I'd love to call myself a liberal; in the classic sense I am one.
Liberal in the classic sense of the word means having knowledge about an issue from a diversity of different viewpoints. In your weblog, you cite a creationist website (all the while apologizing for it) as the basis for a scientifically reasoned argument about the small likelihood of extraterrestrial life. And if you are a liberal in the classic sense, how can you chafe at foreign journalists' criticism of US-sponosored military destruction?
Part of the problem seems to be that you don't know what a liberal really is. For example, your future participation in the democratic process (itself a standard for classical liberal humanism) is to treat it as a system that should be gamed. You claim you will be "[holding] your nose" as you vote for Bush this year, but why? Why not be a "liberal in the classic sense of the word" and vote your conscience, for the person who best represents your interests, consequences be damned? Holding your nose while voting does not seem to be an exercise of your individual political power as much as it seems to be the transferrence of that power to anyone-who-is-not-not-Bush (i.e. Bush). I'm sad you feel you have no better choice than to vote for something that you think "stinks."
I guess you're not familiar with Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, or Imperial Japan, then..
Iraq was hardly the kind of threat Germany, Italy, and Japan were during WWII. Bush's war was a preemptive one and from the evidence that has been gathered so far, preemption seems not to have been necessary. In other words, Iraq wasn't even about to transgress their national boundaries any time soon. It seems the first Gulf War centered around Iraq's occupation of Kuwait taught Hussein a lesson he was not likely to forget.
When you write things such as "set up a free state in the middle of the region to act as a beacon to bring liberty and peace to the rest of the region" I believe you are unrealistically optimistic about the actual state that will Iraw will have ten years' time. The stability the US is so interested in bringing to the Middle East has little to do with human rights concerns and everything to do with ensuring that American oil cartels and the fossil-fuel depedent US economy continue as they have been since the 1960s.
I do believe that the protection and extension of human rights are the most important function any government. However, I don't believe that forcibly removing Saddam Hussein from power in the way the US did so was the best way to ensure human rights in Iraq and elsewhere in the Middle East. In my more cynical moments, I suspect that the 2003-? Persian Gulf War will in fact decrease govermental protections of human rights in the Middle East.
you'll get a shock through the case of the Powerbook if you're using only the two prong adapter
In the winter, even the gentlest brush with my Powerbook case would generate a loud static pop. A firewire hard drive, hooked up to to a different computer that was plugged into the same outlet, would disappear and that computer would complain "improperly removed firewire device . .." xyz. It would also happen if my Powerbook on a different outlet but plugged into the Ethernet.
I never did figure it out but became very careful about discharging any static electricity before getting near the PB.
And just to stay on topic, two things. First, I wish Steve Jobs the quickest of recoveries. I'm glad his surgery went so well and the the form of cancer with which he was diagnosed was so easy to handle. I hope it is gone for good.
Second, I know given this life-and-death situtation there are a thousand more important things to him and those close to him than computers, but I can only despair at the thought of what would happen if he were not around to drive Apple.
I don't know him personally, but my life would be drastically affected, professionally and emotionally
I'm reading below and I can't bear to go on. I read the article well before it appeared on Slashdot and this is what is bugging me:
Post after post, people who did not read the article are asking whether web-reading counts as reading and if not, why not. The article talks about a study that makes its fundamental distinction between literature--defined as poetry, drama, and fiction in print--and all other media. That is, the survey "Reading at Risk" distinguishes between literary books and everything else.
Of course, Internet-reading is reading. But the study was only interested in printed fiction, poetry, and drama. Seems to me that on Slashdot, too many people don't bother to read anything that requires any kind of sustained attention span, printed or otherwise.
She was initially opposed to the mac until she looked at the following benefits
Before you buy, consider this. My girlfriend recently switched from PC to Mac, too. She had about $1300 and got an old-model refurbished (they call them "refreshed" at the Apple Stores) 12" Powerbook. Faster bus, better screen, and same 60G/512MB as the iBook your girlfriend is contemplating.
When you get to the store, make sure to ask about the refreshed units in stock. They, too, qualify for the educational discount and have the same standard 1-year warranty. With the money she saves, she can get 2 years of AppleCare if she's nervous, or a copy of Office or something.
As a side note, one of my friends got a 15" PowerBook from the same Apple Store. It was the model before the 1.5 GHz speed bump, so it was like $200 less. The Apple Store also knocked an additional $100 off because, get this, the packaging was damaged.
At least Microsoft tends to buy the companies whose technology it wants,[. . ..]
I didn't know Microsoft owned Netscape! What the heck! Where does the DOJ get off on taking Microsoft to court for killing a company it already owned?!?!
Now you've got me wondering. If software that circumvents digital copyright protection schemes can be classified as munitiions or arms, then wouldn't US citizens have a right to own them under the Second Amendment?
Keep in mind that I am not trying to defend Microsoft's DRM, my position is that BOTH DRMs are bad. Anyway, my real question is, what makes Apple so perfect and Microsoft so wrong?
It's a simple matter of history. For the past 10 years, Microsoft has behaved atrociously in any market where they have had a stake. They have run roughshod over consumer interests, antimonopoly laws, and have singlehandedly destroyed free market competition.
While no one can be sure, many of those who mod pro-MS DRM (or pro MS anything) negatively are relying on their historical knowledge of MSs behavior. Apple generally have not abused the markets in which they compete (though they have been known to do so: e.g. Final Cut Pro, though that is debatable given Adobe's letting Premeire languish).
So, long story short, people mod pro-MS posts negatively and pro-Apple posts positively because they recognize that the two companies are DIFFERENT. It's not only what you say, but of whom you say it, and let's be realistic. Given the chance, MS would almost certainly use any DRM scheme it controlled in a way that abused its monopoly position. Apple doesn't have a monopoly it can abuse. Its lead in digtial music sales is independent of its horrifyingly low desktop market share.
In context-sensitive debates involving IT, it does matter if you are talking about IBM, SCO, Apple or, Microsoft. Funny that you can't seem to understand that people use what they know when deciding whether to moderate up or down.
I am not shaking my head at the aliens, but the fact that the aliens get so many rights. On the one hand I want to do things by the book and become part of society.
The jobs you would occupy are threatening to the educated and monied class of the US. The jobs illegal aliens occupy are not. The monied class wants a pool of exploitable labor, not people who could give them real competition.
If the US rounded up all the Scientologists and shot them, I think it would gain more popularity than any tax cut.
I think you underestimate the commitment to the 1st Amendment many Americans have. Sure, I don't like (the stereotype of) Scientologists, but if the U.S. Goverment rounded them up and executed them I would be very angry, indeed.
"Hardcore APIs"...? How do you suppose other third party codecs work?
Sorry, but it may be my ignorance showing here. I assumed MS has many undocumented APIs ("hooks") that it reserves for its sole use. Regarding the arena of "multimedia" (sound, video), I assumed MS both has and uses such undocumented/reserved ("hardcore") APIs.
But I'm perfectly open to the possibility that I am completely wrong about this.
But, when you say noone likes Real, well, maybe I don't "like" them, but I'm certainly grateful for being the first of the three to even consider my platform.
This post will probably get buried being as late as it is in this story, but your (lukewarm) advocacy of Real make it as good a place as any.
All this talk about how Real is a terrible company, one that loads its poorly performing software with adware and spyware and adds to that would the salt of damaged file associations, etc. makes me think that Real is actually the victim of its own (poorly considered) strategy to compete with Microsoft on Windows.
Real can't get its icons on the desktop, it can't get access to the hardcore APIs that would enable its codec to work seamlessly with the various generations of MS Windows. So, it plays to kinds of games: 1 find the freeware, and 2) spamware masquerades as freeware.
Just a bit of random speculation that Real may be the victim of trying to play on Microsoft's court. Sad story if you look at it that way.
I agree that Real makes a terrible product and has despicable business practice. But the curious thing is that so many Internet companies who stream or provide video files do so for Real Player and/or Windows Media Player. Often, such sites will offer files viewable only with Real Player.
From everything I can see, Real has a sizeable share of the Internet video market.
I knew it was by design, too, but had a devil of a time find it (Googling for "auditory + feedback + telephone" returns pages for stuttering therapies). ChrisMaple, below, named the feature: sidetone. Here's a googled a definition of sidetone.
You can be an Apple fanboi all you want and love love love the pretty lickable interface, but it is more restrictive in almost all aspects - other than perhaps no DRM'd WMAs on a Mac
The problem with the word "restrictive" is that you are using it across distinct categories. Sure, Fairplay DRM'd files only play on Windows 2000 and XP machines with iTunes, Apple computers with iTunes, and iPods, but nowhere are Fairply DRM'd AAC files as restrictive as "no burn" WMA DRM'd files.
What many people mean by "restrictive" has no meaning across the categories of "fair use" and "device-playable", which is where the fuzziness of your thinking occurs. A more useful concept would be DRM consistency or DRM coherence.
Fairplay DRM as implemented by iTMS is consistent across all versions of its files. WMA DRM'd files are not. The extreme end of fair use restriction for WMA DRM'd files is MUCH MORE restricteve than the fair use restriction of Fairlplay AAC files available on iTMS.
There is a reason we have the moderation system on Slashdot.
The moderation system works to an extent, but the system is massively manipulated/abused (your choice) by the Slashdot editorial board. Furthermore, the Slashdot editors/founders deprive users in good standing of their moderation abilities without notifying them and without measured consideration of their reasons for doing so.
The paid employees of Slashdot do not behave ethically enough for me to put my financial support behind them. If accounts are subject to random and unreported restrictions, then using the site with a free account seems like a reasonable tradeoff.
I frequently pay for digital resources I use frequently (e. g. I pay for shareware) and had been considering paying for a subscription to Slashdot, but once I became aware of the unethical behavior of some of the Slashdot employees (regarding the deprivileging of user accounts), I thought it wiser to save my money.
Speculation is one thing, diagnosis and debugging is another./. may be full of kibbutzers, but not a damn one us who doesn't work for NASA did a thing, really. In the end, even those who hit it "right on," what did they actually know about the situation? Next to nothing, and this means that their solution was a guess. Just because the guess was correct does not mean anything merit-worthy was done by the guesser.
Nasa engineers, 1: Slashdot, 1/2 (a lucky guess is worth something, I suppose)
Sorry, for picking you from among the many who are echoing such sentiments, but how is this "less evil than before"? As far as I can tell (not having yet seen the ad and given the article's details), the former defendants will be on the tube, hats in hand, promoting a pay service to obtain files over the Internet. Furthermore, the AAC files Apple sells on the iTMS are DRM'ed. This is everything the RIAA could have hoped for: former P2P'ers nodding to the beat of paying for their downloads.
Also keep in mind that members of the RIAA get a take of money earned by the iTMS if those tracks are copyrighted by RIAA-affiliated labels, and many are.
Don't get me wrong. I think iTMS is great (I'm a Mac head from way back who loves UNIX) and have maybe a couple dozen songs with the "m4p" extension. I also used Napster maybe a dozen times and hated the RIAA's campaign to destroy one of the best databases the world has ever known. But with the exception of profiting from digital music distribution, I don't see how the RIAA has changed at all.
But we tend to forget what Steve Jobs clearly says in light of all this hype:
The iTunes Music Store makes little if no profit. At all.
Why, pray tell, is this not a problem for Apple? Because Apple uses the iTMS as a Trojan Horse to sell more iPods.
I only partially believe what Jobs has to say on the matter because he certainly is playing this up for effect (the effect of not alienating the free-downloads-or-die-and-kill-music-middlemen crowd). Once the infrastructure for iTMS is in place and paid for, every additional download HAS to be pure profit for Apple. There is no way that every single cent of the forty Apple makes on each and every download goes to administrating the label/artist payout once the infrastructure has been built and paid for.
Watching people uncritically repeat Jobs' statement that iTMS makes little or no profit reminds me of Ben Kenobi and the stormtroopers: "These are not the droids you're looking for," except here it's "iTMS makes no money for Apple. We are not an evil music disbtributor." If Apple is not making money off iTMS, they will be soon. At some point the hefty profit on iPod sales will be accompanied by a smaller profit on iTMS sales. The real question is how many iTunes downloads does it take to equal or beat the profit on an iPod sale.
The Neistat brothers' side of the story contains this gem:
"We then purchased a third-party battery online. I'm very proficient with electronics, but it's a very difficult thing to change the battery on the iPod, and that's why I think Apple doesn't offer the option...
When I put in the new battery, I broke my iPod. So then I had to buy a brand new $400 iPod." According to Corey Neistat, it's then that the fury that fueled the video truly kicked in. [emphasis added]
Basically, the Neistat brothers tried to install a new battery into the iPod, broke the iPod, then railed at Apple for not offering a replacement.
Given the discrepancies between what the Neistat brothers have so far said and the journalistic record, the Neistat brothers appear to be at best disingenous. At worst, they are liars looking to punish Apple for their own poor hacking skills.
Slashdot Mirror
I'd love to call myself a liberal; in the classic sense I am one.
Liberal in the classic sense of the word means having knowledge about an issue from a diversity of different viewpoints. In your weblog, you cite a creationist website (all the while apologizing for it) as the basis for a scientifically reasoned argument about the small likelihood of extraterrestrial life. And if you are a liberal in the classic sense, how can you chafe at foreign journalists' criticism of US-sponosored military destruction?
Part of the problem seems to be that you don't know what a liberal really is. For example, your future participation in the democratic process (itself a standard for classical liberal humanism) is to treat it as a system that should be gamed. You claim you will be "[holding] your nose" as you vote for Bush this year, but why? Why not be a "liberal in the classic sense of the word" and vote your conscience, for the person who best represents your interests, consequences be damned? Holding your nose while voting does not seem to be an exercise of your individual political power as much as it seems to be the transferrence of that power to anyone-who-is-not-not-Bush (i.e. Bush). I'm sad you feel you have no better choice than to vote for something that you think "stinks."
I guess you're not familiar with Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, or Imperial Japan, then..
Iraq was hardly the kind of threat Germany, Italy, and Japan were during WWII. Bush's war was a preemptive one and from the evidence that has been gathered so far, preemption seems not to have been necessary. In other words, Iraq wasn't even about to transgress their national boundaries any time soon. It seems the first Gulf War centered around Iraq's occupation of Kuwait taught Hussein a lesson he was not likely to forget.
When you write things such as "set up a free state in the middle of the region to act as a beacon to bring liberty and peace to the rest of the region" I believe you are unrealistically optimistic about the actual state that will Iraw will have ten years' time. The stability the US is so interested in bringing to the Middle East has little to do with human rights concerns and everything to do with ensuring that American oil cartels and the fossil-fuel depedent US economy continue as they have been since the 1960s.
I do believe that the protection and extension of human rights are the most important function any government. However, I don't believe that forcibly removing Saddam Hussein from power in the way the US did so was the best way to ensure human rights in Iraq and elsewhere in the Middle East. In my more cynical moments, I suspect that the 2003-? Persian Gulf War will in fact decrease govermental protections of human rights in the Middle East.
you'll get a shock through the case of the Powerbook if you're using only the two prong adapter
In the winter, even the gentlest brush with my Powerbook case would generate a loud static pop. A firewire hard drive, hooked up to to a different computer that was plugged into the same outlet, would disappear and that computer would complain "improperly removed firewire device . . ." xyz. It would also happen if my Powerbook on a different outlet but plugged into the Ethernet.
I never did figure it out but became very careful about discharging any static electricity before getting near the PB.
And just to stay on topic, two things. First, I wish Steve Jobs the quickest of recoveries. I'm glad his surgery went so well and the the form of cancer with which he was diagnosed was so easy to handle. I hope it is gone for good.
Second, I know given this life-and-death situtation there are a thousand more important things to him and those close to him than computers, but I can only despair at the thought of what would happen if he were not around to drive Apple.
I don't know him personally, but my life would be drastically affected, professionally and emotionally
I'm reading below and I can't bear to go on. I read the article well before it appeared on Slashdot and this is what is bugging me:
Post after post, people who did not read the article are asking whether web-reading counts as reading and if not, why not. The article talks about a study that makes its fundamental distinction between literature--defined as poetry, drama, and fiction in print--and all other media. That is, the survey "Reading at Risk" distinguishes between literary books and everything else.
Of course, Internet-reading is reading. But the study was only interested in printed fiction, poetry, and drama. Seems to me that on Slashdot, too many people don't bother to read anything that requires any kind of sustained attention span, printed or otherwise.
She was initially opposed to the mac until she looked at the following benefits
Before you buy, consider this. My girlfriend recently switched from PC to Mac, too. She had about $1300 and got an old-model refurbished (they call them "refreshed" at the Apple Stores) 12" Powerbook. Faster bus, better screen, and same 60G/512MB as the iBook your girlfriend is contemplating.
When you get to the store, make sure to ask about the refreshed units in stock. They, too, qualify for the educational discount and have the same standard 1-year warranty. With the money she saves, she can get 2 years of AppleCare if she's nervous, or a copy of Office or something.
As a side note, one of my friends got a 15" PowerBook from the same Apple Store. It was the model before the 1.5 GHz speed bump, so it was like $200 less. The Apple Store also knocked an additional $100 off because, get this, the packaging was damaged.
At least Microsoft tends to buy the companies whose technology it wants,[. . . .]
I didn't know Microsoft owned Netscape! What the heck! Where does the DOJ get off on taking Microsoft to court for killing a company it already owned?!?!
Software doesn't pirate games... People do.
Now you've got me wondering. If software that circumvents digital copyright protection schemes can be classified as munitiions or arms, then wouldn't US citizens have a right to own them under the Second Amendment?
However, I wish Apple would provide more information on their updates.
Apple always provides complete information about their updates in the Apple Knowledgebase. The information for the 10.3.4 update is here.
Keep in mind that I am not trying to defend Microsoft's DRM, my position is that BOTH DRMs are bad. Anyway, my real question is, what makes Apple so perfect and Microsoft so wrong?
It's a simple matter of history. For the past 10 years, Microsoft has behaved atrociously in any market where they have had a stake. They have run roughshod over consumer interests, antimonopoly laws, and have singlehandedly destroyed free market competition.
While no one can be sure, many of those who mod pro-MS DRM (or pro MS anything) negatively are relying on their historical knowledge of MSs behavior. Apple generally have not abused the markets in which they compete (though they have been known to do so: e.g. Final Cut Pro, though that is debatable given Adobe's letting Premeire languish).
So, long story short, people mod pro-MS posts negatively and pro-Apple posts positively because they recognize that the two companies are DIFFERENT. It's not only what you say, but of whom you say it, and let's be realistic. Given the chance, MS would almost certainly use any DRM scheme it controlled in a way that abused its monopoly position. Apple doesn't have a monopoly it can abuse. Its lead in digtial music sales is independent of its horrifyingly low desktop market share.
In context-sensitive debates involving IT, it does matter if you are talking about IBM, SCO, Apple or, Microsoft. Funny that you can't seem to understand that people use what they know when deciding whether to moderate up or down.
I am not shaking my head at the aliens, but the fact that the aliens get so many rights. On the one hand I want to do things by the book and become part of society.
The jobs you would occupy are threatening to the educated and monied class of the US. The jobs illegal aliens occupy are not. The monied class wants a pool of exploitable labor, not people who could give them real competition.
Army slob 1: OK, everything locked down?
Army slob2: Services off, filtering on. Nothin's gettin' in here.
NSA hack: [Taps on keyboard. Clicks "Send."]
Army slob 1: Hey, check it out. I just got an email with nude pix of Natalie Portman and HOT GRITS!
Army slob 2: Score!
Army slob 1: [Clicks "Open Email"]
NSA 1: Army 0
If the US rounded up all the Scientologists and shot them, I think it would gain more popularity than any tax cut.
I think you underestimate the commitment to the 1st Amendment many Americans have. Sure, I don't like (the stereotype of) Scientologists, but if the U.S. Goverment rounded them up and executed them I would be very angry, indeed.
"Hardcore APIs"...? How do you suppose other third party codecs work?
Sorry, but it may be my ignorance showing here. I assumed MS has many undocumented APIs ("hooks") that it reserves for its sole use. Regarding the arena of "multimedia" (sound, video), I assumed MS both has and uses such undocumented/reserved ("hardcore") APIs.
But I'm perfectly open to the possibility that I am completely wrong about this.
But, when you say noone likes Real, well, maybe I don't "like" them, but I'm certainly grateful for being the first of the three to even consider my platform.
This post will probably get buried being as late as it is in this story, but your (lukewarm) advocacy of Real make it as good a place as any.
All this talk about how Real is a terrible company, one that loads its poorly performing software with adware and spyware and adds to that would the salt of damaged file associations, etc. makes me think that Real is actually the victim of its own (poorly considered) strategy to compete with Microsoft on Windows.
Real can't get its icons on the desktop, it can't get access to the hardcore APIs that would enable its codec to work seamlessly with the various generations of MS Windows. So, it plays to kinds of games: 1 find the freeware, and 2) spamware masquerades as freeware.
Just a bit of random speculation that Real may be the victim of trying to play on Microsoft's court. Sad story if you look at it that way.
suposedly people with higher scores on these are somehow smarter,
Not smarter, just better able to navigate the rote kinds of query and response that measure success in academic environments.
I agree that Real makes a terrible product and has despicable business practice. But the curious thing is that so many Internet companies who stream or provide video files do so for Real Player and/or Windows Media Player. Often, such sites will offer files viewable only with Real Player.
From everything I can see, Real has a sizeable share of the Internet video market.
I knew it was by design, too, but had a devil of a time find it (Googling for "auditory + feedback + telephone" returns pages for stuttering therapies). ChrisMaple, below, named the feature: sidetone. Here's a googled a definition of sidetone.
You can be an Apple fanboi all you want and love love love the pretty lickable interface, but it is more restrictive in almost all aspects - other than perhaps no DRM'd WMAs on a Mac
The problem with the word "restrictive" is that you are using it across distinct categories. Sure, Fairplay DRM'd files only play on Windows 2000 and XP machines with iTunes, Apple computers with iTunes, and iPods, but nowhere are Fairply DRM'd AAC files as restrictive as "no burn" WMA DRM'd files.
What many people mean by "restrictive" has no meaning across the categories of "fair use" and "device-playable", which is where the fuzziness of your thinking occurs. A more useful concept would be DRM consistency or DRM coherence.
Fairplay DRM as implemented by iTMS is consistent across all versions of its files. WMA DRM'd files are not. The extreme end of fair use restriction for WMA DRM'd files is MUCH MORE restricteve than the fair use restriction of Fairlplay AAC files available on iTMS.
And they were 100% dead wrong. Why? Because the iPod Mini isn't aimed at the tech-savy /. market.
Maybe the /. market may be technological, but I increasingly wonder if it is a savvy one.
There is a reason we have the moderation system on Slashdot.
The moderation system works to an extent, but the system is massively manipulated/abused (your choice) by the Slashdot editorial board. Furthermore, the Slashdot editors/founders deprive users in good standing of their moderation abilities without notifying them and without measured consideration of their reasons for doing so.
The paid employees of Slashdot do not behave ethically enough for me to put my financial support behind them. If accounts are subject to random and unreported restrictions, then using the site with a free account seems like a reasonable tradeoff.
I frequently pay for digital resources I use frequently (e. g. I pay for shareware) and had been considering paying for a subscription to Slashdot, but once I became aware of the unethical behavior of some of the Slashdot employees (regarding the deprivileging of user accounts), I thought it wiser to save my money.
I hate Real, and I hate Quicktime. [ . . . ] I honestly want them both out of the way so that more open standards will take their place faster.
Quicktime is a wrapper, not a file format. As such, it supports open standards.
Speculation is one thing, diagnosis and debugging is another. /. may be full of kibbutzers, but not a damn one us who doesn't work for NASA did a thing, really. In the end, even those who hit it "right on," what did they actually know about the situation? Next to nothing, and this means that their solution was a guess. Just because the guess was correct does not mean anything merit-worthy was done by the guesser.
Nasa engineers, 1: Slashdot, 1/2 (a lucky guess is worth something, I suppose)
Sorry, for picking you from among the many who are echoing such sentiments, but how is this "less evil than before"? As far as I can tell (not having yet seen the ad and given the article's details), the former defendants will be on the tube, hats in hand, promoting a pay service to obtain files over the Internet. Furthermore, the AAC files Apple sells on the iTMS are DRM'ed. This is everything the RIAA could have hoped for: former P2P'ers nodding to the beat of paying for their downloads.
Also keep in mind that members of the RIAA get a take of money earned by the iTMS if those tracks are copyrighted by RIAA-affiliated labels, and many are.
Don't get me wrong. I think iTMS is great (I'm a Mac head from way back who loves UNIX) and have maybe a couple dozen songs with the "m4p" extension. I also used Napster maybe a dozen times and hated the RIAA's campaign to destroy one of the best databases the world has ever known. But with the exception of profiting from digital music distribution, I don't see how the RIAA has changed at all.
But we tend to forget what Steve Jobs clearly says in light of all this hype:
Why, pray tell, is this not a problem for Apple? Because Apple uses the iTMS as a Trojan Horse to sell more iPods.
I only partially believe what Jobs has to say on the matter because he certainly is playing this up for effect (the effect of not alienating the free-downloads-or-die-and-kill-music-middlemen crowd). Once the infrastructure for iTMS is in place and paid for, every additional download HAS to be pure profit for Apple. There is no way that every single cent of the forty Apple makes on each and every download goes to administrating the label/artist payout once the infrastructure has been built and paid for.
Watching people uncritically repeat Jobs' statement that iTMS makes little or no profit reminds me of Ben Kenobi and the stormtroopers: "These are not the droids you're looking for," except here it's "iTMS makes no money for Apple. We are not an evil music disbtributor." If Apple is not making money off iTMS, they will be soon. At some point the hefty profit on iPod sales will be accompanied by a smaller profit on iTMS sales. The real question is how many iTunes downloads does it take to equal or beat the profit on an iPod sale.
The Neistat brothers' side of the story contains this gem:
Basically, the Neistat brothers tried to install a new battery into the iPod, broke the iPod, then railed at Apple for not offering a replacement.
Even more fishy is the assertion--in the Neistat brothers' side of the story--that Apple did not offer a replacement for the iPod battery until after their video was downloaded by hundreds of thousands of users. The Neistat brothers began editing their video on 23 November, but MacMinute reports that Apple began offering an iPod battery replacement service as early as 14 November. Google gives the same date for both MacRumors' and MacNN's reports of Apple's iPod battery replacment service.
Given the discrepancies between what the Neistat brothers have so far said and the journalistic record, the Neistat brothers appear to be at best disingenous. At worst, they are liars looking to punish Apple for their own poor hacking skills.