can't file a lawsuit unless you have a certain IQ? Does that mean that people with low IQ's can't sue anyone? Making a claim that you can eliminate all meritless lawsuits without also eliminating legitimate ones is like saying you can have a criminal justice system that wont ever send any innocent people to jail while not letting any bad guys off. Its is a ludicrous and ignorant statement to make. And saying "just because you don't know how doesn't mean its impossible" is a lame cop out. Just ask Harold.
However, they are rarely dismissed at the first hearing.
And why would you dismiss a lawsuit before all the facts come out?
The lawyers involved rarely see any punishment
And why should the lawyers be punished because their client was wrong? Along those lines of reasoning, we should start punishing defense attorneys for defending criminals.
"Frivolous" lawsuits don't happen?
I never said they don't. However, the frequency of their occurrence is greatly exaggerated.
When I opened my first brokerage account (at the age of 12), I was screwed by my broker.
What in the blue hell are you babbling about? Are you saying that a broker taking your money and knowingly using it to his benefit while losing your investment is not grounds for a lawsuit? Okay, if you like taking it up the butt from others, thats your business. But just because you're a sissy doesn't mean you should try to prevent the rest of us from fighting back.
No, no, no, no. YOU CAN'T OUTLAW STUPID LAWSUITS WITHOUT OUTLAWING LEGITIMATE ONES. A lawsuit is frequently the *only* weapon a consumer or employee has to keep companies from screwing them over. Did you know that California is one of the few (only?) states that make it a felony for an employer to disregard saftey laws and regulations resulting in a workers death? In most places its a misdemenor. If you don't live in California and your brother is killed working on some heavy machinery because they didn't a) shut it down and b) have a spotter, your only recourse is a wrongful death lawsuit. If damages are capped, at say $500,000, the company will merrily keep breaking rules if it saves them money. They'll just write it off as a business expense.
Same thing with consumer products - if one of your family members was killed by one of the Ford Explorers with one of the bad Firestone tires, would you feel their life was worth $500,000? When they knew there was a problem and said nothing, hoping no one would notice? If the damages are capped the company wont feel any pain. Microsoft could be fined 10 billion dollars tomorrow and would write out a check with only a sigh, and keep right on doing what got it that its 40 billion in the first place.
And most of the so called "frivolous" lawsuits that the tort reform people like to site are anything but. Either they didn't exist in the first place (like the guy who supposedly tried to trim his hedge by picking up his lawnmower and accidently cut his foot), or by emmiting significant details. Perfect example: the McDonalds coffee lady. She did not sue and win because she dumped hot coffee on her own damn self. She sued and one because McDonalds had gotten HUNDREDS of complains from both customers and health inspectors about the temperature of their coffee and ignored them, and because she got THIRD DEGREE BURNS REQUIRING 280 THOUSAND DOLLARS IN SURGERY. She. Was. Burned. To. The. Bone. Third degree burns. Skin grafts. And she didn't even want to sue them in the first place, just receive reimbursment for her medical bills. It was after they blew her off that it went to trial. And the final damage award was reduced anyway. What was it in the first place? About $3 million. How much is that to McDonalds? About two days worth of sales. For just coffee.
To recap: you can't ban unreasonable lawsuits without also banning reasonable ones. The best you can hope for is that stupid lawsuits are dismissed early on. Because the alternative is not worth the cost, ever.
That sounds like the same idiotic blather from ludites and law enforcement that any medium could be used to transmit CHILD PRON or TERRORIST messages. Whether or not its actually happened or not is irrelevant - IT COULD HAPPEN so we must stop it now!
The Fraunhofer codec is definitely better than most codecs out there. But it is a distant second to LAME, which is constantly being improved all of the time. In addition, LAME is completely open source.
That sounds more like LAME evangelism to me. (heh heh). Its going to be tough to prove that a third party compressor is better than the one made by the guys who came up with the codec in the first place, especially for something as subjective as audio quality.
Adobe Premiere and After Effects some good video editing solutions. Yes, they are expensive. But the money I save by buying a PC far outweighs the cost. So by using Premiere on a PC, I save over $1000 dollars in software and hardware costs. I really can't see why Apple is the better option here.
Riiight. The only way its going to be cheaper is if you warez Premiere and After Effects, as together they are over a thousand dollars.
Hell, you could buy an eMac with a DVD burner for what you'd pay for Adobe's software alone.
Also, the Apple equivalent of Premiere, Final Cut Pro, costs $250 dollars more than Premiere.
Three words: Final Cut Express. Price? $100. Basically most of power of FCP, but without some of the filters that drive up the cost. So for another $100 over the cost of Premiere and After Effects, you can get an eMac with a DVD burner and FCE.
If you are thinking about iMovie, is not what I'd call a professional video editing tool. It's great for amateurs. But it is totally and wholly beaten out by open source windows video editing programs such as Virtual Dub Mod.
As far as Virtual Dub goes, it is an excelent tool - if you're recompressing or croping a single video and audio stream. However, if you are trying to re-arrange clips to make a video, iMovie will stomp all over Vdub. Unless your time is completely worthless, Vdub is just not going to cut it for any kind of video project that needs chronological editing, unless its very small.
So, in summary: Apple stomps all over the PC in video editing, at the low end, the high end, *and* on price. And there's still no PC product that compares to iMovie for how much it costs and what it does.
Apple is a huge company. Bigger than McDonalds. Routinely one of the top five computer manufactuers. Why, when comparing Apple to the Wintel market, do people lump the 90% of the PC manufatuers together as if they were a single company, like the one that writes their os?
LAME is the only good way to encode. Anything else will produce inferior MP3s.
Possibly among free encoders, but what about "official" ones? Apple licensed the Fraunhofer codec for Quicktime, which is the engine that runes iTunes.
Um, no. The only DRM is on AAC files downloaded from Apple's music store, and its about the least restrictive DRM on the planet. iTunes has a built in mp3 encoder, which should be very good as Apple licensed the codec from Faunhaufer, and nothing stops you from having all mp3's on your 'Pod.
Also, most of the content creation software, such as iMovie, have perfectly good PC equivalents.
Like what. The free PC software sucks, and the good ones are very expensive. I doubt your "perfectly good PC equivalents" exist, at least as far as video editing goes.
Personally, I think that a law that would make it easy for the police to find sick fucks like this guy is a good idea.
Oh? Quoting the judge:
She agreed that the police broke the law by pretending to be lawyers, but said police are allowed to do that to catch criminals.
While I'm sure there's a lot more to the statement, she's saying the police are alowed to break the law in order to arrest people. That doesn't set off any warning bells with you?
I wouldn't feel too guilty about doing this because consumers don't have any option for damaged or defective DVD's, but I'm sure Blockbuster does as a Really Big Company.
...look no farther than how American ads portray men and fathers. You mentioned role reversals, but the issue warrants more of a mention than that. Men and fathers are portrayed as helpless idiots, inferior parents and "humorously" subjected to violence.
There's the add where the woman takes pictures of items so her brainless husband can find the items in the store, the Dodge minivan ad with the caption "gets more work done than most husbands", the candy bar ad where a squirrel chomps on a guys nuts, the (insurance?) ad where the guy doesn't care that he's spilled hot coffee on his crotch, and worst of all, the Progressive Insurance ad where a vindictive woman tortures her ex with a voodoo doll site - including taking a pair of wire cutters to his testicles.
If women in this country were subjected to as much humiliation, or female genital mutilation was treated as a joke in a commercial, there would be blood in the streets and NOW would be storming these advertizing agencies with tanks.
Its not theft. Never was, never will be, for the simple reason that you must remove something to steal it. If you're copying, you aren't removing so there is no theft. Is copyright infringment illegal? Sure. Do the creators of content deserve some kind of compensation? Sure. But that doens't make it theft.
You don't expect to be given a new car for free when your old one crashes or breaks down; why should DVDs be different?
Because the ratio of the material cost to the sticker price for a car is huge, while for a DVD it almost nothing. What he should suggest is being able to get new copies of damaged media for the cost of shipping and materials - rather than having to pay for the content again as well.
But DNNA almost certainly didn't make the mistake. That's the point.
Oh? And on what do you base that assertion? The fact that it said on the packaging that it came with three years of service, the fact that it said *inside the box* that it came with three years of service, the fact that the odds of multiple stores just happening to have the exact same "error" at the exact same time are astronomically low, or the fact that DNNA's own customer service reps said those machines came with 3 years of service?
It was their mistake. Deal with it.
If you believe that all mistakes should be severly punished
When did I say anything about punishment? Thats right, never. What they need to do is offer what they promised - the three years of service that came with those units.
It doesn't matter what kind of mistake it was. Rectifying the mistake means one of two things, and only offering a refund isn't one of them: either they can give these people their three years of service, or provide compensation for those three years, such as a Tivo with a comparible service agreement.
Companies have to stand by what they advertize. Apple has been sued (successfully) because they advertized that some of their machines would be processor upgradible, or that OS X would run on certain machines.
Ah, that makes a little more sense then.:) Yes, it would be nice if you could get a retro-discount on an Apple replaced battery. But as businesses run on profit, not being nice, and legally customers are entitled to squat after the warranty is up. But it would be a good move for pr reasons.
So its one watt off from the 12" PB model....oh, damn. As for the iBooks, I have two theories. I heard that they use the older, more power hungry version of the G4 than the PowerBooks use. And I don't care enough about you to go look it up to be sure. The second, that the iBook can take a bigger battery because its in a different case. Didja think of that possibility? The 17" PB is the thinest of the line, for example.
From one point of view, Apple's problem is failing to be forthright about its intention to discourage battery replacement.
Do you see any other electronics manufacturers print large warnings that their product isn't supported out of warranty? Do you see DVD manufactuers put a big label on the box saying it isn't feasible to replace the laser if it breaks, *out of warranty*?
Everyone would benefit if Apple simply put the battery in a better place than under the hdd and made the case easier to open without voiding the warranty.
Except you can't do that and keep the iPod as sleek as it is. Not going to happen. To make the battery replacable, either they need to increase the size of the iPod, or the size of the rest of the components need to shrink.
How, under any stretch of the imagination, is it "reasonable" to compensate someone for a battery that dies out of warranty? Especially if only the battery is dead, and you can still use the device if its plugged in? Unless Apple advertized the the iPod's battery was cheap & easy to replace, or advertized that the batter would last indefinetly, the lawyers don't have a case, and neither do you.
I love Apple products in general but please...there is no way that most consumers would ever regard having to pay $99 to replace a battery in a $400 gizmo after 18 months as being reasonable.
The 18 months thing is possible though very rare. Anyone who repeats "18 months" as if it were happening to most of the first gen iPods are either 1) very ignorant or 2) an asshat. If you truly love Apple products as you say, I doubt you are that ignorant.
But yes, imagine for a second that we weren't talking about an Apple product. Sure you would think it sucks if your hard drive or dvd player developed a fault 6 months after warranty (even if you decide never to replace a dead iPod battery, you can still use it if its plugged in), but is the company somehow at fault for it? Especially when its a rare occurrence and its out of warranty? No.
So no, this is not a case of Apple being let off the hook because they're Apple, but another case where they are being given waaaaaay to much flack *because* they are Apple and not somebody else.
Slashdot Mirror
You certainly can. Just because you can't conceive of a plan to do so does not make it impossible.
Uh, right. And I have a giant bunny named Harold in my back yard. He has no mass and is invisible. Just because you can't find him doesn't make it impossible.
Get real. How exactly would you implement such a foolproof system? You can't file a lawsuit unless you have a certain IQ? Does that mean that people with low IQ's can't sue anyone? Making a claim that you can eliminate all meritless lawsuits without also eliminating legitimate ones is like saying you can have a criminal justice system that wont ever send any innocent people to jail while not letting any bad guys off. Its is a ludicrous and ignorant statement to make. And saying "just because you don't know how doesn't mean its impossible" is a lame cop out. Just ask Harold.
However, they are rarely dismissed at the first hearing.
And why would you dismiss a lawsuit before all the facts come out?
The lawyers involved rarely see any punishment
And why should the lawyers be punished because their client was wrong? Along those lines of reasoning, we should start punishing defense attorneys for defending criminals.
"Frivolous" lawsuits don't happen?
I never said they don't. However, the frequency of their occurrence is greatly exaggerated.
When I opened my first brokerage account (at the age of 12), I was screwed by my broker.
What in the blue hell are you babbling about? Are you saying that a broker taking your money and knowingly using it to his benefit while losing your investment is not grounds for a lawsuit? Okay, if you like taking it up the butt from others, thats your business. But just because you're a sissy doesn't mean you should try to prevent the rest of us from fighting back.
No, no, no, no. YOU CAN'T OUTLAW STUPID LAWSUITS WITHOUT OUTLAWING LEGITIMATE ONES. A lawsuit is frequently the *only* weapon a consumer or employee has to keep companies from screwing them over. Did you know that California is one of the few (only?) states that make it a felony for an employer to disregard saftey laws and regulations resulting in a workers death? In most places its a misdemenor. If you don't live in California and your brother is killed working on some heavy machinery because they didn't a) shut it down and b) have a spotter, your only recourse is a wrongful death lawsuit. If damages are capped, at say $500,000, the company will merrily keep breaking rules if it saves them money. They'll just write it off as a business expense.
Same thing with consumer products - if one of your family members was killed by one of the Ford Explorers with one of the bad Firestone tires, would you feel their life was worth $500,000? When they knew there was a problem and said nothing, hoping no one would notice? If the damages are capped the company wont feel any pain. Microsoft could be fined 10 billion dollars tomorrow and would write out a check with only a sigh, and keep right on doing what got it that its 40 billion in the first place.
And most of the so called "frivolous" lawsuits that the tort reform people like to site are anything but. Either they didn't exist in the first place (like the guy who supposedly tried to trim his hedge by picking up his lawnmower and accidently cut his foot), or by emmiting significant details. Perfect example: the McDonalds coffee lady. She did not sue and win because she dumped hot coffee on her own damn self. She sued and one because McDonalds had gotten HUNDREDS of complains from both customers and health inspectors about the temperature of their coffee and ignored them, and because she got THIRD DEGREE BURNS REQUIRING 280 THOUSAND DOLLARS IN SURGERY. She. Was. Burned. To. The. Bone. Third degree burns. Skin grafts. And she didn't even want to sue them in the first place, just receive reimbursment for her medical bills. It was after they blew her off that it went to trial. And the final damage award was reduced anyway. What was it in the first place? About $3 million. How much is that to McDonalds? About two days worth of sales. For just coffee.
To recap: you can't ban unreasonable lawsuits without also banning reasonable ones. The best you can hope for is that stupid lawsuits are dismissed early on. Because the alternative is not worth the cost, ever.
That sounds like the same idiotic blather from ludites and law enforcement that any medium could be used to transmit CHILD PRON or TERRORIST messages. Whether or not its actually happened or not is irrelevant - IT COULD HAPPEN so we must stop it now!
The Fraunhofer codec is definitely better than most codecs out there. But it is a distant second to LAME, which is constantly being improved all of the time. In addition, LAME is completely open source.
That sounds more like LAME evangelism to me. (heh heh). Its going to be tough to prove that a third party compressor is better than the one made by the guys who came up with the codec in the first place, especially for something as subjective as audio quality.
Adobe Premiere and After Effects some good video editing solutions. Yes, they are expensive. But the money I save by buying a PC far outweighs the cost. So by using Premiere on a PC, I save over $1000 dollars in software and hardware costs. I really can't see why Apple is the better option here.
Riiight. The only way its going to be cheaper is if you warez Premiere and After Effects, as together they are over a thousand dollars.
$800 eMac + free iMovie = $800
$600 Dell + Premiere + AE = $1700
Hell, you could buy an eMac with a DVD burner for what you'd pay for Adobe's software alone.
Also, the Apple equivalent of Premiere, Final Cut Pro, costs $250 dollars more than Premiere.
Three words: Final Cut Express. Price? $100. Basically most of power of FCP, but without some of the filters that drive up the cost. So for another $100 over the cost of Premiere and After Effects, you can get an eMac with a DVD burner and FCE.
If you are thinking about iMovie, is not what I'd call a professional video editing tool. It's great for amateurs. But it is totally and wholly beaten out by open source windows video editing programs such as Virtual Dub Mod.
As far as Virtual Dub goes, it is an excelent tool - if you're recompressing or croping a single video and audio stream. However, if you are trying to re-arrange clips to make a video, iMovie will stomp all over Vdub. Unless your time is completely worthless, Vdub is just not going to cut it for any kind of video project that needs chronological editing, unless its very small.
So, in summary: Apple stomps all over the PC in video editing, at the low end, the high end, *and* on price. And there's still no PC product that compares to iMovie for how much it costs and what it does.
Apple is a huge company. Bigger than McDonalds. Routinely one of the top five computer manufactuers. Why, when comparing Apple to the Wintel market, do people lump the 90% of the PC manufatuers together as if they were a single company, like the one that writes their os?
you're finally allowed
:)
Are you that whipped, or does she also have to get your permission to get a new pair of shoes?
LAME is the only good way to encode. Anything else will produce inferior MP3s.
Possibly among free encoders, but what about "official" ones? Apple licensed the Fraunhofer codec for Quicktime, which is the engine that runes iTunes.
iTunes has rather restrictive DRM
Um, no. The only DRM is on AAC files downloaded from Apple's music store, and its about the least restrictive DRM on the planet. iTunes has a built in mp3 encoder, which should be very good as Apple licensed the codec from Faunhaufer, and nothing stops you from having all mp3's on your 'Pod.
Go crawl back under your bridge.
Also, most of the content creation software, such as iMovie, have perfectly good PC equivalents.
Like what. The free PC software sucks, and the good ones are very expensive. I doubt your "perfectly good PC equivalents" exist, at least as far as video editing goes.
Oh? Quoting the judge:
- She agreed that the police broke the law by pretending to be lawyers, but said police are allowed to do that to catch criminals.
While I'm sure there's a lot more to the statement, she's saying the police are alowed to break the law in order to arrest people. That doesn't set off any warning bells with you?I wouldn't feel too guilty about doing this because consumers don't have any option for damaged or defective DVD's, but I'm sure Blockbuster does as a Really Big Company.
...look no farther than how American ads portray men and fathers. You mentioned role reversals, but the issue warrants more of a mention than that. Men and fathers are portrayed as helpless idiots, inferior parents and "humorously" subjected to violence.
There's the add where the woman takes pictures of items so her brainless husband can find the items in the store, the Dodge minivan ad with the caption "gets more work done than most husbands", the candy bar ad where a squirrel chomps on a guys nuts, the (insurance?) ad where the guy doesn't care that he's spilled hot coffee on his crotch, and worst of all, the Progressive Insurance ad where a vindictive woman tortures her ex with a voodoo doll site - including taking a pair of wire cutters to his testicles.
If women in this country were subjected to as much humiliation, or female genital mutilation was treated as a joke in a commercial, there would be blood in the streets and NOW would be storming these advertizing agencies with tanks.
The entire, I can't afford what I want so I'll steal philosophy is pathetic..
Its not stealing, its copying.
Copying can be theft.
Its not theft. Never was, never will be, for the simple reason that you must remove something to steal it. If you're copying, you aren't removing so there is no theft. Is copyright infringment illegal? Sure. Do the creators of content deserve some kind of compensation? Sure. But that doens't make it theft.
You don't expect to be given a new car for free when your old one crashes or breaks down; why should DVDs be different?
Because the ratio of the material cost to the sticker price for a car is huge, while for a DVD it almost nothing. What he should suggest is being able to get new copies of damaged media for the cost of shipping and materials - rather than having to pay for the content again as well.
But DNNA almost certainly didn't make the mistake. That's the point.
Oh? And on what do you base that assertion? The fact that it said on the packaging that it came with three years of service, the fact that it said *inside the box* that it came with three years of service, the fact that the odds of multiple stores just happening to have the exact same "error" at the exact same time are astronomically low, or the fact that DNNA's own customer service reps said those machines came with 3 years of service?
It was their mistake. Deal with it.
If you believe that all mistakes should be severly punished
When did I say anything about punishment? Thats right, never. What they need to do is offer what they promised - the three years of service that came with those units.
It doesn't matter what kind of mistake it was. Rectifying the mistake means one of two things, and only offering a refund isn't one of them: either they can give these people their three years of service, or provide compensation for those three years, such as a Tivo with a comparible service agreement.
Companies have to stand by what they advertize. Apple has been sued (successfully) because they advertized that some of their machines would be processor upgradible, or that OS X would run on certain machines.
Ah, that makes a little more sense then. :) Yes, it would be nice if you could get a retro-discount on an Apple replaced battery. But as businesses run on profit, not being nice, and legally customers are entitled to squat after the warranty is up. But it would be a good move for pr reasons.
It doesn't matter if some marketing droid made a mistake, the company is still responsible for that mistake.
A few hundred less times silly than spending the aformentioned hundreds of billions a year to re-fight a war that happened 60 years ago.
So its one watt off from the 12" PB model....oh, damn. As for the iBooks, I have two theories. I heard that they use the older, more power hungry version of the G4 than the PowerBooks use. And I don't care enough about you to go look it up to be sure. The second, that the iBook can take a bigger battery because its in a different case. Didja think of that possibility? The 17" PB is the thinest of the line, for example.
From one point of view, Apple's problem is failing to be forthright about its intention to discourage battery replacement.
Do you see any other electronics manufacturers print large warnings that their product isn't supported out of warranty? Do you see DVD manufactuers put a big label on the box saying it isn't feasible to replace the laser if it breaks, *out of warranty*?
Everyone would benefit if Apple simply put the battery in a better place than under the hdd and made the case easier to open without voiding the warranty.
Except you can't do that and keep the iPod as sleek as it is. Not going to happen. To make the battery replacable, either they need to increase the size of the iPod, or the size of the rest of the components need to shrink.
How, under any stretch of the imagination, is it "reasonable" to compensate someone for a battery that dies out of warranty? Especially if only the battery is dead, and you can still use the device if its plugged in? Unless Apple advertized the the iPod's battery was cheap & easy to replace, or advertized that the batter would last indefinetly, the lawyers don't have a case, and neither do you.
I love Apple products in general but please...there is no way that most consumers would ever regard having to pay $99 to replace a battery in a $400 gizmo after 18 months as being reasonable.
The 18 months thing is possible though very rare. Anyone who repeats "18 months" as if it were happening to most of the first gen iPods are either 1) very ignorant or 2) an asshat. If you truly love Apple products as you say, I doubt you are that ignorant.
But yes, imagine for a second that we weren't talking about an Apple product. Sure you would think it sucks if your hard drive or dvd player developed a fault 6 months after warranty (even if you decide never to replace a dead iPod battery, you can still use it if its plugged in), but is the company somehow at fault for it? Especially when its a rare occurrence and its out of warranty? No.
So no, this is not a case of Apple being let off the hook because they're Apple, but another case where they are being given waaaaaay to much flack *because* they are Apple and not somebody else.