The real question I would pose is: After "copyright reform" (which as best as I can tell is "make file-sharing legal"), what prevents people/companies from violating the GPL. After all you gave them a copy of the code, why can't they share with others under terms they see fit.
I would like to note that the Submitter is "I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property". If that's the case, Mr. Submitter, then the GPL should be thrown out too.
You can almost forgive them for that. Most of them voted to authorize the Commander in Chief to do whatever is necessary to keep the US safe when they voted to support the troop build up and that permission to use them if needed. Very few assumed the Office of the President would use it's power in a knowingly needless way, which it appears is exactly what the President did.
The entire pretense for the invasion was a lie, we know it was a lie because up until Sept 11, 2001 when reporters asked anyone in the current administration about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, the universal answer was "they aren't a risk and they don't have them". We can now summize that 9/11 was used as a politically expediant way to enact the vision of the New American Century, whose members rose to being in the Presidents office.
Those who voted to authorize the President to do what was needed and later recanted once they realized what happened were honestly trying to do what's right. No one seriously considered that the President would be so reckless that he would actually make the country more unsafe to live in and more vulnerable to terrorists. Seriously, why would any President do that, even ones you didn't like at the time? They made the same mistake the rest of America did, trust a bunch of self confessed Neo Conservatives to not invade random countries as a demonstration of power and instead focus on actually stopping more attacks on US and Allied soil from killing more people. Just ask Spain and Great Britian how much of an impact invading Iraq had on stopping terrorism and if that money would have been better spent.
Doesn't sound too far fetched since Earth has Cruithne sharing it's orbit, which in it's own way is a "second moon". On a functional level, not that different from what they are suggesting. I would even take it step futher, there's no reason to even believe any specific natural satellite of Earth originated from our planet or it's creation.
I agree that fundamentally monopolies are bad for consumers. In the case of Google, today, it's not a problem. Google isn't the default search engine in a clear majority of computers shipping today. That's quite telling. People have to seek Google out on purpose and chose to do so because Google works and works well. If you remember, Google rose to that position due to the arrogance of other search engines. Pay for top ranking, ads disguised as links in the ranks, eye candy over functionality. Then Google came along and said, why don't we try making a search engine first and generate revenue second. They are one of the few dot com companies that tried that and succeeded. Remember when ad words was first added and how "controversial" it was? It was ultimately accepted because Google MUST generate revenue somewhere in order to actually function.
In terms of online advertising, they may end up being a problem. All those ad words customers they generated ended up being very attractive to 3rd parties. Google will pay to put their customers ads up on your site, same basic market model as someone like doubleclick. It is here that a monopoly will end up costing consumers, given the proper board and CEO of Google. They have neither a monopoly there, nor the apparent corporate culture necessary to make this a problem. Yet.
This revenue is what Microsoft is interested in. In order to get there, Microsoft needs a functioning web site with an astronomical amount of users, to attract advertisers. Then they can take that customer base and start sharing it with 3rd parties, which attracts more customers. From what I understand, Yahoo has far better advertisement position than "Live" does. Combined with Yahoo, Microsoft would be in a position to make an advertisement company that could ultimately rival Google, doubleclick, etc. They failed because ultimately Yahoo's internal culture is against Microsoft. From what I can see, it's to the point that employees would have left the company in numbers significant enough that Yahoo would have ended up worthless. This is something the guys at MS didn't see happening. They assumed the amount of cash offered and the overall chance to rival Google in both search engine and advertisements would have been good enough for both management and employees. It clearly wasn't and now Microsoft understands that, which is why they recalled their bid and aren't chasing the hostile take over option.
How is this example any different: I walk into the store looking for a Pepsi. I ask the clerk, "where is it?", she says, "It's over there next to the big Coke sign.
Think about that for a second.
Now, lets take it step further. Lets say I make a searchable yellow pages. It quite literally searches scans of the yellow pages and pulls up the pages that might have what you are looking for. You're going to see ads for competitors when you use trademarked words.
Of course though, this is in the UK, whose advertising laws are MUCH different than in the States. Google is likely to lose there.
If that were the result, the winner would get a delisting from Google. That's one of the many reasons I'm never going to be a CEO.
How often do you stare at your phone? As in look at your phone. I'm sure there's some market for this, but I'm not sure who. Web browsers (quick looking up movie times), email (crackberry, et al.),MP3 players (iPhone), I can understand putting those in a phone. TV? A phone is more of a passive attachment. One you are aware of, but don't have an absolute need to touch for an hour straight without using it as a phone. If you're going to send email or web browse for an hour, you're going to do it from a computer. Watching TV is something that takes more than a couple of minutes.
This is really a solution in search of a problem. I think, in reality, they are shooting for the "cool, I can watch TV" crowd who use it for a month, then stop using it, but never remove it from their plan.
Suing customers? Customers pay for products, not download them from people who may or may not have paid for it. When you start up a competitive service that gives the same exact product that someone else produced and one that you may or may not have paid for away for free, you are breaking the law. You may not like it, but you don't have the right to do that. It's not for you to decide that someone's music should be free. If you are sued, I have no sympathy for you, sorry. If you don't like the practices of the RIAA, then don't consumer their products, at all.
I honestly don't understand peoples absolute preoccupation with the RIAA. Let me ask you something...
You're artist, designer, or coder. You make things. Doesn't matter what it is as long as it's easily copyable on the internet (music, images, web pages, software). You do this for a living. One day someone sets up a web page that gives what you sell for a living away to others for free. What would you do? How would you handle it? Would you just tolerate it? What if you began to notice you were no longer making $40,000 a year and ended up making only $20,000 a year? Would you give up the art that you love?
I'll admit, what I do know of the RIAA is they are extremely heavy handed, so much so that it's entirely possible that innocents are wrapped up in their vendetta. They are sloppy, thuggish, and an out right bully. What can they do? What would you do, just start giving away that which you make your living on? Is that the answer? Is that what everyone wants?
Maybe somehow I left behind on this whole internet thing, since I don't use Gnutella or Bittorrent. I pay for the stuff I use and listen to. I guess I'm a fool for seeing value in the arts that I love in my life, a value worth paying for.
? The best example there (after the Mac itself) would be software - MP3 players on MacOS were unstable, crash-prone winamp clones until Apple bought an audio software company and then iTunes came along....
Not completely accurate. Apple hired the guy who made SoundJam. Before he worked there, iTunes was already in development (in a prototype form). The company that made SoundJam just closed up shop in the transition to OS X. Apparently they had trouble making the switch to OS X.
It's more a common carrier thing. Here are two possibilities of storage that function the same.
You set up a remote UPnP server over a VPN and configure the devices to communicate with it. In this case the service provider is merely a common carrier, agnostic to the packets going across it's network.
Some one else sets it all up and you copy the files to their machine and they in turn distribute them back out to you. In this case the service provider is actively receiving and sending copyrighted material over their network. I would suspect they would need a license for that.
The first case, in most likelihood is perfectly legal. The second case, while having the same function as the first one, just might not be legal. This is the kind of thing that would need congressional clarification, it's not as clear cut as some here thing it is.
While I don't care if record stores go out of business, since it's clear that online downloads has won as the successor to the CD format, I do care about copyright. Online distribution without compensating the copyright holder will cause the arts to suffer. Yes, artists are getting ripped off by music companies, that will change as online downloads dramatically decreases the cost of distributing the work to the people. There are already companies that will list you on iTunes while leaving the copyright in your possession. The artists still get compensated in a way they find meaningful. Just because you don't like how they are treated doesn't mean you have the right to give their works away for free, thus removing all revenue they would generate for the work. An artist who finds a way to give their works away for free while still earning money on those works is making the choice, which is well within their rights, but it is NOT within your rights to make that choice for them.
Copyright serves a purpose, yes it's misused, yes the way works is sent out to the masses can be improved, but artists need to know they can earn a living worthy enough to create works. Yes, they can earn a great deal of money playing live shows, but do you honestly realize how hard it is on a person to tour? People have left bands that were earning them millions of dollars because they missed their wives! These are human beings, not some commodity to be used at your discretion.
While I'll simplify it down some, here are the two most important things you need to know about copyright.
Making copies of works that you didn't create is illegal unless you are doing it for personal use (fair use, there's a whole set up things that fall in this catagory).
Making copies of works you didn't create for the purposes earning money is illegal unless you have the copyright holders permission.
The problem is run into in the nature of the service being offered. This isn't merely storage, they are distributing the works. The way it seems to run, this isn't a common carrier thing that is being run in good faith, like say any random hosting company, this is a company that is advertising that it will distribute copies of music that you bought from someone else to you on any device you want. That changes the rules, they can't do that without a license, even if you have 5000 copies at home.
You do have the right to store it, they don't have the right to actively distribute it, especially, if my impression is correct, their goal is to make money doing this.
I'm typing this from Firefox in OS X 10.5 right now. Safari is my default browser. Why? Cause I don't care what the default is, I launch my stuff, so whatever. Anyhow, when I click links outside of Firefox, guess what OS X launches? That's right Safari. I go, oh yeah, maybe I should do something about that, close out Safari when it's done and go back to Firefox.
Seriously, I do that. My roommate has a XP machine with Firefox and IE. IE is her default browser. Same thing, too unconcerned to change the setting.
Anyways, people are NOT going to change their default browser for one Site. They aren't. They might download something so it doesn't break, but go back to whatever they wanted to use in the first place. People do that you know. Phishing sites will not be affected by Paypal blocking browsers, because those phishing sites will still function in those browsers. All it will do is annoy people.
My suspicion is that when PayPal deals with browsers that are not "up to snuff", there will be differences in behaviour and additional back-end security measures that may not be used with "approved" secure browsers. But I doubt they will disallow any modern browser entirely.
The real question is what exactly does this do for "security". Anything that PayPal does on their end will have no affect on phishing sites. All current web browsers, regardless of how PayPal treats them, will function with phishing sites just fine. Any user that falls for a phishing scam is just going to think, "cool PayPal works again". I see no point in blocking a web browser unless for some ungodly reason, the phishers blocked those browsers too.
So you're telling me that you used to have to pay your phone company AND the phone company of the person you were calling in order to make a phone call or the receiving company just might not even put the call through? I couldn't even imagine all the phone bills you got back then.
Metered prices is different than what these guys are doing.
No, it is the same thing. I pay for my network access, you pay for your network access. I don't pay to access YOUR network to YOUR network company. The agreements between the companies take care of that. The internet functions identically to the phone network. Making ME pay your phone company to call you faster is the same thing as making me pay your internet provider to send you a page faster. They are both same exact thing and both not in the interest of the consumer.
One day "the people" are going to learn the only thing a company is interested in is making money. They work for the consumer when it's more profitable to work for the consumer than it is to do something that isn't in the interested of the consumer. Network congestion is not solved by throttling, the only thing throttling does is make the internet slower. Which is supposedly the very thing it is supposed to solve.
Of course, that's what they say. Here's the thing, if those guys could figure out a way to charge people for calling me on my phone, they would. Oh, but you say they are already paying for phone coverage, well our phone network is getting over used, we need set priorities, so we are going to direct your call in 5 minutes while more important people (who paid extra) can make calls to out customers right now. Sounds stupid doesn't it. IT'S THE SAME THING THEY ARE PROPOSING.
One thing I don't get, why does something magically get confusing when the words "computer" or "internet" are used in the business discussion? Like somehow it's all of a sudden a debatable thing to talk about?
Oh, that article writer is an idiot. Net Neutrality needs to me set in stone by law, end of story. Networks are made faster by putting in more pipes, not by turning off/down some of them.
This case is about trademark and copyright, not the EULA. It's that simple. Taking someone else's product, changing it, and reselling under the original trademark is the kind of thing that just gets you put out of business. This is true for all markets. If you take Craftsman tools reshape some of them in heat and sell using the name Craftsman, you go out of business in the resulting law suit.
I'm not sure what you define as non-trivial applications. These old machines were doing MORE than win 3.1 for workgroups and than win 95, on the same hardware. The reason I installed linux on the things was to make them useful again. Originally, it was to make them xterms. As time went on, we jobs on them, might as well. You under estimate what older machines can do.
I had compiled Linux from floppy on to a 386 and a 486 to use a work station to access to VAXs in the lab. Hand compiled X-Win on top of that. It ran fine. So yes, PCs clearly had enough RAM and CPU power to run "enforce proper privilege separation". Funny thing is, Linux better both Win 3.1 and Win 95 on the same hardware.
If monkeys were unable to reliably distinguish red, blue and green M&Ms, then they would have no systematic preference for one colour over another
That's not true. Random choices can easily have clumping in low sampling data sets, especially when one assumes there WILL be clumping and base the latter part of the experiment off the assumption that something is "preferred" or not. The initial "preference" could just as simply been the size of a data set and the bias of the scientist who assumed there would be preference in the initial color selection.
Second, if the economist is correct (and I'm not going to find the journal article he's referencing to figure it out), then the experiment has an inherent statistical bias towards one color or another. That is, given the decision tree, the outcome is already known and is not random at all. In fact, the experimental results did nothing more than express that tree exactly.
There is no "official beta release" of the 2.0 firmware. There is a version of the pre-2.0 firmware that comes with the emulator in the SDK. In order to get that on your iPhone you need to unlock it, against Apple's say, then put it on your iPhone.
In the emulator that Apple provides and the firmware is locked, by default, to running in. You have to unlock the firmware so that it works on an iPhone and then install it there yourself, thus doing exactly what Apple specifically told you not to do.
Slashdot Mirror
The real question I would pose is: After "copyright reform" (which as best as I can tell is "make file-sharing legal"), what prevents people/companies from violating the GPL. After all you gave them a copy of the code, why can't they share with others under terms they see fit.
I would like to note that the Submitter is "I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property". If that's the case, Mr. Submitter, then the GPL should be thrown out too.
You can almost forgive them for that. Most of them voted to authorize the Commander in Chief to do whatever is necessary to keep the US safe when they voted to support the troop build up and that permission to use them if needed. Very few assumed the Office of the President would use it's power in a knowingly needless way, which it appears is exactly what the President did.
The entire pretense for the invasion was a lie, we know it was a lie because up until Sept 11, 2001 when reporters asked anyone in the current administration about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, the universal answer was "they aren't a risk and they don't have them". We can now summize that 9/11 was used as a politically expediant way to enact the vision of the New American Century, whose members rose to being in the Presidents office.
Those who voted to authorize the President to do what was needed and later recanted once they realized what happened were honestly trying to do what's right. No one seriously considered that the President would be so reckless that he would actually make the country more unsafe to live in and more vulnerable to terrorists. Seriously, why would any President do that, even ones you didn't like at the time? They made the same mistake the rest of America did, trust a bunch of self confessed Neo Conservatives to not invade random countries as a demonstration of power and instead focus on actually stopping more attacks on US and Allied soil from killing more people. Just ask Spain and Great Britian how much of an impact invading Iraq had on stopping terrorism and if that money would have been better spent.
Doesn't sound too far fetched since Earth has Cruithne sharing it's orbit, which in it's own way is a "second moon". On a functional level, not that different from what they are suggesting. I would even take it step futher, there's no reason to even believe any specific natural satellite of Earth originated from our planet or it's creation.
I agree that fundamentally monopolies are bad for consumers. In the case of Google, today, it's not a problem. Google isn't the default search engine in a clear majority of computers shipping today. That's quite telling. People have to seek Google out on purpose and chose to do so because Google works and works well. If you remember, Google rose to that position due to the arrogance of other search engines. Pay for top ranking, ads disguised as links in the ranks, eye candy over functionality. Then Google came along and said, why don't we try making a search engine first and generate revenue second. They are one of the few dot com companies that tried that and succeeded. Remember when ad words was first added and how "controversial" it was? It was ultimately accepted because Google MUST generate revenue somewhere in order to actually function.
In terms of online advertising, they may end up being a problem. All those ad words customers they generated ended up being very attractive to 3rd parties. Google will pay to put their customers ads up on your site, same basic market model as someone like doubleclick. It is here that a monopoly will end up costing consumers, given the proper board and CEO of Google. They have neither a monopoly there, nor the apparent corporate culture necessary to make this a problem. Yet.
This revenue is what Microsoft is interested in. In order to get there, Microsoft needs a functioning web site with an astronomical amount of users, to attract advertisers. Then they can take that customer base and start sharing it with 3rd parties, which attracts more customers. From what I understand, Yahoo has far better advertisement position than "Live" does. Combined with Yahoo, Microsoft would be in a position to make an advertisement company that could ultimately rival Google, doubleclick, etc. They failed because ultimately Yahoo's internal culture is against Microsoft. From what I can see, it's to the point that employees would have left the company in numbers significant enough that Yahoo would have ended up worthless. This is something the guys at MS didn't see happening. They assumed the amount of cash offered and the overall chance to rival Google in both search engine and advertisements would have been good enough for both management and employees. It clearly wasn't and now Microsoft understands that, which is why they recalled their bid and aren't chasing the hostile take over option.
How is this example any different: I walk into the store looking for a Pepsi. I ask the clerk, "where is it?", she says, "It's over there next to the big Coke sign.
Think about that for a second.
Now, lets take it step further. Lets say I make a searchable yellow pages. It quite literally searches scans of the yellow pages and pulls up the pages that might have what you are looking for. You're going to see ads for competitors when you use trademarked words.
Of course though, this is in the UK, whose advertising laws are MUCH different than in the States. Google is likely to lose there.
If that were the result, the winner would get a delisting from Google. That's one of the many reasons I'm never going to be a CEO.
How often do you stare at your phone? As in look at your phone. I'm sure there's some market for this, but I'm not sure who. Web browsers (quick looking up movie times), email (crackberry, et al.),MP3 players (iPhone), I can understand putting those in a phone. TV? A phone is more of a passive attachment. One you are aware of, but don't have an absolute need to touch for an hour straight without using it as a phone. If you're going to send email or web browse for an hour, you're going to do it from a computer. Watching TV is something that takes more than a couple of minutes.
This is really a solution in search of a problem. I think, in reality, they are shooting for the "cool, I can watch TV" crowd who use it for a month, then stop using it, but never remove it from their plan.
Brick layers never had to compete with their own product, because unless you turned them into a slave, it's impossible. Your analogy fails.
Suing customers? Customers pay for products, not download them from people who may or may not have paid for it. When you start up a competitive service that gives the same exact product that someone else produced and one that you may or may not have paid for away for free, you are breaking the law. You may not like it, but you don't have the right to do that. It's not for you to decide that someone's music should be free. If you are sued, I have no sympathy for you, sorry. If you don't like the practices of the RIAA, then don't consumer their products, at all.
I honestly don't understand peoples absolute preoccupation with the RIAA. Let me ask you something...
You're artist, designer, or coder. You make things. Doesn't matter what it is as long as it's easily copyable on the internet (music, images, web pages, software). You do this for a living. One day someone sets up a web page that gives what you sell for a living away to others for free. What would you do? How would you handle it? Would you just tolerate it? What if you began to notice you were no longer making $40,000 a year and ended up making only $20,000 a year? Would you give up the art that you love?
I'll admit, what I do know of the RIAA is they are extremely heavy handed, so much so that it's entirely possible that innocents are wrapped up in their vendetta. They are sloppy, thuggish, and an out right bully. What can they do? What would you do, just start giving away that which you make your living on? Is that the answer? Is that what everyone wants?
Maybe somehow I left behind on this whole internet thing, since I don't use Gnutella or Bittorrent. I pay for the stuff I use and listen to. I guess I'm a fool for seeing value in the arts that I love in my life, a value worth paying for.
? The best example there (after the Mac itself) would be software - MP3 players on MacOS were unstable, crash-prone winamp clones until Apple bought an audio software company and then iTunes came along....
Not completely accurate. Apple hired the guy who made SoundJam. Before he worked there, iTunes was already in development (in a prototype form). The company that made SoundJam just closed up shop in the transition to OS X. Apparently they had trouble making the switch to OS X.
That's clearly not what I said. Re-read the post.
It's more a common carrier thing. Here are two possibilities of storage that function the same.
You set up a remote UPnP server over a VPN and configure the devices to communicate with it. In this case the service provider is merely a common carrier, agnostic to the packets going across it's network.
Some one else sets it all up and you copy the files to their machine and they in turn distribute them back out to you. In this case the service provider is actively receiving and sending copyrighted material over their network. I would suspect they would need a license for that.
The first case, in most likelihood is perfectly legal. The second case, while having the same function as the first one, just might not be legal. This is the kind of thing that would need congressional clarification, it's not as clear cut as some here thing it is.
Your analogy doesn't hold.
While I don't care if record stores go out of business, since it's clear that online downloads has won as the successor to the CD format, I do care about copyright. Online distribution without compensating the copyright holder will cause the arts to suffer. Yes, artists are getting ripped off by music companies, that will change as online downloads dramatically decreases the cost of distributing the work to the people. There are already companies that will list you on iTunes while leaving the copyright in your possession. The artists still get compensated in a way they find meaningful. Just because you don't like how they are treated doesn't mean you have the right to give their works away for free, thus removing all revenue they would generate for the work. An artist who finds a way to give their works away for free while still earning money on those works is making the choice, which is well within their rights, but it is NOT within your rights to make that choice for them.
Copyright serves a purpose, yes it's misused, yes the way works is sent out to the masses can be improved, but artists need to know they can earn a living worthy enough to create works. Yes, they can earn a great deal of money playing live shows, but do you honestly realize how hard it is on a person to tour? People have left bands that were earning them millions of dollars because they missed their wives! These are human beings, not some commodity to be used at your discretion.
While I'll simplify it down some, here are the two most important things you need to know about copyright.
Making copies of works that you didn't create is illegal unless you are doing it for personal use (fair use, there's a whole set up things that fall in this catagory).
Making copies of works you didn't create for the purposes earning money is illegal unless you have the copyright holders permission.
The problem is run into in the nature of the service being offered. This isn't merely storage, they are distributing the works. The way it seems to run, this isn't a common carrier thing that is being run in good faith, like say any random hosting company, this is a company that is advertising that it will distribute copies of music that you bought from someone else to you on any device you want. That changes the rules, they can't do that without a license, even if you have 5000 copies at home.
You do have the right to store it, they don't have the right to actively distribute it, especially, if my impression is correct, their goal is to make money doing this.
I'm typing this from Firefox in OS X 10.5 right now. Safari is my default browser. Why? Cause I don't care what the default is, I launch my stuff, so whatever. Anyhow, when I click links outside of Firefox, guess what OS X launches? That's right Safari. I go, oh yeah, maybe I should do something about that, close out Safari when it's done and go back to Firefox.
Seriously, I do that. My roommate has a XP machine with Firefox and IE. IE is her default browser. Same thing, too unconcerned to change the setting.
Anyways, people are NOT going to change their default browser for one Site. They aren't. They might download something so it doesn't break, but go back to whatever they wanted to use in the first place. People do that you know. Phishing sites will not be affected by Paypal blocking browsers, because those phishing sites will still function in those browsers. All it will do is annoy people.
My suspicion is that when PayPal deals with browsers that are not "up to snuff", there will be differences in behaviour and additional back-end security measures that may not be used with "approved" secure browsers. But I doubt they will disallow any modern browser entirely.
The real question is what exactly does this do for "security". Anything that PayPal does on their end will have no affect on phishing sites. All current web browsers, regardless of how PayPal treats them, will function with phishing sites just fine. Any user that falls for a phishing scam is just going to think, "cool PayPal works again". I see no point in blocking a web browser unless for some ungodly reason, the phishers blocked those browsers too.
So you're telling me that you used to have to pay your phone company AND the phone company of the person you were calling in order to make a phone call or the receiving company just might not even put the call through? I couldn't even imagine all the phone bills you got back then.
Metered prices is different than what these guys are doing.
No, it is the same thing. I pay for my network access, you pay for your network access. I don't pay to access YOUR network to YOUR network company. The agreements between the companies take care of that. The internet functions identically to the phone network. Making ME pay your phone company to call you faster is the same thing as making me pay your internet provider to send you a page faster. They are both same exact thing and both not in the interest of the consumer.
One day "the people" are going to learn the only thing a company is interested in is making money. They work for the consumer when it's more profitable to work for the consumer than it is to do something that isn't in the interested of the consumer. Network congestion is not solved by throttling, the only thing throttling does is make the internet slower. Which is supposedly the very thing it is supposed to solve.
Of course, that's what they say. Here's the thing, if those guys could figure out a way to charge people for calling me on my phone, they would. Oh, but you say they are already paying for phone coverage, well our phone network is getting over used, we need set priorities, so we are going to direct your call in 5 minutes while more important people (who paid extra) can make calls to out customers right now. Sounds stupid doesn't it. IT'S THE SAME THING THEY ARE PROPOSING.
One thing I don't get, why does something magically get confusing when the words "computer" or "internet" are used in the business discussion? Like somehow it's all of a sudden a debatable thing to talk about?
Oh, that article writer is an idiot. Net Neutrality needs to me set in stone by law, end of story. Networks are made faster by putting in more pipes, not by turning off/down some of them.
This case is about trademark and copyright, not the EULA. It's that simple. Taking someone else's product, changing it, and reselling under the original trademark is the kind of thing that just gets you put out of business. This is true for all markets. If you take Craftsman tools reshape some of them in heat and sell using the name Craftsman, you go out of business in the resulting law suit.
I'm not sure what you define as non-trivial applications. These old machines were doing MORE than win 3.1 for workgroups and than win 95, on the same hardware. The reason I installed linux on the things was to make them useful again. Originally, it was to make them xterms. As time went on, we jobs on them, might as well. You under estimate what older machines can do.
I had compiled Linux from floppy on to a 386 and a 486 to use a work station to access to VAXs in the lab. Hand compiled X-Win on top of that. It ran fine. So yes, PCs clearly had enough RAM and CPU power to run "enforce proper privilege separation". Funny thing is, Linux better both Win 3.1 and Win 95 on the same hardware.
If monkeys were unable to reliably distinguish red, blue and green M&Ms, then they would have no systematic preference for one colour over another
That's not true. Random choices can easily have clumping in low sampling data sets, especially when one assumes there WILL be clumping and base the latter part of the experiment off the assumption that something is "preferred" or not. The initial "preference" could just as simply been the size of a data set and the bias of the scientist who assumed there would be preference in the initial color selection.
Second, if the economist is correct (and I'm not going to find the journal article he's referencing to figure it out), then the experiment has an inherent statistical bias towards one color or another. That is, given the decision tree, the outcome is already known and is not random at all. In fact, the experimental results did nothing more than express that tree exactly.
There is no "official beta release" of the 2.0 firmware. There is a version of the pre-2.0 firmware that comes with the emulator in the SDK. In order to get that on your iPhone you need to unlock it, against Apple's say, then put it on your iPhone.
In the emulator that Apple provides and the firmware is locked, by default, to running in. You have to unlock the firmware so that it works on an iPhone and then install it there yourself, thus doing exactly what Apple specifically told you not to do.