There is nothing implied or explicit in the language above, about encoding communications using proprietary or patented protocols.The language focuses on intent "purpose of obscuring". I interpret this as the difference between compressing and encrypting.
Arguably, the intent is to obscure the data in such a way that you can only receive it using another proprietary device.
If I use G729 to compress voice transmission, it doesn't mean my intent is to obfuscate, but merely improve the efficiency of my communication.
It's not just your intent that matters. For a company to use a proprietary codec has multiple purposes: one probably is to achieve a given level of voice quality without much effort, another is to gain market share and create barriers to entry.
It's reasonably possible to do what D-STAR does without using proprietary codecs or protocols; therefore, the use should not be permitted.
Somewhere over the last couple of decades, the amateur radio community has drifted off into a dependency on proprietary hardware and software, contrary to the original intent and spirit of amateur radio use. It's probably because people actually interested in digital technology just left amateur radio for the Internet, and the people who were left were just Windows-using analog guys who didn't care about all this digital stuff or licensing.
After having an amateur radio license for 20 years, I'm just going to let it lapse this year. As far as I'm concerned, with the kinds of attitudes prevailing among current amateur radio users, the bands should just be returned to more productive use.
Amateur radio should only use open standards, codecs, and protocols; anything else should not be allowed on the air and people using anything else should lose their license.
There really is no reason to use anything proprietary anyway: the necessary technologies and protocols have been known for a while.
So you'd be fine if someone went around inciting other people to violence against you but never suffered any consequences himself because he never personally did anything other than talk?
"Fine"? No. It's disturbing. But in most cases, it's legal and it should remain legal.
As a member of several minorities at which hate speech is regularly aimed, I want hate speech to remain legal, because I know that governmental restrictions on free speech tend to be disproportionately applied to minorities.
Ok, from this side of pond, all states look the same, but you get the idea.
Well, why don't you worry about the appalling state of free speech on your side of the pond then:
Back to America. If there is already hate for blacks, Muslims or what you hate there, then a right word in right moment can spark what happened in Kyrgyzstan.
And you think that hate speech laws would prevent that? How naive can you be? These people are willing to put their lives on the line and bash in each other's heads; being hit with a hate speech conviction is likely low on their list of concerns. Long term, they need more free speech, not less; they need to be able to air their grievances and respond to each other.
And quite frankly, Hitler made some high quality hate speeches.
Yes, and no German court of law would have convicted him because what he said wouldn't have been considered hate speech by the government. But Hitler (like other oppressive German regimes) used restrictions on speech that were ostensibly in place to protect the public peace in order to stifle political discussion and opposition.
But, what makes you believe that there is a cause/effect relationship between them?
Proponents of anti-pornography laws are justifying those laws by (often implicitly) postulating a causal relationship between pornography and sex crimes. Not only is there little proof of such a causal relationship, the observation of a negative correlation between pornography consumption and sex crimes contradicts such a causal relationship.
I would agree, that porn might help relieve some, let's call it 'stresses' -- but that it is one of the bigger reasons for lower levels of abuse?
Who knows? Who cares? People advocating free speech don't have to prove anything, people attempting to restrict it have to come up with convincing arguments and data, and so far they haven't.
The problem with the "people need an outlet" argument is that it's fundamental disrespectful to the individual on a basic level.
It's not an "argument", it's an observation. I'm sorry that the facts of nature contradict your beliefs, but the problem is with your beliefs, not with nature.
People are not simply a collection of insatiable urges that must be controlled or managed or released.
How do you get from "pornography should be legal" to "people are simply a collection of insatiable urges"? Whether or how I consume pornography, or what spiritual implications that does or does not have for me, is none of your or the government's business or concern as long as my consumption of it doesn't cause specific, demonstrable harm to others.
Until we can recognize this, all our efforts to help will be in vain.
You have no business "helping" me. Just get lost and worry about your own business.
It matters because Obama is coming up for an election again. I'm willing to give the guy a lot of leeway, but I draw the line at tinkering with free speech.
If he screws up this nomination, I'm either staying home or voting for someone else.
The problem is that we've gone too far in being accommodating of hate speech.
We haven't "accommodated" it, it has always been legal, and for good reason. The only thing that should get you into trouble, speech wise, are libel, slander, and threats, and only if directed against specific, identifiable persons.
Under these free speech laws, slavery ended, women got voting rights, and Jews, Mormons, Catholics, homosexuals, and other minorities integrated into mainstream society. They could do this because free speech was possible, because people could challenge the status quo even if that did upset a lot of people. With a track record like that, why would you want to change US free speech laws? There is not a shred of evidence that hate speech laws lead to more civil liberties or protect minorities.
On the other hand, the prospect of having the government decide what is and isn't legitimate free speech is truly frightening. Totalitarian regimes engage in that kind of government censorship; the US should not.
A lot of it is just made up like like those bigoted Barrack Husein Obama posters. And the folks that claim that giving equal rights to the GLBT community is somehow undermining their rights. These are not people engaging in legitimate free speech
You're totally naive if you think that hate speech laws with be used to protect presidential candidates from attacks by right wing nuts, or to protect homosexuals from the kind of hate speech that is preached daily by Catholic priests and Muslim clerics. What hate speech laws are commonly used for is to protect established, powerful religious interests from criticism and ridicule.
Norway is an oil-rich country with about twice the per-capita GNP of most of the rest of Europe (and per-capita energy waste to match). What happens in Norway is about as typical for the rest of the world as Dubai or the UAE.
The dedicated Skype or VoIP phones are junk in my experience: hard to configure, unreliable, etc. They usually can't deal with browser-based configuration, limit your choice of VoIP providers, etc.
My recommendation: get an Android phone, Nokia Symbian phone, or an iPod touch. All of them support VoIP, including Skype. The Android phone is the better choice but a bit more expensive; it will also allow you to make phone calls when you travel. Nokia phones with WiFi are cheaper, have better battery life, and also have great browsers, but the UI is bit clunky. The iPod Touch has a good screen and lots of apps, but the only way you can call is with a headset.
I feel sorry for her loss. However, I'm a bit unclear about the reasoning behind this. For which fees, financial obligations, and loans is it unpatriotic to ask for repayment?
Waiving such fees is a nice thing to do; it expresses gratitude for the sacrifices that our military makes.
However, I start feeling uncomfortable when members of the military start talking about it as if it were an entitlement or obligation.
Good questions. There may be studies to back up my hypothesis, but I'm relying on my own anecdotal evidence. Some real sociologists are going to have to conduct proper experiments to get real numbers.
Real sociologists have, because a lot of people have had your idea.
But correlation does not prove causation.
But absence of a positive correlation disproves the causation that you postulate.
Religious beliefs may lead people to immoral behavior. Or those people who require the external guidance of a faith in place of an internal set of morals may tend to backslide more absent continuous supervision.
Your hypothesis was:
There are still people too immature or un-self aware to develop internal rules of morality, even as adults. So religion still plays a necessary part in incorporating them into society safely.
Your hypothesis implies a positive correlation: more religion, more "safe incorporation into society". We don't find that positive correlation, hence your hypothesis is untenable.
Now, cut to the present. There are still people too immature or un-self aware to develop internal rules of morality, even as adults. So religion still plays a necessary part in incorporating them into society safely. The problem with religion is that those that need external guidance are exactly the people that you don't want running things.
That's a nice theory. But where's the evidence that that actually works? And where is the evidence that we need to lie to people in order for them to behave morally? In fact, correlations between religious affiliation and behavior often show that the less religious people are, the better they behave in just those areas where religions claim to promote morality; this is true both at a population level and at the level of nations.
There is, however, plenty of evidence that religion is being abused for political purposes.
But who gets to decide? Buddhism: good, Christianity: bad. I can see some fundamental First Amendment problems here.
What's there to decide? Treating Christianity as intrinsically immoral and at the same tolerating its practice are not incompatible with one another; as long as secular laws keep Christians from harming other people or imposing their immoral beliefs on others, they can do whatever they want, just like anybody else.
So lets just keep them all out of the classroom, courtroom, and laboratory.
We don't need to keep Christians out of classrooms, courtrooms, or the laboratory, but we do need to stop accepting religion as an excuse for bad behavior. If you want to be a nurse, lawyer, or teacher, you have to act as a professional. And if you are a government employee, you have to obey the non-establishment clause. If that conflicts with your religion, you need to seek a different profession. So, if you're a nurse and you refuse to participate in abortions, you should get fired. If you're a teacher and you teach that homosexuality is unnatural or that the earth was created 6000 years ago, you should get fired. You get fired not for being a Christian, but for doing things that contradict established scientific facts.
By insisting that people act according to science and reason in public, professional lives, members of religions that contradict science and reason will sort themselves out; we don't need a religious litmus test.
Dante placed Mohammed at the lowest circle of hell, and to anybody who isn't a Muslim, that's pretty much the only view of Mohammed that's possible based on his documented conduct: a child molesting, mass-murdering cult leader. Without suppressing all other beliefs, blasphemy against Islam is therefore inevitable. And that's what makes these blasphemy laws and attempts at censorship so dangerous: they are a thinly veiled attempt to force everybody to submit to Islam (at least everybody in Pakistan). If we want to have religious tolerance and freedom, everybody must tolerate blasphemy; the two are inseparable because one person's firmly held religious belief is another person's blasphemy.
So, they are saying that I release open source software because I don't want to pay for music? Yeah, right, like that makes sense. In fact, people release stuff under open source licenses or creative commons for the reason they do everything else: either they get paid for it, or they do it for fun. Both are legitimate reasons in a free market.
No, the real problem the ASCAP has is that the production and distribution costs for their products are dropping through the floor so that what used to be enormously valuable on its own is now so cheap that it can't even be sold on its own and instead serves other commercial functions, like advertising.
ASCAP is being driven out of business by the free market; they aren't competitive anymore, and now they want government to prop up their uncompetitive and failing business.
Wow, what misleading marketing speak. Let's look at that:
Larry Page himself said that poor battery life in android is usually down to multitasking.
That doesn't mean what you imply. Android battery life is about like iPhone battery life. Here are the numbers from my Android phone after about 18h of usage: 47% voice calls, 21% display, 12% phone idle, 10% cell standby, 4% Google Maps (foreground usage), 3% android system. The 20 multitasking apps that I have running have consumed a whopping 3%.
What Page was saying is that on the rare occasions where your battery life is unexpectedly short, a misbehaving background app is usually responsible. I have never seen that on my Android phone, and it's not a reason to restrict multitasking. I have, however, run down the battery on my iPhone plenty of times unexpectedly through some foreground app I forgot about.
Wrong. One of the main reasons to support an explicit API is that it gives the app a chance to free up memory that won't be needed when in the background.
Explicit APIs are good: APIs that tell the application "please reduce your memory/network/cpu usage or get suspended to disk", "please get rid of your GUI-related data structures", "please suspend yourself to disk now". Many UNIX systems and Android have these kinds of APIs. They don't require any restrictions on what the applications can do, only how much of it they can do it at any given time.
It's a smart phone, not a general purpose computer. It needs to be small, light weight and cheap enough for people to want to buy it.The restrictions are all about having a good user experience for non-technical people.
But the user experience is not good: a lot of iPad and iPhone applications fail to do the kinds of routine maintenance things one expects applications to be able to do in the background. None of these would be CPU intensive, but many don't fit into the limited categories that Apple has set up. That means that when I grab my iPad and go, data and information that should have been updated isn't there. The user experience on the iPad and iPhone is vaguely akin to using an MS-DOS system, except for the prettier graphics.
Full multitasking would severely limit battery life unless all apps are well behaved.
Repeating this bullshit again and again doesn't make it true. Whatever CPU limits you think are necessary to impose on background tasks can be imposed by the scheduler.
Furthermore, phones and PDAs have had multitasking for many years, and they have had battery meters, so there is plenty of data on what the effect of multitasking is. I have never seen full multitasking to lead to any kind of unexpected battery life problems.
Apple's (and your) explanations make no technical sense. What does make sense is that Apple's restrictions on multitasking are related to their business model and attempts to keep tight control of the platform.
This is a completely nonsensical argument. Apple already have complete control over applications that are available through the app store
That's an obvious but wrong response. Apple also wouldn't have to declare any explicit prohibitions on scripting languages, they could just turn down applications, but the resulting uncertainty would be bad for developers. Therefore, when Apple doesn't want unrestricted multitasking, they need to communicate and implement that somehow in a way that doesn't create hazards for their developers.
By defining a specific set of APIs and laying down the rule "no multitasking except through these APIs", Apple gets the restrictions they want, developers get clear rules to follow, and users still get the amount of multitasking Apple is willing to give them. In different words, the existence of these extra APIs codifies business strategy.
If you have another explanation, let's hear it, but Apple's explanation is nonsense. Whatever technical goals Apple says they want to achieve, they could simply achieve through small modifications to their scheduler, if need be, on a per-application basis, with much less work for themselves and their developers.
Apple's restrictions on multitasking make little sense from a technical point of view. From other platforms, we know that is not a major battery drain, and it's perfectly possible for a scheduler to do automatically whatever Apple's special APIs are trying to achieve.
Unless Apple just doesn't know what they are doing, the real reason behind Apple's restrictions on multitasking is more likely the same as their restrictions on scripting languages and alternative development environments: they want to keep control. With multitasking, you could run local file servers and local web servers. You could create new applications delivery platforms, local music servers, and a local file system and file manager.
Apple prefers if you use your phone with both hands, in particular while visiting certain web sites; it keeps you out of trouble and prevents the moisture sensor from triggering.
Slashdot Mirror
There is nothing implied or explicit in the language above, about encoding communications using proprietary or patented protocols.The language focuses on intent "purpose of obscuring". I interpret this as the difference between compressing and encrypting.
Arguably, the intent is to obscure the data in such a way that you can only receive it using another proprietary device.
If I use G729 to compress voice transmission, it doesn't mean my intent is to obfuscate, but merely improve the efficiency of my communication.
It's not just your intent that matters. For a company to use a proprietary codec has multiple purposes: one probably is to achieve a given level of voice quality without much effort, another is to gain market share and create barriers to entry.
It's reasonably possible to do what D-STAR does without using proprietary codecs or protocols; therefore, the use should not be permitted.
Yes, PACTOR III should be disallowed as well.
Somewhere over the last couple of decades, the amateur radio community has drifted off into a dependency on proprietary hardware and software, contrary to the original intent and spirit of amateur radio use. It's probably because people actually interested in digital technology just left amateur radio for the Internet, and the people who were left were just Windows-using analog guys who didn't care about all this digital stuff or licensing.
After having an amateur radio license for 20 years, I'm just going to let it lapse this year. As far as I'm concerned, with the kinds of attitudes prevailing among current amateur radio users, the bands should just be returned to more productive use.
Amateur radio should only use open standards, codecs, and protocols; anything else should not be allowed on the air and people using anything else should lose their license.
There really is no reason to use anything proprietary anyway: the necessary technologies and protocols have been known for a while.
both of which could lead to more copyright claims from rights holders."
Copyright is not an "inalienable right". Therefore, these people aren't "rights holders" unless we, the people, grant them these additional rights.
So you'd be fine if someone went around inciting other people to violence against you but never suffered any consequences himself because he never personally did anything other than talk?
"Fine"? No. It's disturbing. But in most cases, it's legal and it should remain legal.
As a member of several minorities at which hate speech is regularly aimed, I want hate speech to remain legal, because I know that governmental restrictions on free speech tend to be disproportionately applied to minorities.
Ok, from this side of pond, all states look the same, but you get the idea.
Well, why don't you worry about the appalling state of free speech on your side of the pond then:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/merseyside/8549613.stm
Back to America. If there is already hate for blacks, Muslims or what you hate there, then a right word in right moment can spark what happened in Kyrgyzstan.
And you think that hate speech laws would prevent that? How naive can you be? These people are willing to put their lives on the line and bash in each other's heads; being hit with a hate speech conviction is likely low on their list of concerns. Long term, they need more free speech, not less; they need to be able to air their grievances and respond to each other.
And quite frankly, Hitler made some high quality hate speeches.
Yes, and no German court of law would have convicted him because what he said wouldn't have been considered hate speech by the government. But Hitler (like other oppressive German regimes) used restrictions on speech that were ostensibly in place to protect the public peace in order to stifle political discussion and opposition.
The USA has a long tradition of racism, anti-semitism, and homophobia.
And the USA also has a long tradition of overcoming those issues, in part because the US protects free speech so strongly.
We have hate speech/crime laws because [protected classes] were killed left and right, while their murders were getting off scott free at trial.
The US does not have hate speech laws; the US does have hate crime laws. There's a big difference.
But, what makes you believe that there is a cause/effect relationship between them?
Proponents of anti-pornography laws are justifying those laws by (often implicitly) postulating a causal relationship between pornography and sex crimes. Not only is there little proof of such a causal relationship, the observation of a negative correlation between pornography consumption and sex crimes contradicts such a causal relationship.
I would agree, that porn might help relieve some, let's call it 'stresses' -- but that it is one of the bigger reasons for lower levels of abuse?
Who knows? Who cares? People advocating free speech don't have to prove anything, people attempting to restrict it have to come up with convincing arguments and data, and so far they haven't.
The problem with the "people need an outlet" argument is that it's fundamental disrespectful to the individual on a basic level.
It's not an "argument", it's an observation. I'm sorry that the facts of nature contradict your beliefs, but the problem is with your beliefs, not with nature.
People are not simply a collection of insatiable urges that must be controlled or managed or released.
How do you get from "pornography should be legal" to "people are simply a collection of insatiable urges"? Whether or how I consume pornography, or what spiritual implications that does or does not have for me, is none of your or the government's business or concern as long as my consumption of it doesn't cause specific, demonstrable harm to others.
Until we can recognize this, all our efforts to help will be in vain.
You have no business "helping" me. Just get lost and worry about your own business.
It matters because Obama is coming up for an election again. I'm willing to give the guy a lot of leeway, but I draw the line at tinkering with free speech.
If he screws up this nomination, I'm either staying home or voting for someone else.
The problem is that we've gone too far in being accommodating of hate speech.
We haven't "accommodated" it, it has always been legal, and for good reason. The only thing that should get you into trouble, speech wise, are libel, slander, and threats, and only if directed against specific, identifiable persons.
Under these free speech laws, slavery ended, women got voting rights, and Jews, Mormons, Catholics, homosexuals, and other minorities integrated into mainstream society. They could do this because free speech was possible, because people could challenge the status quo even if that did upset a lot of people. With a track record like that, why would you want to change US free speech laws? There is not a shred of evidence that hate speech laws lead to more civil liberties or protect minorities.
On the other hand, the prospect of having the government decide what is and isn't legitimate free speech is truly frightening. Totalitarian regimes engage in that kind of government censorship; the US should not.
A lot of it is just made up like like those bigoted Barrack Husein Obama posters. And the folks that claim that giving equal rights to the GLBT community is somehow undermining their rights. These are not people engaging in legitimate free speech
You're totally naive if you think that hate speech laws with be used to protect presidential candidates from attacks by right wing nuts, or to protect homosexuals from the kind of hate speech that is preached daily by Catholic priests and Muslim clerics. What hate speech laws are commonly used for is to protect established, powerful religious interests from criticism and ridicule.
Norway is an oil-rich country with about twice the per-capita GNP of most of the rest of Europe (and per-capita energy waste to match). What happens in Norway is about as typical for the rest of the world as Dubai or the UAE.
The dedicated Skype or VoIP phones are junk in my experience: hard to configure, unreliable, etc. They usually can't deal with browser-based configuration, limit your choice of VoIP providers, etc.
My recommendation: get an Android phone, Nokia Symbian phone, or an iPod touch. All of them support VoIP, including Skype. The Android phone is the better choice but a bit more expensive; it will also allow you to make phone calls when you travel. Nokia phones with WiFi are cheaper, have better battery life, and also have great browsers, but the UI is bit clunky. The iPod Touch has a good screen and lots of apps, but the only way you can call is with a headset.
(I've used all of them myself.)
I feel sorry for her loss. However, I'm a bit unclear about the reasoning behind this. For which fees, financial obligations, and loans is it unpatriotic to ask for repayment?
Waiving such fees is a nice thing to do; it expresses gratitude for the sacrifices that our military makes.
However, I start feeling uncomfortable when members of the military start talking about it as if it were an entitlement or obligation.
Good questions. There may be studies to back up my hypothesis, but I'm relying on my own anecdotal evidence. Some real sociologists are going to have to conduct proper experiments to get real numbers.
Real sociologists have, because a lot of people have had your idea.
But correlation does not prove causation.
But absence of a positive correlation disproves the causation that you postulate.
Religious beliefs may lead people to immoral behavior. Or those people who require the external guidance of a faith in place of an internal set of morals may tend to backslide more absent continuous supervision.
Your hypothesis was:
Your hypothesis implies a positive correlation: more religion, more "safe incorporation into society". We don't find that positive correlation, hence your hypothesis is untenable.
Now, cut to the present. There are still people too immature or un-self aware to develop internal rules of morality, even as adults. So religion still plays a necessary part in incorporating them into society safely. The problem with religion is that those that need external guidance are exactly the people that you don't want running things.
That's a nice theory. But where's the evidence that that actually works? And where is the evidence that we need to lie to people in order for them to behave morally? In fact, correlations between religious affiliation and behavior often show that the less religious people are, the better they behave in just those areas where religions claim to promote morality; this is true both at a population level and at the level of nations.
There is, however, plenty of evidence that religion is being abused for political purposes.
But who gets to decide? Buddhism: good, Christianity: bad. I can see some fundamental First Amendment problems here.
What's there to decide? Treating Christianity as intrinsically immoral and at the same tolerating its practice are not incompatible with one another; as long as secular laws keep Christians from harming other people or imposing their immoral beliefs on others, they can do whatever they want, just like anybody else.
So lets just keep them all out of the classroom, courtroom, and laboratory.
We don't need to keep Christians out of classrooms, courtrooms, or the laboratory, but we do need to stop accepting religion as an excuse for bad behavior. If you want to be a nurse, lawyer, or teacher, you have to act as a professional. And if you are a government employee, you have to obey the non-establishment clause. If that conflicts with your religion, you need to seek a different profession. So, if you're a nurse and you refuse to participate in abortions, you should get fired. If you're a teacher and you teach that homosexuality is unnatural or that the earth was created 6000 years ago, you should get fired. You get fired not for being a Christian, but for doing things that contradict established scientific facts.
By insisting that people act according to science and reason in public, professional lives, members of religions that contradict science and reason will sort themselves out; we don't need a religious litmus test.
Dante placed Mohammed at the lowest circle of hell, and to anybody who isn't a Muslim, that's pretty much the only view of Mohammed that's possible based on his documented conduct: a child molesting, mass-murdering cult leader. Without suppressing all other beliefs, blasphemy against Islam is therefore inevitable. And that's what makes these blasphemy laws and attempts at censorship so dangerous: they are a thinly veiled attempt to force everybody to submit to Islam (at least everybody in Pakistan). If we want to have religious tolerance and freedom, everybody must tolerate blasphemy; the two are inseparable because one person's firmly held religious belief is another person's blasphemy.
So, they are saying that I release open source software because I don't want to pay for music? Yeah, right, like that makes sense. In fact, people release stuff under open source licenses or creative commons for the reason they do everything else: either they get paid for it, or they do it for fun. Both are legitimate reasons in a free market.
No, the real problem the ASCAP has is that the production and distribution costs for their products are dropping through the floor so that what used to be enormously valuable on its own is now so cheap that it can't even be sold on its own and instead serves other commercial functions, like advertising.
ASCAP is being driven out of business by the free market; they aren't competitive anymore, and now they want government to prop up their uncompetitive and failing business.
Wow, what misleading marketing speak. Let's look at that:
Larry Page himself said that poor battery life in android is usually down to multitasking.
That doesn't mean what you imply. Android battery life is about like iPhone battery life. Here are the numbers from my Android phone after about 18h of usage: 47% voice calls, 21% display, 12% phone idle, 10% cell standby, 4% Google Maps (foreground usage), 3% android system. The 20 multitasking apps that I have running have consumed a whopping 3%.
What Page was saying is that on the rare occasions where your battery life is unexpectedly short, a misbehaving background app is usually responsible. I have never seen that on my Android phone, and it's not a reason to restrict multitasking. I have, however, run down the battery on my iPhone plenty of times unexpectedly through some foreground app I forgot about.
Wrong. One of the main reasons to support an explicit API is that it gives the app a chance to free up memory that won't be needed when in the background.
Explicit APIs are good: APIs that tell the application "please reduce your memory/network/cpu usage or get suspended to disk", "please get rid of your GUI-related data structures", "please suspend yourself to disk now". Many UNIX systems and Android have these kinds of APIs. They don't require any restrictions on what the applications can do, only how much of it they can do it at any given time.
It's a smart phone, not a general purpose computer. It needs to be small, light weight and cheap enough for people to want to buy it.The restrictions are all about having a good user experience for non-technical people.
But the user experience is not good: a lot of iPad and iPhone applications fail to do the kinds of routine maintenance things one expects applications to be able to do in the background. None of these would be CPU intensive, but many don't fit into the limited categories that Apple has set up. That means that when I grab my iPad and go, data and information that should have been updated isn't there. The user experience on the iPad and iPhone is vaguely akin to using an MS-DOS system, except for the prettier graphics.
Full multitasking would severely limit battery life unless all apps are well behaved.
Repeating this bullshit again and again doesn't make it true. Whatever CPU limits you think are necessary to impose on background tasks can be imposed by the scheduler.
Furthermore, phones and PDAs have had multitasking for many years, and they have had battery meters, so there is plenty of data on what the effect of multitasking is. I have never seen full multitasking to lead to any kind of unexpected battery life problems.
Apple's (and your) explanations make no technical sense. What does make sense is that Apple's restrictions on multitasking are related to their business model and attempts to keep tight control of the platform.
This is a completely nonsensical argument. Apple already have complete control over applications that are available through the app store
That's an obvious but wrong response. Apple also wouldn't have to declare any explicit prohibitions on scripting languages, they could just turn down applications, but the resulting uncertainty would be bad for developers. Therefore, when Apple doesn't want unrestricted multitasking, they need to communicate and implement that somehow in a way that doesn't create hazards for their developers.
By defining a specific set of APIs and laying down the rule "no multitasking except through these APIs", Apple gets the restrictions they want, developers get clear rules to follow, and users still get the amount of multitasking Apple is willing to give them. In different words, the existence of these extra APIs codifies business strategy.
If you have another explanation, let's hear it, but Apple's explanation is nonsense. Whatever technical goals Apple says they want to achieve, they could simply achieve through small modifications to their scheduler, if need be, on a per-application basis, with much less work for themselves and their developers.
Apple's restrictions on multitasking make little sense from a technical point of view. From other platforms, we know that is not a major battery drain, and it's perfectly possible for a scheduler to do automatically whatever Apple's special APIs are trying to achieve.
Unless Apple just doesn't know what they are doing, the real reason behind Apple's restrictions on multitasking is more likely the same as their restrictions on scripting languages and alternative development environments: they want to keep control. With multitasking, you could run local file servers and local web servers. You could create new applications delivery platforms, local music servers, and a local file system and file manager.
Apple prefers if you use your phone with both hands, in particular while visiting certain web sites; it keeps you out of trouble and prevents the moisture sensor from triggering.