Yeah, I know -- they'd just love for me to pay the extra 20 bucks a month they want for digital instead of analog.
That's the whole point. CableCard would bring that down to an extra buck or two a month, at best. The card replaces the digital box. The real money is in services like PPV and VOD and so on.
So anyway, I don't get it -- tell me again why I should want to replace every TV in my house (they ALL only have RF jacks) in order to get the "privilage" of paying more for DRM'd content that violates my Fair-Use rights, and be provided with the "opportunity" of having advertising shoved in my face, my personal information sold to the highest bidder for "marketing purposes" or worse, so that the government can monitor me, and being forced to pay per view instead of buying the damn thing once and watching it as much as I want?
1. You wouldn't pay more. 2. The content would not be DRM'd. There's laws preventing that. Perhaps the PPV stuff would be, granted, but Tivo wouldn't be able to make a CableCard PVR (which they just announced last week) if the content was DRM'd. The whole point of CableCard is to provide an interface standard. 3. Nothing can violate your Fair Use rights. If you think it can, you don't understand what "Fair Use" means. 4. No digital box shoves advertising in your face. WTF are you talking about? 5. As has been pointed out countless times, your personal information is worthless to a marketer. You're not that fucking important. Marketers care about selling to lot sof people, not selling to you. 6. If you think the government gives a shit about what you, I recommend therapy. 7. How in the hell is anybody going to force you to get Pay Per View? Are you suddenly unable to just go buy the fucking DVD or something?
Yeah, I think I'll pass -- and the cable companies, the government, and you (since you seem to be in favor of it) are all cordially invited to GO FUCK YOURSELVES!!
The majority of cable subscribers in my area are on "standard cable" which is still all analog. The FCC has little control over how cable or satellite companies transmit their signals over the media and bands they use.
True, but cable companies have been trying to switch everybody to digital for quite a while now. There's a lot more profit in it for them because they can offer things like PPV and so forth. While they will continue to put analog on the cable for quite a while, eventually the big network channels are going to simply stop providing analog signals to cable. Cable companies can either downshift the signal to an analog feed at the cable head end, or force the remaining analog feed customers to switch to digital.
CableCard will help them to do that. Because a lot of newer TV's have cable card capabilities, and TV viewers are so down on set top boxes, the cablecard will let them simply plug a card in and go. No STB. They'll probably let the analog run on cable until well after CableCard 2.0 is out and about and in all new TV sets, because there's little financial incentive for the cable provider to switch CableCard 1.0 (no support for PPV, etc).
So it might be another 10 years before analog truly dies on cable as well. Expect the satellite companies to be touting "all digital" for quite a while to try to get cable customers to switch as well.
December 2006 is the scheduled date for turning off analog signals.
The simple fact of the matter is that the vast majority of people in this country are using a set top box of some sort to receive programming. Whether it be cable or satellite or HDTV over the air, most people are not watching with rabbit ears anymore. It's too limiting. Analog TV was on the decline well before the digital broadcasting revolution got rolling along back in 1997.
And the last time I checked, April 2005 is the date by which *all* programming must be made available digitally. If you can't get a set top box to receive Digital TV in a year and a half, well, that's your loss, I figure.
Look, we need digital TV. We need the bandwidth that analog is using back in order to improve. Turning off analog is part of that process. So your old analog TV tuner won't work anymore. Deal with it and get a digital tuner.
Googling around discovers it is a PCMCIA device. And the quote is CableCARD is coming to a PCMCIA slot near you. My nearest PCMCIA slot is on the left side of my notebook. So, when do I finally get to watch TV on my laptop?
When somebody creates hardware that can read the digital signal from the cable line and inject it into your computer, and then creates software that can use a CableCard in the computer to decrypt said digital signal.
If Apple is suing him, then they are suing him using some form of law to make their case. You can't just sue anybody at random, you have to have a legal backing upon which to do it. he has no contract with Apple, he signed no NDA, so they're not getting him on contract law. In this particular case, they are using trade secret protection laws to do the suing.
Laws are passed by the government. If the existance of this law allows the private company to suppress his freedom of speech, then the government is at fault for passing the law in question. The existence of the law constitutes government interference and First Amendment protections do indeed apply.
What if somebody stole a manuscript for the next Harry Potter book, or StarWars Episode III, and slipped it to "ThinkPotter" or "ThinkJedi.com," who promptly posted it on the internet?
Well, for one thing, those would be protected by copyright law.
ThinkSecret redistributed stolen, protected information. This is not protected speech. In this case ThinkSecret are not journalists, they are accomplices!! And accomplices that **profited** from their actions, I might add!
The question is whether this sort of information is protected information. If somebody off the street comes up to me and tells me "hey, apple is coming out with a new flash player device called the iPod Shuffle" and I post this infomation online, have I done broken the law? Certainly not copyright law, because information cannot be copyrighted, only actual text and photos and such can.
Now, some laws exist to prevent the release of trade secrets, this much is true. However these laws might be superceded by freedom of the press. And the press is defined as anybody reporting information to the public, like it or not. He has every right to argue that he was publishing as a journalist. Whether he makes a profit on it or not is irrelevant. The New York Times sells advertisements and subscriptions, after all.
And it's really quite debatable whether the knowledge that Apple is making any particular product is indeed a "trade secret" or not under the definitions used in the law.
If he had posted copyrighted material, he'd have no case. As it is, he does have a case.
All of which is just a prelude to my real point, regarding "You can't say that." Which is that nobody ever just says "women have less mathematical aptitude". Nobody ever says "women have less innate ability at math, so let's give them additional tutoring to help and maybe we can cover the disparity". No. It's always "women suck at [X] so it's okay that we don't admit/hire/promote/assist as many, and let's not try to give them a boost because it would be a waste of time". In other words, the statement is always used as a way to justify discrimination against women -- discrimination that existed long before any possible proof of the statement itself.
So when people just assume that "women suck at math" is a sexist statement, it's because every single time I've ever heard it uttered it has been.
Perhaps you couldn't hear the "so let's give them additional tutoring" statement that was going to be said because the groupthink people were too busy screaming after the person started off by saying "women suck at math".
If you don't listen to the whole thing, then how can you know what the intentions were?
So far, all that I can see this guy has said was that women suck at math and he thinks that is something that should be studied. He didn't say why it should be studied, and as far as I can tell, nobody asked either. They simply assumed the worst.
If you assume the statement is sexist on it's face, then it never has an opportunity to not be sexist.
Sure Apple could sue an employee or former employee for divulging this type of information, but I don't see what duty the kid has to keep it a secret. Once he, as a member of the public, learned the secret, it was no longer a secret.
Go read the Uniform Trade Secrets Act. Basically, if you knew it was a trade secret and knew that it was obtained improperly, and you disclose it, they can sue you for doing so.
However, it's possible that he could weasel out because knowledge of the existence of a product might not fall into the category of "trade secret" according to the definition of "trade secret" in that law.
It's also possible he could get out of naming names using the California Shield Law. This protects journalists from revealing their source (most of the time) and is written directly into the California Constitution, so it supercedes a lot of other laws there.
In short, if he hires a good lawyer, he can probably get out of it, and maybe even get his attorney's fees paid using the anti-SLAPP legislation. Depends on the court, really. His best bet is probably to turn the whole thing into a First Amendment issue in the eyes of the press. He'll be quite likely to get some support on that angle, you can be sure.
Rural areas that are NOT being "propped up" by big cities pay less taxes.
Do you not see the flaw in your own statement? A rural area paying less taxes is being propped up by a big city, by definition. The city pays more taxes which go to support the rural area.
And in any case, there are no rural areas that are not being propped up by big cities.
My family has no right to my emails unless I gave them the password. After I die, I fully expect my email accounts to expire after some amount of time and the contents to be deleted. If I wanted them to have this info, then I'd have passed along the password.
And Yahoo! shouldn't be put in the position of having to verify that people are really next of kin and that users are really deceased when they don't have any way to verify who the heck uses the email account in the first place.
Dont forget that the majority of food this country consumes comes out of those little home towns and the communities that surround them. Thats a damn fine contribution to society as a whole I think.
Ahh, the farmer notion. Except for the fact that you're completely wrong, you have a point.
Nearly all the food in the country comes from the rural areas, true, but the amount of people these farming operations employ is nowhere near high enough to explain the population of these small towns. There's a lot of farmers out there, true, but there's a hell of a lot more people in these sorts of rural areas than you can easily explain by farming. Farming turned into big business long ago, and what you generally have is some company or corporation owning hundreds of thousands of acres and farming the whole thing. Thanks to automated machinery, this is a relatively low manpower operation. A few dozen people can farm several hundred thousands of acres.
In fact, most of these towns are supported by one or sometimes two major industrial operations that tends to dominate the town. Usually some kind of low level manufacturing or raw materials type of concern. The auto industry accounts for a large amount of this sort of thing, actually. All those parts in the cars have to be made somewhere.
But the fact of the matter is that the cash for these goods comes from the big cities, for the most part. It's a mutally beneficial relationship. The rural areas export goods and the cities export cash and, basically, civilization. Each to the other's benefit.
Maybe if instead of moving to a whole new state every time someone offered you another perk you put down some roots and started contributing to your own home town
Maybe instead of contributing to your home town you could grow up out of the 1920's and started contributing to society as a whole?
Some of see the bigger picture here. Like contributing to society as a whole, or making the world better as a world instea do fjust making your little slice of it better. We tried the small town concept a hundred years ago. It doesn't work. It never worked. It's a fantasy. And today, small towns can only exist as leeches off the cities. Look at what happens to any little hick burg when the one or two major employers shut down and move away? Answer: the town dies. Why does it die? Because it only existed because of the infusion of money provided by those in the city buying the goods produced by that industry.
And while it's nice and well and good to like where you live (and I love where I live), not everybody wants to live in some hole so small that you could know everybody else. Because that's essentially what you're saying here. Everybody knows everybody and so it's easy to judge a man's character or his honesty and thus gauge the risk involved. That's fine when everybody does indeed know everybody, but in a big city that's not only infeasible, but impossible.
Seriously, if you like living in the sticks then that's fine. But applying your small town logic to bigger areas simply makes no sense. A credit reporting system is necessary. It may not be fair, and it may be badly made, but the correct solution is to fix the system, not to dump it.
Disabling SSID broadcast doesn't prevent somebody from seeing your SSID. The SSID is in every frame, so it's not like you're preventing anybody with a sniffer from seeing the SSID. Furthermore, they don't even need your SSID to connect to you, as on most systems, the "ANY" SSID will allow association unless your AP had the ability to disable that.
All disabling SSID broadcast will do is to prevent your SSID from showing up in Windows little list of "available networks". This might prevent the little old lady next door from connecting to your system by accident, but it does absolutely nothing in terms of security.
Those forums have the highest concentration of dissatisfied customers I have ever seen, many of whom think that they are talking to Apple directly.
You have a point there.:D
I would contend that the vast majority of these are stupid, launched by otherwise smart and reasonable people that want someone to pay for the fact that they made a mistake. They just seem to get vengeful and willfully stupid as soon as they enter their credit card number. But that's a not much of an argument.
I'm not disagreeing with you here, because you're right. However that does not also mean anything about this particular case. The guy might have a point is all I'm really trying to say. Simply dismissing him as an idiot, while it may be true, is really missing that point. Apple has gone to pretty great lengths, so far, to ensure that only iPod's can play iTMS files and that iTMS is the only store that will work on iPod's. They bitched pretty heavily about Real's Harmony software adding support for iPod's, for example.
This new Motorola phone thing might indicate a change in strategy, but then again it might indicate that they don't think phones are competing with the iPod and thus it will not hurt their sales any. When they start licensing FairPlay to other portable players, then I'll think that they're playing fair.
I'm speaking of lock-in to music stores, not lock-in to file formats. A player that doesn't support MP3's, for example, is dead on arrival. Look at a lot of Sony's players. They support MP3 only by convert it to ATRAC. Ick.
There's plenty of competition in the marketplace, quite simply competition is meant to be better for the consumer,
I agree that competition is good, but there is no competition.
-Try buying music online for your iPod with any store other than iTMS (with the exception of Real's store, which I admit has added support for iPod's on their own and which Apple claims they did illegally).
-Even better, try putting iTMS music on any other player device.
Can't do it? Exactly. That's what "vendor lock-in" means. Having competition is not the issue here. Locking an iPod purchaser into the iTMS or locking an iTMS user into the iPod is the issue.
an ipod purchaser claiming ignorance that he's locked-in (and he isn't) to buying tracks from itunes for his ipod would hardly stand up in court, methinks. especially when there are legal methods to transfer most drm restricted to an ipod and aac's to other devices.
Please. There are no other choices for an iPod user other than iTMS and Real's online store (which Apple vehemently claims is illegal and dangerous and run by hackers and pirates and such).
And there are no legal ways to transfer DRM restricted material to and iPod and iTMS's FairPlay protected AAC's to other devices. Even the burn and re-rip method violates the DMCA.
That, of course, is an unfortunate situation. Though, it is not apple's fault.
I disagree, it's 100% Apple's fault. They're the ones who disabled WMA support, they're the ones refusing to license FairPlay to other player manufacturers. It's a pretty clear case of delibrately locking iTMS users into the iPod and iPod users into iTMS.
Remember when Real came out with the new Harmony thing that allows Real's online store to send protected files to iPod's by faking FairPlay support? Remember the huge fuss they raised then, calling Real a bunch of hackers and pirates, in no uncertain terms? To me, that's a pretty clear indication that they did it intentionally. They want to lock in users to Apple in both markets. That just ain't right, man.
This is, of course, stupid, as you already know this when you buy music from iTMS in the first place.
The large volume of posters on Apple's own discussion forums would disagree with you as to this particular point. There's several dozen posts a day asking why they can't convert iTMS purchased tunes to MP3 for their non-iPod player. This is simply not made very clear to your average non-technical user.
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Yeah, I know -- they'd just love for me to pay the extra 20 bucks a month they want for digital instead of analog.
That's the whole point. CableCard would bring that down to an extra buck or two a month, at best. The card replaces the digital box. The real money is in services like PPV and VOD and so on.
So anyway, I don't get it -- tell me again why I should want to replace every TV in my house (they ALL only have RF jacks) in order to get the "privilage" of paying more for DRM'd content that violates my Fair-Use rights, and be provided with the "opportunity" of having advertising shoved in my face, my personal information sold to the highest bidder for "marketing purposes" or worse, so that the government can monitor me, and being forced to pay per view instead of buying the damn thing once and watching it as much as I want?
1. You wouldn't pay more.
2. The content would not be DRM'd. There's laws preventing that. Perhaps the PPV stuff would be, granted, but Tivo wouldn't be able to make a CableCard PVR (which they just announced last week) if the content was DRM'd. The whole point of CableCard is to provide an interface standard.
3. Nothing can violate your Fair Use rights. If you think it can, you don't understand what "Fair Use" means.
4. No digital box shoves advertising in your face. WTF are you talking about?
5. As has been pointed out countless times, your personal information is worthless to a marketer. You're not that fucking important. Marketers care about selling to lot sof people, not selling to you.
6. If you think the government gives a shit about what you, I recommend therapy.
7. How in the hell is anybody going to force you to get Pay Per View? Are you suddenly unable to just go buy the fucking DVD or something?
Yeah, I think I'll pass -- and the cable companies, the government, and you (since you seem to be in favor of it) are all cordially invited to GO FUCK YOURSELVES!!
Nice. Very mature.
The majority of cable subscribers in my area are on "standard cable" which is still all analog. The FCC has little control over how cable or satellite companies transmit their signals over the media and bands they use.
True, but cable companies have been trying to switch everybody to digital for quite a while now. There's a lot more profit in it for them because they can offer things like PPV and so forth. While they will continue to put analog on the cable for quite a while, eventually the big network channels are going to simply stop providing analog signals to cable. Cable companies can either downshift the signal to an analog feed at the cable head end, or force the remaining analog feed customers to switch to digital.
CableCard will help them to do that. Because a lot of newer TV's have cable card capabilities, and TV viewers are so down on set top boxes, the cablecard will let them simply plug a card in and go. No STB. They'll probably let the analog run on cable until well after CableCard 2.0 is out and about and in all new TV sets, because there's little financial incentive for the cable provider to switch CableCard 1.0 (no support for PPV, etc).
So it might be another 10 years before analog truly dies on cable as well. Expect the satellite companies to be touting "all digital" for quite a while to try to get cable customers to switch as well.
One step at a time, in other words.
December 2006 is the scheduled date for turning off analog signals.
The simple fact of the matter is that the vast majority of people in this country are using a set top box of some sort to receive programming. Whether it be cable or satellite or HDTV over the air, most people are not watching with rabbit ears anymore. It's too limiting. Analog TV was on the decline well before the digital broadcasting revolution got rolling along back in 1997.
And the last time I checked, April 2005 is the date by which *all* programming must be made available digitally. If you can't get a set top box to receive Digital TV in a year and a half, well, that's your loss, I figure.
Look, we need digital TV. We need the bandwidth that analog is using back in order to improve. Turning off analog is part of that process. So your old analog TV tuner won't work anymore. Deal with it and get a digital tuner.
Googling around discovers it is a PCMCIA device. And the quote is CableCARD is coming to a PCMCIA slot near you.
My nearest PCMCIA slot is on the left side of my notebook. So, when do I finally get to watch TV on my laptop?
When somebody creates hardware that can read the digital signal from the cable line and inject it into your computer, and then creates software that can use a CableCard in the computer to decrypt said digital signal.
If Apple is suing him, then they are suing him using some form of law to make their case. You can't just sue anybody at random, you have to have a legal backing upon which to do it. he has no contract with Apple, he signed no NDA, so they're not getting him on contract law. In this particular case, they are using trade secret protection laws to do the suing.
Laws are passed by the government. If the existance of this law allows the private company to suppress his freedom of speech, then the government is at fault for passing the law in question. The existence of the law constitutes government interference and First Amendment protections do indeed apply.
What if somebody stole a manuscript for the next Harry Potter book, or StarWars Episode III, and slipped it to "ThinkPotter" or "ThinkJedi.com," who promptly posted it on the internet?
Well, for one thing, those would be protected by copyright law.
ThinkSecret redistributed stolen, protected information. This is not protected speech. In this case ThinkSecret are not journalists, they are accomplices!! And accomplices that **profited** from their actions, I might add!
The question is whether this sort of information is protected information. If somebody off the street comes up to me and tells me "hey, apple is coming out with a new flash player device called the iPod Shuffle" and I post this infomation online, have I done broken the law? Certainly not copyright law, because information cannot be copyrighted, only actual text and photos and such can.
Now, some laws exist to prevent the release of trade secrets, this much is true. However these laws might be superceded by freedom of the press. And the press is defined as anybody reporting information to the public, like it or not. He has every right to argue that he was publishing as a journalist. Whether he makes a profit on it or not is irrelevant. The New York Times sells advertisements and subscriptions, after all.
And it's really quite debatable whether the knowledge that Apple is making any particular product is indeed a "trade secret" or not under the definitions used in the law.
If he had posted copyrighted material, he'd have no case. As it is, he does have a case.
All of which is just a prelude to my real point, regarding "You can't say that." Which is that nobody ever just says "women have less mathematical aptitude". Nobody ever says "women have less innate ability at math, so let's give them additional tutoring to help and maybe we can cover the disparity". No. It's always "women suck at [X] so it's okay that we don't admit/hire/promote/assist as many, and let's not try to give them a boost because it would be a waste of time". In other words, the statement is always used as a way to justify discrimination against women -- discrimination that existed long before any possible proof of the statement itself.
So when people just assume that "women suck at math" is a sexist statement, it's because every single time I've ever heard it uttered it has been.
Perhaps you couldn't hear the "so let's give them additional tutoring" statement that was going to be said because the groupthink people were too busy screaming after the person started off by saying "women suck at math".
If you don't listen to the whole thing, then how can you know what the intentions were?
So far, all that I can see this guy has said was that women suck at math and he thinks that is something that should be studied. He didn't say why it should be studied, and as far as I can tell, nobody asked either. They simply assumed the worst.
If you assume the statement is sexist on it's face, then it never has an opportunity to not be sexist.
some people "pursue their dreams" of ... drinking 15 beers without passing out. Those aren't things that deserve anyone's respect or admiration.
I agree. 15 beers is easy. It only takes minor training time. Anybody who sets their goals so low isn't deserving of anyone's respect or admiration.
Up that to around 50-60 beers, and then you're talking.
Sure Apple could sue an employee or former employee for divulging this type of information, but I don't see what duty the kid has to keep it a secret. Once he, as a member of the public, learned the secret, it was no longer a secret.
Go read the Uniform Trade Secrets Act. Basically, if you knew it was a trade secret and knew that it was obtained improperly, and you disclose it, they can sue you for doing so.
However, it's possible that he could weasel out because knowledge of the existence of a product might not fall into the category of "trade secret" according to the definition of "trade secret" in that law.
It's also possible he could get out of naming names using the California Shield Law. This protects journalists from revealing their source (most of the time) and is written directly into the California Constitution, so it supercedes a lot of other laws there.
In short, if he hires a good lawyer, he can probably get out of it, and maybe even get his attorney's fees paid using the anti-SLAPP legislation. Depends on the court, really. His best bet is probably to turn the whole thing into a First Amendment issue in the eyes of the press. He'll be quite likely to get some support on that angle, you can be sure.
I'm no lawyer : can a court order someone to reveal its sources?
In some states, yes. In California, where I assume they're suing him, no. Google for the California Shield Law. It's pretty broad.
Rural areas that are NOT being "propped up" by big cities pay less taxes.
Do you not see the flaw in your own statement? A rural area paying less taxes is being propped up by a big city, by definition. The city pays more taxes which go to support the rural area.
And in any case, there are no rural areas that are not being propped up by big cities.
My family has no right to my emails unless I gave them the password. After I die, I fully expect my email accounts to expire after some amount of time and the contents to be deleted. If I wanted them to have this info, then I'd have passed along the password.
And Yahoo! shouldn't be put in the position of having to verify that people are really next of kin and that users are really deceased when they don't have any way to verify who the heck uses the email account in the first place.
Dont forget that the majority of food this country consumes comes out of those little home towns and the communities that surround them.
Thats a damn fine contribution to society as a whole I think.
Ahh, the farmer notion. Except for the fact that you're completely wrong, you have a point.
Nearly all the food in the country comes from the rural areas, true, but the amount of people these farming operations employ is nowhere near high enough to explain the population of these small towns. There's a lot of farmers out there, true, but there's a hell of a lot more people in these sorts of rural areas than you can easily explain by farming. Farming turned into big business long ago, and what you generally have is some company or corporation owning hundreds of thousands of acres and farming the whole thing. Thanks to automated machinery, this is a relatively low manpower operation. A few dozen people can farm several hundred thousands of acres.
In fact, most of these towns are supported by one or sometimes two major industrial operations that tends to dominate the town. Usually some kind of low level manufacturing or raw materials type of concern. The auto industry accounts for a large amount of this sort of thing, actually. All those parts in the cars have to be made somewhere.
But the fact of the matter is that the cash for these goods comes from the big cities, for the most part. It's a mutally beneficial relationship. The rural areas export goods and the cities export cash and, basically, civilization. Each to the other's benefit.
Of course rural areas pay less taxes. They're being supported/propped up by the taxes/money of those in the cities. This is fairly obvious.
First, you very well can connect XP to a non-broadcast SSID. Just put the SSID into the dialog manually. It'll work.
Secondly, he's complaining about wireless and channel interference (OSI Layer 1), not SSID (OSI Layer 2). Wholly different stuff.
Sprechen sie sassy?
Maybe if instead of moving to a whole new state every time someone offered you another perk you put down some roots and started contributing to your own home town
Maybe instead of contributing to your home town you could grow up out of the 1920's and started contributing to society as a whole?
Some of see the bigger picture here. Like contributing to society as a whole, or making the world better as a world instea do fjust making your little slice of it better. We tried the small town concept a hundred years ago. It doesn't work. It never worked. It's a fantasy. And today, small towns can only exist as leeches off the cities. Look at what happens to any little hick burg when the one or two major employers shut down and move away? Answer: the town dies. Why does it die? Because it only existed because of the infusion of money provided by those in the city buying the goods produced by that industry.
And while it's nice and well and good to like where you live (and I love where I live), not everybody wants to live in some hole so small that you could know everybody else. Because that's essentially what you're saying here. Everybody knows everybody and so it's easy to judge a man's character or his honesty and thus gauge the risk involved. That's fine when everybody does indeed know everybody, but in a big city that's not only infeasible, but impossible.
Seriously, if you like living in the sticks then that's fine. But applying your small town logic to bigger areas simply makes no sense. A credit reporting system is necessary. It may not be fair, and it may be badly made, but the correct solution is to fix the system, not to dump it.
Disabling SSID broadcast doesn't prevent somebody from seeing your SSID. The SSID is in every frame, so it's not like you're preventing anybody with a sniffer from seeing the SSID. Furthermore, they don't even need your SSID to connect to you, as on most systems, the "ANY" SSID will allow association unless your AP had the ability to disable that.
All disabling SSID broadcast will do is to prevent your SSID from showing up in Windows little list of "available networks". This might prevent the little old lady next door from connecting to your system by accident, but it does absolutely nothing in terms of security.
Those forums have the highest concentration of dissatisfied customers I have ever seen, many of whom think that they are talking to Apple directly.
:D
You have a point there.
I would contend that the vast majority of these are stupid, launched by otherwise smart and reasonable people that want someone to pay for the fact that they made a mistake. They just seem to get vengeful and willfully stupid as soon as they enter their credit card number. But that's a not much of an argument.
I'm not disagreeing with you here, because you're right. However that does not also mean anything about this particular case. The guy might have a point is all I'm really trying to say. Simply dismissing him as an idiot, while it may be true, is really missing that point. Apple has gone to pretty great lengths, so far, to ensure that only iPod's can play iTMS files and that iTMS is the only store that will work on iPod's. They bitched pretty heavily about Real's Harmony software adding support for iPod's, for example.
This new Motorola phone thing might indicate a change in strategy, but then again it might indicate that they don't think phones are competing with the iPod and thus it will not hurt their sales any. When they start licensing FairPlay to other portable players, then I'll think that they're playing fair.
I'm speaking of lock-in to music stores, not lock-in to file formats. A player that doesn't support MP3's, for example, is dead on arrival. Look at a lot of Sony's players. They support MP3 only by convert it to ATRAC. Ick.
There's plenty of competition in the marketplace, quite simply competition is meant to be better for the consumer,
I agree that competition is good, but there is no competition.
-Try buying music online for your iPod with any store other than iTMS (with the exception of Real's store, which I admit has added support for iPod's on their own and which Apple claims they did illegally).
-Even better, try putting iTMS music on any other player device.
Can't do it? Exactly. That's what "vendor lock-in" means. Having competition is not the issue here. Locking an iPod purchaser into the iTMS or locking an iTMS user into the iPod is the issue.
an ipod purchaser claiming ignorance that he's locked-in (and he isn't) to buying tracks from itunes for his ipod would hardly stand up in court, methinks. especially when there are legal methods to transfer most drm restricted to an ipod and aac's to other devices.
Please. There are no other choices for an iPod user other than iTMS and Real's online store (which Apple vehemently claims is illegal and dangerous and run by hackers and pirates and such).
And there are no legal ways to transfer DRM restricted material to and iPod and iTMS's FairPlay protected AAC's to other devices. Even the burn and re-rip method violates the DMCA.
That, of course, is an unfortunate situation. Though, it is not apple's fault.
I disagree, it's 100% Apple's fault. They're the ones who disabled WMA support, they're the ones refusing to license FairPlay to other player manufacturers. It's a pretty clear case of delibrately locking iTMS users into the iPod and iPod users into iTMS.
Remember when Real came out with the new Harmony thing that allows Real's online store to send protected files to iPod's by faking FairPlay support? Remember the huge fuss they raised then, calling Real a bunch of hackers and pirates, in no uncertain terms? To me, that's a pretty clear indication that they did it intentionally. They want to lock in users to Apple in both markets. That just ain't right, man.
Sure. The question is: Will you notice? And to repeat my question: got any studies?
Go read my post again. The answers are "Yes" and "Studies are unnecessary when you can actually hear it quite blatently."
This is, of course, stupid, as you already know this when you buy music from iTMS in the first place.
The large volume of posters on Apple's own discussion forums would disagree with you as to this particular point. There's several dozen posts a day asking why they can't convert iTMS purchased tunes to MP3 for their non-iPod player. This is simply not made very clear to your average non-technical user.