Big brother decides who will do what even if it's not against one of his laws. Anyone at anytime can be pounded on for anything.
True. Big Brother didn't do a thing here, though, except investigate and then return his equipment. While the government is usually quite dickish, according to the article they only did what was somewhat "fair". The major inconvenience for the guy was having his equipment confiscated, but it seems it was returned in a couple of months.
Having said that, let me veer off for a second. Slashdot has quite a few pro and anti Apple people, and that's fine. I'm not one for Apple products, but I don't automatically assume you're demented if you buy an Apple machine. This guy being an exception. Regardless of whether he was right or not, he thought he was. And tried to cordially contact Apple, saying he'd take the project it off the internet if they wanted him to. Their response was to ignore him, then go over his head directly to his host. And send him what seems to be an automated e-mail asking him to take the site offline after they did it themselves. And, of course, they unleashed the FBI on him to take his computers away. Cold, brutal, uncaring and impersonal the whole way. And what does the guy do? Orders a new Macbook from them. Really, either he's the world's most forgiving person or it's a case akin to stockholm syndrome.
Me, I think it's Apple's right to push like that. But - and he even mentions it, being fully aware of the fact - it's incredibly hypocritical of them seeing as they did something similar themselves, and unnecessarily forceful. If they did anything like that to me, they'd never see my money again. Wouldn't hurt their bottom line on bit, but I'd feel like a black, gay, poor mexican godless communist donating money to the GOP.
This makes sense. Andriod is really a platform for Google to sell their services (or promote ad based ones). It's not surprising they'll sell an at-cost device. They're also really nice machines, and set the bar for what a "low cost" device should really have.
Very true. I wish they also did something similar with phones. Right now Android is perceived by a lot of people as kind of crappy because the phones they buy are kind of crappy. Maybe Google realized that the lower end is a better place to insert the Nexus reference and kill bad products by offering better alternatives.
Intel is already out with a x86 phone that runs Android, is it not? Battery life and performance seems to be competitive with ARM offerings and I read talks about roughly 75% compatibility with existing Market apps. The thing about being Chipzilla is you can get blindsided by change and still come out on top, with a superior product, by throwing more money at R&D than the sum of all your competitors' assets is worth.
Yes, actual relevant news about improvements in technology. And it's seeing way less comments (and traffic, one assumes) than the more recent article about San Francisco not buying Apple products. It's a sad state of affairs.
I can't really decide if that's extremely funny or incredibly scary. Did she actually say that people should have nothing to do with laws? That she'd keep pushing it covertly until it passed, making no compromises? Whoever votes for that woman is a very special kind of idiot.
Seeing how we already have Cyanogenmod (and quite a few others), initiatives like the Raspberry Pi and people are running Android on iPhones, yes, I think we'll still be able to do that for quite some time. It will probably be about as popular as Linux on the desktop is today, though.
The absence of Firefox for your device isn't performance related. You can find a few unofficial builds of the source that seem to run fine (and there's no reason why it shouldn't - Opera Mobile runs just fine on a 600MHz ARMv6). Here's the relevant bugzilla thread: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=723946
By the way, the Optimus V is a variant of the Optimus One, is it not? As a fellow Optimus owner, I strongly suggest you to install Cyanogenmod if you haven't done it already. Our phones are shockingly speedier than LG's crapware allows them to.
Part of the point of Firefox is to provide alternate capabilities, rather than reuse the built-in ones. Firefox for Android uses same Gecko engine as Firefox 4 for desktop. That’s how it can support features that Android’s WebKit doesn’t, like SVG and ES5. (Of course, WebKit supports some features Gecko doesn’t, which is why it’s great to have a choice.)
Uses the Jaegermonkey JIT, which is getting faster all the time. It runs JavaScript much faster than the Android 2.1 browser, and is even faster than the Android 2.2 browser on the WebKit’s own SunSpider benchmark.
iOS locks out javascript and competing browsers are just webkit Safari based with different UI skins. Andriod is it the same with webkit and only Chrome gets V8.
Firefox for Android runs Gecko and Jägermonkey, so no.
I suspect if this works at all, it will be because of the mobile phone hardware available in 2013 - multi-core processors, 2 GB of RAM, etc... might allow a completely HTML5 interface to perform well enough to satisfy users.
Their partners are ZTE and Alcatel. ZTE's best offer so far is the Blade, powered by a 600MHz ARMv6 (very capable phone, actually, but not exactly zippy), and Alcatel was far behind, last I checked. I think going for the higher end of the spectrum is out of the question, at least in this first push.
To be fair,/. as a whole is a big prophet of doom. Every piece of news that mentions a new product or technology receives mostly comments along the lines of "that's stupid", "won't work" and "$EXISTENT_TECH is better". Just like Android would never be a viable alternative to iOS, AMD's Bulldozer was a dead end, underpowered keyboardless laptops would never sell... I could go on. We're right about as often as psychics or stock brokers. What I found funnier about the linked discussion was the most spot-on error of judgement I've seen in years (not squiggleslash's, BTW):
Also, a few years ago Apple could have offered a seriously better UI experience over existing phones. These days, manufacturers like Sony-Erriccson seem to be getting their UI acts together, so Apple would have to come up with something seriously magical to differentiate themselves.
as part of the Android Licensing Agreement for OEMs (I assume there IS one of those),
There isn't. The kernel is GPL, the rest is Apache. You're free to distribute it on your devices, modify it as you see fit and not even tell Google about it. Which is mostly why it took off in the first place.
There are other things to consider. Would you be happy, as a CEO,
Hell yes!
to work your butt off 24/7 for years
I'm confused. Weren't we talking about CEOs? When did the subject change?
to invent something great, and just when it catches up and start making real money, see Google make the *very exact same thing* (with a different logo) on a much much much larger scale (because they're so much bigger) and make you go back into mothingness?
You're talking about moth breeding patents, I assume? Never heard of them. Is it an allegory? Anyway, if Google makes it better than I do and/or offers it at a better price point, that's only fair and what markets are all about. It beats not being even able to start your project because it necessarily depends on a fuckton of other patented stuff and would result in you being sued into oblivion.
I guess not.
Patents are here for a reason, and that reason is perfectly valid. Of course, the process can be perfected. For example, I think patents should be adapted to the field they apply to. For instance, software patents should last 5 years max.
Hardware patents I could see lasting about 5 years. Software patents should last about 5 minutes. Patenting software is like patenting specific mathemathical operations ("oh, no, you can't do 4+5, I have patented that already... try 4+4+1, if it isn't already patented").
But remove patents altogether and all hell will break lose.
Patents are here and hell is loose. I don't know if metaphorically or literally because of the huge amount of lawyers involved.
Look, say my book became viral. Publishers would be beating down my door trying to get me to sign a contract so they could publish it, and I would profit from it, and have a lot more incentive to write another one. But if there were no copyright, they'd just make tons of money on it and I wouldn't get a dime -- the middlemen you hate would get everything, I would get nothing. This is your idea of fair?
I give my book away for free, and encourage everyone else to do the same, but I'd be pissed if you benefitted financially from my work while I got nothing.
In that case, people pay the publisher solely for the medium and printing. Considering I just bought Ulysses (lots of pages, out of copyright) for $4, the price seems fair. I could download it for free at Project Gutenberg. If I had an eReader, that would be my preferred method of reading, actually.
For the customary car analogy, it's like paving streets for free and complaining that car companies are profiting from your asphalt. They are, but indirectly.
It's the same objection Mark Twain had, and why he defended copyright extension. However, it just doesn't hold water in this day and age, when unlimited digital copies can be made and downloaded at virtually no cost and a physical medium for distributing isn't necessary.
Bt the way, I do believe copyright should exist, but for about five or ten years, maximum. After that your work, if scientifically or culturally relevant, should be shared.
From what I've gathered so far: they hire clueless idiots who spend all day posting banalities on the 'net, pay them excessively, and don't force a standard workday.
There we fully agree. You don't have to flip it all of a sudden. By all means, give the baby time to adjust, just don't stop turning, is what I'd vote for. And starting with software patents seems only logical - even quite a bit of the software giants are fed up with them by now.
Well, both "somewhat good" and "somewhat bad" are "less than ideal". In case you meant the former, I expressed my belief that it, in fact, contitutes the latter.
As for your question, I don't know. I'm arguing only for a healthy dose of doubt, that I feel is underrepresented in the face of the ubiquitous discourse that IP laws are necessary for or foster innovation. I believe competition, by itself, already fosters plenty of innovation. Not that I think it's a valid comparison - it's only being made to elucidade my point further -, but armies do not respect IP laws and that has never halted innovation one bit. In short and allegorically, that's my point: given how much headache patents bring, we might as well, try to flip the tub to throw away the bathwater and see if the baby holds on.
The problem I have with interviewing "people who innovate" is that it always gets you a biased sample. These "people" are actually the current successful corporations. They are innovating because they are profiting, which means they're doing fine with the current system. Odds are, then, that they will defend it. So I believe checking with these people is actually conterproductive when you're looking at ways to better legislation.
Also, the article states the correlation of stronger IP laws with bigger investment from big pharma and biotech. That seems pretty intuitive to me. You have stronger IP laws, you'll get investment, and those investors will lobby for stronger IP laws, which will spur more investment and so on. Companies will tend to go for countries that have stronger IP laws and make them even stronger.
What I'm saying is that even if IP laws were completely absent, we may still not see innovation stifle. On a per-country basis, a country with no IP laws could simply "steal" whatever was being made in others*, and on a global basis, innovation would still be necessary to avoid saturated markets. And then it would get saturated again pretty quickly, so innovation would have to be constant, not in sparse waves. And the biggest unsung bonus is getting to combine research from different sources into better stuff that can only be possible today by expensive cross-licensing. These are mere possibilities, but that's exactly why they should be investigated.
*some research would obviously be still needed unless the IP-abiding companies were very kind and released their trade secrets, which is another argument for why, even without IP laws, newcomers wouldn't get totally past research costs, making them prohibitive. They would have to be smart about it, though.
Actually, buying it is always fine. Sending it to Iran is the illegal part. And since Apple isn't in charge of overseeing customs, the issue is if they have any sort of authority over what you are or aren't allowed to buy. They don't.
Well, how would we know? Maybe farmers would. They now use those better* seeds for a reason - they are profitable. And the cost to develop is less than what they are being charged for them now, otherwise Monsanto would be broke. Would farmers mobilize and do it? I don't know. Possibly not. But lots of important political and economic justifications are built upon huge ifs, which I dislike because I agree too much with your signature. And given how much overhead those companies and executives (the ones that exist to profit from taking R&D risks) represent, I think experimenting with turning every market into a commodity market could be interesting.
*from a purely economic perspective here, not entering into health or environmental concerns.
Slashdot Mirror
Big brother decides who will do what even if it's not against one of his laws. Anyone at anytime can be pounded on for anything.
True. Big Brother didn't do a thing here, though, except investigate and then return his equipment. While the government is usually quite dickish, according to the article they only did what was somewhat "fair". The major inconvenience for the guy was having his equipment confiscated, but it seems it was returned in a couple of months.
Having said that, let me veer off for a second. Slashdot has quite a few pro and anti Apple people, and that's fine. I'm not one for Apple products, but I don't automatically assume you're demented if you buy an Apple machine. This guy being an exception. Regardless of whether he was right or not, he thought he was. And tried to cordially contact Apple, saying he'd take the project it off the internet if they wanted him to. Their response was to ignore him, then go over his head directly to his host. And send him what seems to be an automated e-mail asking him to take the site offline after they did it themselves. And, of course, they unleashed the FBI on him to take his computers away. Cold, brutal, uncaring and impersonal the whole way. And what does the guy do? Orders a new Macbook from them. Really, either he's the world's most forgiving person or it's a case akin to stockholm syndrome.
Me, I think it's Apple's right to push like that. But - and he even mentions it, being fully aware of the fact - it's incredibly hypocritical of them seeing as they did something similar themselves, and unnecessarily forceful. If they did anything like that to me, they'd never see my money again. Wouldn't hurt their bottom line on bit, but I'd feel like a black, gay, poor mexican godless communist donating money to the GOP.
Now this may have been "art", but the Secret Service called it something else.
No, they didn't. They investigated for some time and found no evidence of any law being breached. That's why the guy wasn't prosecuted. It's in TFA.
-1 redundant. Who doesn't know that already? It's like not knowing how to use the three seashells.
This makes sense.
Andriod is really a platform for Google to sell their services (or promote ad based ones). It's not surprising they'll sell an at-cost device. They're also really nice machines, and set the bar for what a "low cost" device should really have.
Very true. I wish they also did something similar with phones. Right now Android is perceived by a lot of people as kind of crappy because the phones they buy are kind of crappy. Maybe Google realized that the lower end is a better place to insert the Nexus reference and kill bad products by offering better alternatives.
Intel is already out with a x86 phone that runs Android, is it not? Battery life and performance seems to be competitive with ARM offerings and I read talks about roughly 75% compatibility with existing Market apps. The thing about being Chipzilla is you can get blindsided by change and still come out on top, with a superior product, by throwing more money at R&D than the sum of all your competitors' assets is worth.
Yes, actual relevant news about improvements in technology. And it's seeing way less comments (and traffic, one assumes) than the more recent article about San Francisco not buying Apple products. It's a sad state of affairs.
I can't really decide if that's extremely funny or incredibly scary. Did she actually say that people should have nothing to do with laws? That she'd keep pushing it covertly until it passed, making no compromises? Whoever votes for that woman is a very special kind of idiot.
only the king of retards believes it
Nope, not even I bought it.
Seeing how we already have Cyanogenmod (and quite a few others), initiatives like the Raspberry Pi and people are running Android on iPhones, yes, I think we'll still be able to do that for quite some time. It will probably be about as popular as Linux on the desktop is today, though.
What a great idea! I'll just write a similar wallpaper-based antivirus in MSPaint right now.
The absence of Firefox for your device isn't performance related. You can find a few unofficial builds of the source that seem to run fine (and there's no reason why it shouldn't - Opera Mobile runs just fine on a 600MHz ARMv6). Here's the relevant bugzilla thread: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=723946
By the way, the Optimus V is a variant of the Optimus One, is it not? As a fellow Optimus owner, I strongly suggest you to install Cyanogenmod if you haven't done it already. Our phones are shockingly speedier than LG's crapware allows them to.
Javascript is forbidden. You are running a special neutered version of it with a Firefox skin on safari.
Making a mistake is something we all do at one point or another, but the blind, confrontational confidence you seem to exhibit in your misinformation is a mark of the highly stupid. Relevant excerpts below:
Part of the point of Firefox is to provide alternate capabilities, rather than reuse the built-in ones. Firefox for Android uses same Gecko engine as Firefox 4 for desktop. That’s how it can support features that Android’s WebKit doesn’t, like SVG and ES5. (Of course, WebKit supports some features Gecko doesn’t, which is why it’s great to have a choice.)
Uses the Jaegermonkey JIT, which is getting faster all the time. It runs JavaScript much faster than the Android 2.1 browser, and is even faster than the Android 2.2 browser on the WebKit’s own SunSpider benchmark.
iOS locks out javascript and competing browsers are just webkit Safari based with different UI skins. Andriod is it the same with webkit and only Chrome gets V8.
Firefox for Android runs Gecko and Jägermonkey, so no.
I suspect if this works at all, it will be because of the mobile phone hardware available in 2013 - multi-core processors, 2 GB of RAM, etc... might allow a completely HTML5 interface to perform well enough to satisfy users.
Their partners are ZTE and Alcatel. ZTE's best offer so far is the Blade, powered by a 600MHz ARMv6 (very capable phone, actually, but not exactly zippy), and Alcatel was far behind, last I checked. I think going for the higher end of the spectrum is out of the question, at least in this first push.
To be fair, /. as a whole is a big prophet of doom. Every piece of news that mentions a new product or technology receives mostly comments along the lines of "that's stupid", "won't work" and "$EXISTENT_TECH is better". Just like Android would never be a viable alternative to iOS, AMD's Bulldozer was a dead end, underpowered keyboardless laptops would never sell... I could go on. We're right about as often as psychics or stock brokers. What I found funnier about the linked discussion was the most spot-on error of judgement I've seen in years (not squiggleslash's, BTW):
Also, a few years ago Apple could have offered a seriously better UI experience over existing phones. These days, manufacturers like Sony-Erriccson seem to be getting their UI acts together, so Apple would have to come up with something seriously magical to differentiate themselves.
as part of the Android Licensing Agreement for OEMs (I assume there IS one of those),
There isn't. The kernel is GPL, the rest is Apache. You're free to distribute it on your devices, modify it as you see fit and not even tell Google about it. Which is mostly why it took off in the first place.
There are other things to consider. Would you be happy, as a CEO,
Hell yes!
to work your butt off 24/7 for years
I'm confused. Weren't we talking about CEOs? When did the subject change?
to invent something great, and just when it catches up and start making real money, see Google make the *very exact same thing* (with a different logo) on a much much much larger scale (because they're so much bigger) and make you go back into mothingness?
You're talking about moth breeding patents, I assume? Never heard of them. Is it an allegory? Anyway, if Google makes it better than I do and/or offers it at a better price point, that's only fair and what markets are all about. It beats not being even able to start your project because it necessarily depends on a fuckton of other patented stuff and would result in you being sued into oblivion.
I guess not.
Patents are here for a reason, and that reason is perfectly valid. Of course, the process can be perfected. For example, I think patents should be adapted to the field they apply to. For instance, software patents should last 5 years max.
Hardware patents I could see lasting about 5 years. Software patents should last about 5 minutes. Patenting software is like patenting specific mathemathical operations ("oh, no, you can't do 4+5, I have patented that already... try 4+4+1, if it isn't already patented").
But remove patents altogether and all hell will break lose.
Patents are here and hell is loose. I don't know if metaphorically or literally because of the huge amount of lawyers involved.
Look, say my book became viral. Publishers would be beating down my door trying to get me to sign a contract so they could publish it, and I would profit from it, and have a lot more incentive to write another one. But if there were no copyright, they'd just make tons of money on it and I wouldn't get a dime -- the middlemen you hate would get everything, I would get nothing. This is your idea of fair?
I give my book away for free, and encourage everyone else to do the same, but I'd be pissed if you benefitted financially from my work while I got nothing.
In that case, people pay the publisher solely for the medium and printing. Considering I just bought Ulysses (lots of pages, out of copyright) for $4, the price seems fair. I could download it for free at Project Gutenberg. If I had an eReader, that would be my preferred method of reading, actually.
For the customary car analogy, it's like paving streets for free and complaining that car companies are profiting from your asphalt. They are, but indirectly.
It's the same objection Mark Twain had, and why he defended copyright extension. However, it just doesn't hold water in this day and age, when unlimited digital copies can be made and downloaded at virtually no cost and a physical medium for distributing isn't necessary.
Bt the way, I do believe copyright should exist, but for about five or ten years, maximum. After that your work, if scientifically or culturally relevant, should be shared.
I wonder how much they paid for Stonehenge back then...
From what I've gathered so far: they hire clueless idiots who spend all day posting banalities on the 'net, pay them excessively, and don't force a standard workday.
For the love of god please clue us in.
I bet he edits /. summaries.
There we fully agree. You don't have to flip it all of a sudden. By all means, give the baby time to adjust, just don't stop turning, is what I'd vote for. And starting with software patents seems only logical - even quite a bit of the software giants are fed up with them by now.
Well, both "somewhat good" and "somewhat bad" are "less than ideal". In case you meant the former, I expressed my belief that it, in fact, contitutes the latter.
As for your question, I don't know. I'm arguing only for a healthy dose of doubt, that I feel is underrepresented in the face of the ubiquitous discourse that IP laws are necessary for or foster innovation. I believe competition, by itself, already fosters plenty of innovation. Not that I think it's a valid comparison - it's only being made to elucidade my point further -, but armies do not respect IP laws and that has never halted innovation one bit. In short and allegorically, that's my point: given how much headache patents bring, we might as well, try to flip the tub to throw away the bathwater and see if the baby holds on.
The problem I have with interviewing "people who innovate" is that it always gets you a biased sample. These "people" are actually the current successful corporations. They are innovating because they are profiting, which means they're doing fine with the current system. Odds are, then, that they will defend it. So I believe checking with these people is actually conterproductive when you're looking at ways to better legislation.
Also, the article states the correlation of stronger IP laws with bigger investment from big pharma and biotech. That seems pretty intuitive to me. You have stronger IP laws, you'll get investment, and those investors will lobby for stronger IP laws, which will spur more investment and so on. Companies will tend to go for countries that have stronger IP laws and make them even stronger.
What I'm saying is that even if IP laws were completely absent, we may still not see innovation stifle. On a per-country basis, a country with no IP laws could simply "steal" whatever was being made in others*, and on a global basis, innovation would still be necessary to avoid saturated markets. And then it would get saturated again pretty quickly, so innovation would have to be constant, not in sparse waves. And the biggest unsung bonus is getting to combine research from different sources into better stuff that can only be possible today by expensive cross-licensing. These are mere possibilities, but that's exactly why they should be investigated.
*some research would obviously be still needed unless the IP-abiding companies were very kind and released their trade secrets, which is another argument for why, even without IP laws, newcomers wouldn't get totally past research costs, making them prohibitive. They would have to be smart about it, though.
Actually, buying it is always fine. Sending it to Iran is the illegal part. And since Apple isn't in charge of overseeing customs, the issue is if they have any sort of authority over what you are or aren't allowed to buy. They don't.
Well, how would we know? Maybe farmers would. They now use those better* seeds for a reason - they are profitable. And the cost to develop is less than what they are being charged for them now, otherwise Monsanto would be broke. Would farmers mobilize and do it? I don't know. Possibly not. But lots of important political and economic justifications are built upon huge ifs, which I dislike because I agree too much with your signature. And given how much overhead those companies and executives (the ones that exist to profit from taking R&D risks) represent, I think experimenting with turning every market into a commodity market could be interesting.
*from a purely economic perspective here, not entering into health or environmental concerns.