To play devil's advocate, losing this case may give them enough leverage in Congress to pass unnecessary legislation-- and with 2 RIAA lawyers in the upper echelons of Justice, I doubt the White House realizes the danger that poses.
That should tell us this case is little more than intimidation. If I were Limewire, I'd retort that this is extortion on a literally astronomical scale; alas, I don't think they have the money to sustain too much resistance.
IMO this is a fundamental weakness of the iOS platform-- you can develop apps for the iPhone for your congregation, but it might not get past Apple and the public at large. That's the price of using iOS.
Furthermore, if people get riled up about the organization, (a) that's to be expected, as Jesus himself said the world at large won't be committed to Christianity, (b) people will generally believe what they want to believe, often in the face of evidence to the contrary (see: Rick Santelli), and (c) there's the possibility that Exodus International simply didn't communicate its message effectively enough-- I didn't know much about EI, and I'm a Christian.
Okay, a parallel drawn between a fortune denied through online sales of applications and the Holocaust gets +4 Insightful?
Unless Apple is threatening the Internet access of a continent, I don't think their policies will do much more than demonstrate that they're inconsistent and ill-tempered.
The ones who don't want to pay even then? You really weren't going to make any money off of them anyway.
Maybe fifty to sixty years ago, Hollywood (and the RIAA for that matter) would have written off such people as losses because there just wasn't enough of them to threaten the bottom line. Then someone got the (tongue-in-cheek) brilliant idea of treating all such piracy estimates as actual losses. It was fun for a while-- the studios and publishers could then claim massive losses to avoid paying the artists and the government alike.
But since their entire business model hinges on not just this absolutely inane fiscal calculation, but also on the complete domination of the production process, the first thing they do when they start to see declining profits is to blame the Internet.
Bang, now there are corporate lawyers looking to make big bucks off of indignant and foolish executives, children, and anyone who happens to get caught in the media cartel's legal dragnet.
Well, the iFixit guy didn't see any other major problems (other than difficulty of replacing the LCD, but that's more of a design issue than anything), and all of the problems he cited can be solved by tightening the build process.
It's also possible that he got a unit built by a n00b. Stripped screws, forgotten ZIF locking, and too much paste are novice errors. The problem with manufacturing in China isn't that the build is consistently crappy, but that the build quality is not consistent.
I don't know what it is about the mindset of corporate Japan, but despite the quality of their goods, their attitudes toward invention and copyright often infuriate me. For example, they generally shun using OSS tools which could save them money and help them avoid vendor lock-in, but instead they'll re-invent the wheel at home, since they "can't trust stuff made by foreigners". Seriously?? Industry standard be damned, they would rather duplicate a bunch of work they don't have to, so they could sell it to gullible like-minded execs in Japan and--
I don't know about you, but modern transportation, the green revolution (cheap and abundant food) and antibiotics, to name just a few of the advances enabled by hydrocarbons, are nothing to be sneezed at.
Yeah, and if petroleum is exhausted to the point of becoming unaffordable, all of those advances will be lost unless we transition to something that doesn't rely on fossil fuels. At the very least, modern transportation as we know it (especially overseas shipping and aircraft-- there's a reason why the Pentagon is taking this seriously) will grind to a halt, and much of the cheap and abundant food we enjoy today will either become impossible to cultivate locally (no artificial fertilizer), or impossible to ship from Peru/Chile.
What's desperately needed are transition fuels for ships and aircraft, to serve as stopgaps before and when the oil crunch hits. Biodiesel works for highway-based freight in temperate climates, so we need the equivalents for heavy fuel oil and kerosene-- and we shouldn't have to sacrifice food/feedstock for it, since several algal species can generate oil on a large scale. We just haven't gotten to the point where we have a strong aquaculture.
Solar and wind energy cannot yet replace our energy needs, not even close. Even if we squeeze every last efficiency gain that we can reasonably get, it still won't be enough.
Solar energy, as current silicon photovoltaics (10-15% efficiency on a good day), can't replace fossil fuel, but they can supplement or offset some of it-- and the offset will only grow when you factor in newer tech like thin-film (20-30%), as well as economies of scale driving down the investment price.
For that matter, there's solar thermal using molten salt, which could power millions of homes and not go offline when the sun goes down. Spain's invested heavily in this, and now their solar facilities are producing practically free energy. Shame it's not offsetting their financial troubles, though. There's also waste to energy conversion and many other technologies that can chip away at the use of fossil fuels-- it's not all about solar and wind.
The point was never that one or two renewable energy techs would completely and immediately replace oil; the point is that a comprehensive strategy involving solar, wind, nuclear, geothermal, tidal, hydro, biofuel, and whatever else we can come up with would reduce our consumption of coal and oil to something more manageable. Then we can seriously think about cutting-edge technologies (like fusion) that could take us off fossil fuel, or change the process to one that's carbon-neutral.
Of course, all of this costs money up-front, and the fossil-fuel-enriched legislators are far more willing to save subsidies on coal and oil, than they are willing to ensure a more stable economy. For that matter, the average investor still thinks "energy = oil|coal"...
That's about the same level of detail and attention span as the typical day trader, who chases after the latest get-rich-quick scheme that flashes something shiny or sexy.
Nuance and sense are not part of that thought process, unfortunately.
Unfortunately for Western players, Pols Voice are much more challenging to defeat without that special ability.
They're one-hit kills with a bow and arrows. Not only that, the arrow pierces through, which allows multiple kills with a single arrow-- no other monster in the game is killed this easily by that weapon. Probably not as bone-headedly easy as yelling into a microphone, but a lot easier than the author lets on.
Hey, it beats having the retailer (*cough*Amazon*cough*) decide for me whether or not I can buy something from a foreign vendor with a card issued in the US.
Did LibreOffice get rid of the Oracle Java parts, replace them with something, or what?
The article says that LO does support Java, but you need to download it separately (licensing issues?). Certain features (database for one) require Java, but for basic Word/Excel clone stuff, you probably don't need it.
You're on the right track-- the closest classification is probably narcissistic or something similar.
Before he was on television, he was a radio shock jock (for I believe a college radio station)-- and he wasn't much different than his persona on Fox. One of his pastimes was character assassination of a fellow radio host, making public insults of her appearance and such. He continued doing so even though coworkers have pleaded with him to stop, because his ratings were so high.
Sure Intel and AMD's offerings will always be "fastest", but do you really need a Six or Eight Core 4ghz CPU costing $1000 to do a few emails, when a $7 750mhz Dual-Core MIPS will do the exact same job?
I can see i7s topping out at around a thousand, but Phenom II hex-cores shouldn't run much more than a few hundred bucks (still, a couple orders of magnitude more costly than the MIPS). Maybe you could get an AMD CPU for a grand if you're going with server chips.
Microsoft cut off the DEC Alpha, PowerPC and MIPS platforms, over 15 years ago in order for Windows NT to compete internally with Windows 95; now they're paying the price and they're going to take down with them anyone else who clings to their coat-tails.
Doubtless they saw the writing on the wall a couple of years earlier than you have, because they wouldn't announce an architecture shift (ARM) unless they were committed to it. This means they'll basically be standing still (sustained by enterprise users and desktop gamers) while Android and iOS eat their lunch in the tablet space.
Of course, Nokia could come out with a badass WP7 tablet and make it a 3-player market. Unfortunately, from what I'm seeing/hearing from Nokia, they're nowhere near ready to go to market.
Intel is the exception, not the rule. To rephrase GP's post, how often, for a company that Microsoft isn't dependent upon to retain control of the desktop and enterprise, is partnering with Microsoft the smartest thing they've done?
SCO? They're on life support. Novell? They're on the chopping block. Those are just the high-profile failures. I'm sure there are several, smaller examples of how companies have failed miserably as a result of joining with Microsoft.
Although the passenger rail line is still alive (sort of) through Irvine and Santa Ana, I don't think anyone around here will go for something proposed by our current President.
Sure, they'll claim it's because of his policies, but it's far more of a visceral, emotional reaction.
Exactly what sort of chance do the other 5 or so parties have? What makes you think that the minority parties are that much better?
Put another way, the last Libertarian candidate is a former prosecutor. Do you honestly think he would have followed through with the Libertarian platform after years as a Republican? I don't think so. Four years may seem like an instant, but that's enough to do a great deal of damage (or self-serving) before getting one's ass kicked out of office-- 2001-2003 is a great and recent example of this.
The minority parties are in a position where they're so desperate to reach the 5% national vote threshold, that they have stopped caring about the voting record or ideology of the people they pick. I've met Greens who say that the democracy movement brewing in Egypt could very well result in another Iran-- this is a party whose platform says self-determination is a key tenet of democracy.
So, yes, we have at least five choices-- one that is politically schizophrenic, one that is allied with too many interests that are against the benefit of the whole nation, and several tiny parties that might not have an office in your district and might not be completely honest with you.
If they can get honest, competent candidates with charisma on the ballot, fine, I'll consider them. But as it stands, the primary reason no one votes for them is because they generally don't fit these criteria-- their entire raison d'election is "I'm not {Democrat|Republican}, those idiots suck".
Realistically, they could lobby for a law that imposes even more draconian penalties on distributors of copyrighted content. They could sue Google SCO style and force Google to fritter away money by stalling in court. They could call up their old buddy in Justice and ask him to file IRS charges on Google, or even just open an investigation. They could give Microsoft or Apple cushy contract deals on content while locking out Google entirely. All of these are not unprecedented, not even in America-- they only need to look up past cases to find examples. Some of them are illegal (asking for false investigation, anti-trust behavior), some are not but clearly unethical (lobbying), but if the MPAA really wants to hurt Google, I'm sure they'll eat the punishment and take Google down with them.
Without fansubs, certain series (*cough*Macross 7/Frontier*cough*) wouldn't even possibly be seen here, full stop.
I'm told that there are so many US copyright SNAFUs and licensing hurdles associated with the "Macross" title, that no Macross title aside from Plus and possibly the original can be distributed in the US unless people pay hundreds of dollars per disc.
Then there's the ADV Films licensing brouhaha not too long ago that locked away several series from the early 2000s until recently.
I would agree with the producers that they should be fairly compensated. But something must be done about media companies who either want total control or who want more money than anyone is willing to pay, and immediately hide behind the excuse of "piracy is ruining sales" whenever they're called on these.
Slashdot Mirror
To play devil's advocate, losing this case may give them enough leverage in Congress to pass unnecessary legislation-- and with 2 RIAA lawyers in the upper echelons of Justice, I doubt the White House realizes the danger that poses.
It's probably all the Star Wars clips I've been watching on Youtube, but that reminded me of this James Earl Jones movie quote:
I know you have been inconvenienced, and I'm prepared to compensate you. Shall we say, one million-- a-HA!!
That should tell us this case is little more than intimidation. If I were Limewire, I'd retort that this is extortion on a literally astronomical scale; alas, I don't think they have the money to sustain too much resistance.
So basically, (loss + statutory loss) * (legal fees) * (pain and suffering over not being able to afford the latest yacht).
IMO this is a fundamental weakness of the iOS platform-- you can develop apps for the iPhone for your congregation, but it might not get past Apple and the public at large. That's the price of using iOS.
Furthermore, if people get riled up about the organization, (a) that's to be expected, as Jesus himself said the world at large won't be committed to Christianity, (b) people will generally believe what they want to believe, often in the face of evidence to the contrary (see: Rick Santelli), and (c) there's the possibility that Exodus International simply didn't communicate its message effectively enough-- I didn't know much about EI, and I'm a Christian.
Okay, a parallel drawn between a fortune denied through online sales of applications and the Holocaust gets +4 Insightful?
Unless Apple is threatening the Internet access of a continent, I don't think their policies will do much more than demonstrate that they're inconsistent and ill-tempered.
Maybe fifty to sixty years ago, Hollywood (and the RIAA for that matter) would have written off such people as losses because there just wasn't enough of them to threaten the bottom line. Then someone got the (tongue-in-cheek) brilliant idea of treating all such piracy estimates as actual losses. It was fun for a while-- the studios and publishers could then claim massive losses to avoid paying the artists and the government alike.
But since their entire business model hinges on not just this absolutely inane fiscal calculation, but also on the complete domination of the production process, the first thing they do when they start to see declining profits is to blame the Internet.
Bang, now there are corporate lawyers looking to make big bucks off of indignant and foolish executives, children, and anyone who happens to get caught in the media cartel's legal dragnet.
That's doubtful-- I'm sure he's under NDA. The best he could probably do is provide hints, and even that could get him in trouble.
Well, the iFixit guy didn't see any other major problems (other than difficulty of replacing the LCD, but that's more of a design issue than anything), and all of the problems he cited can be solved by tightening the build process.
It's also possible that he got a unit built by a n00b. Stripped screws, forgotten ZIF locking, and too much paste are novice errors. The problem with manufacturing in China isn't that the build is consistently crappy, but that the build quality is not consistent.
I don't know what it is about the mindset of corporate Japan, but despite the quality of their goods, their attitudes toward invention and copyright often infuriate me. For example, they generally shun using OSS tools which could save them money and help them avoid vendor lock-in, but instead they'll re-invent the wheel at home, since they "can't trust stuff made by foreigners". Seriously?? Industry standard be damned, they would rather duplicate a bunch of work they don't have to, so they could sell it to gullible like-minded execs in Japan and--
Wait. A bunch of things clicked into place.
Or because the blog writer had to respond to a troll...
Yeah, and if petroleum is exhausted to the point of becoming unaffordable, all of those advances will be lost unless we transition to something that doesn't rely on fossil fuels. At the very least, modern transportation as we know it (especially overseas shipping and aircraft-- there's a reason why the Pentagon is taking this seriously) will grind to a halt, and much of the cheap and abundant food we enjoy today will either become impossible to cultivate locally (no artificial fertilizer), or impossible to ship from Peru/Chile.
What's desperately needed are transition fuels for ships and aircraft, to serve as stopgaps before and when the oil crunch hits. Biodiesel works for highway-based freight in temperate climates, so we need the equivalents for heavy fuel oil and kerosene-- and we shouldn't have to sacrifice food/feedstock for it, since several algal species can generate oil on a large scale. We just haven't gotten to the point where we have a strong aquaculture.
Solar energy, as current silicon photovoltaics (10-15% efficiency on a good day), can't replace fossil fuel, but they can supplement or offset some of it-- and the offset will only grow when you factor in newer tech like thin-film (20-30%), as well as economies of scale driving down the investment price.
For that matter, there's solar thermal using molten salt, which could power millions of homes and not go offline when the sun goes down. Spain's invested heavily in this, and now their solar facilities are producing practically free energy. Shame it's not offsetting their financial troubles, though. There's also waste to energy conversion and many other technologies that can chip away at the use of fossil fuels-- it's not all about solar and wind.
The point was never that one or two renewable energy techs would completely and immediately replace oil; the point is that a comprehensive strategy involving solar, wind, nuclear, geothermal, tidal, hydro, biofuel, and whatever else we can come up with would reduce our consumption of coal and oil to something more manageable. Then we can seriously think about cutting-edge technologies (like fusion) that could take us off fossil fuel, or change the process to one that's carbon-neutral.
Of course, all of this costs money up-front, and the fossil-fuel-enriched legislators are far more willing to save subsidies on coal and oil, than they are willing to ensure a more stable economy. For that matter, the average investor still thinks "energy = oil|coal"...
That's about the same level of detail and attention span as the typical day trader, who chases after the latest get-rich-quick scheme that flashes something shiny or sexy.
Nuance and sense are not part of that thought process, unfortunately.
They're one-hit kills with a bow and arrows. Not only that, the arrow pierces through, which allows multiple kills with a single arrow-- no other monster in the game is killed this easily by that weapon. Probably not as bone-headedly easy as yelling into a microphone, but a lot easier than the author lets on.
It's like E.T. and Pac-Man for the Atari 2600-- the Games That Shall Not Be Named.
Or was that The Games That Nailed The Coffin Shut For the 2600...?
It could be a test-case, so that if Oracle can take down Google here, they can then use this case as a precedent to file C&D letters.
Plus they're looking at damages and legal fees if they win, and they can potentially demand a cut of every Android-related sale.
Hey, it beats having the retailer (*cough*Amazon*cough*) decide for me whether or not I can buy something from a foreign vendor with a card issued in the US.
The article says that LO does support Java, but you need to download it separately (licensing issues?). Certain features (database for one) require Java, but for basic Word/Excel clone stuff, you probably don't need it.
You're on the right track-- the closest classification is probably narcissistic or something similar.
Before he was on television, he was a radio shock jock (for I believe a college radio station)-- and he wasn't much different than his persona on Fox. One of his pastimes was character assassination of a fellow radio host, making public insults of her appearance and such. He continued doing so even though coworkers have pleaded with him to stop, because his ratings were so high.
I can see i7s topping out at around a thousand, but Phenom II hex-cores shouldn't run much more than a few hundred bucks (still, a couple orders of magnitude more costly than the MIPS). Maybe you could get an AMD CPU for a grand if you're going with server chips.
Doubtless they saw the writing on the wall a couple of years earlier than you have, because they wouldn't announce an architecture shift (ARM) unless they were committed to it. This means they'll basically be standing still (sustained by enterprise users and desktop gamers) while Android and iOS eat their lunch in the tablet space.
Of course, Nokia could come out with a badass WP7 tablet and make it a 3-player market. Unfortunately, from what I'm seeing/hearing from Nokia, they're nowhere near ready to go to market.
Intel is the exception, not the rule. To rephrase GP's post, how often, for a company that Microsoft isn't dependent upon to retain control of the desktop and enterprise, is partnering with Microsoft the smartest thing they've done?
SCO? They're on life support.
Novell? They're on the chopping block.
Those are just the high-profile failures. I'm sure there are several, smaller examples of how companies have failed miserably as a result of joining with Microsoft.
Although the passenger rail line is still alive (sort of) through Irvine and Santa Ana, I don't think anyone around here will go for something proposed by our current President.
Sure, they'll claim it's because of his policies, but it's far more of a visceral, emotional reaction.
Exactly what sort of chance do the other 5 or so parties have? What makes you think that the minority parties are that much better?
Put another way, the last Libertarian candidate is a former prosecutor. Do you honestly think he would have followed through with the Libertarian platform after years as a Republican? I don't think so. Four years may seem like an instant, but that's enough to do a great deal of damage (or self-serving) before getting one's ass kicked out of office-- 2001-2003 is a great and recent example of this.
The minority parties are in a position where they're so desperate to reach the 5% national vote threshold, that they have stopped caring about the voting record or ideology of the people they pick. I've met Greens who say that the democracy movement brewing in Egypt could very well result in another Iran-- this is a party whose platform says self-determination is a key tenet of democracy.
So, yes, we have at least five choices-- one that is politically schizophrenic, one that is allied with too many interests that are against the benefit of the whole nation, and several tiny parties that might not have an office in your district and might not be completely honest with you.
If they can get honest, competent candidates with charisma on the ballot, fine, I'll consider them. But as it stands, the primary reason no one votes for them is because they generally don't fit these criteria-- their entire raison d'election is "I'm not {Democrat|Republican}, those idiots suck".
Legally and constitutionally, absolutely none.
Realistically, they could lobby for a law that imposes even more draconian penalties on distributors of copyrighted content. They could sue Google SCO style and force Google to fritter away money by stalling in court. They could call up their old buddy in Justice and ask him to file IRS charges on Google, or even just open an investigation. They could give Microsoft or Apple cushy contract deals on content while locking out Google entirely. All of these are not unprecedented, not even in America-- they only need to look up past cases to find examples. Some of them are illegal (asking for false investigation, anti-trust behavior), some are not but clearly unethical (lobbying), but if the MPAA really wants to hurt Google, I'm sure they'll eat the punishment and take Google down with them.
Without fansubs, certain series (*cough*Macross 7/Frontier*cough*) wouldn't even possibly be seen here, full stop.
I'm told that there are so many US copyright SNAFUs and licensing hurdles associated with the "Macross" title, that no Macross title aside from Plus and possibly the original can be distributed in the US unless people pay hundreds of dollars per disc.
Then there's the ADV Films licensing brouhaha not too long ago that locked away several series from the early 2000s until recently.
I would agree with the producers that they should be fairly compensated. But something must be done about media companies who either want total control or who want more money than anyone is willing to pay, and immediately hide behind the excuse of "piracy is ruining sales" whenever they're called on these.