After the eBay v. Mercexchange case, injunctions are not automatic. The ITC could just award damages if it finds infringement, and not stop the flow of harddrives.
This is an ITC action, not a patent infringement suit. The rules are very different and pretty corrupt.
Back in the 1980s when the US feared it was losing its edge a series of bills was passed to create non-tariff barriers to high tech trade. At the time the US HI-tech companies were complaining that their ideas were being stolen. So they created a kangeroo-court process to allow US companies to block competing imports.
Of course this started long before the effects of Reagans gutting of the USPTO review process were beginning to be realized. At the time a patent actually meant something.
Regardless the drive manufacturers will settle. Just think of it as a private tax.
That holds true for both Jedis and the law. Until there is an "attempted copyright infringement" law on the books, there is no try.
That is not the case, never has been. English common law has always recognized tripwire offenses. If you are caught with the means to counterfeit money it is assumed that you did and sentenced accordingly. In the case of credit cards it is assumed that you stole $50 per card.
The prosecution does not need to prove the amount of the loss, it is not worth the courts spending my tax dollars to determine what the loss is or proving the amount of the loss. If someone has set up the means to perform credit card fraud they are almost certainly intending to commit fraud. There is no reason to require the FBI to prove that a fraud was committed beyond a reasonable doubt.
In the case of copyright infringement the deemed losses are well established in law.
You not only have the right to do so, but the civic duty. In this case, being charged thousands of dollars per song she wasn't commercializing is simply ridiculous.
Bullcrap. She tried to help millions of people steal music that didn't belong to them. She lied to the court and the jury awarded a penalty. Nothing unfair there.
Jury nullification only comes in if the Jury thought that the law was unjust, they didn't.
Like 'States Rights' Jury Nullification has a pretty sordid history. During the civil rights era southern juries sympathetic to the Klan refused to convict numerous white murderers of blacks.
IMO, the biggest barrier is that people simply don't like change. Most computer users are used to doing things the windows way, some to the point of memorizing by rote the steps required to accomplish an task, and Linux disrupts that, because it's different.
And the same for Windows and Mac.
I know folk who still beleive that Genera is the one true operating system, all else is false. And then there are the people who swear that MVS is not the stinking pile of crud most take it for but that there are really cool things you can do with it.
You can buy a PC without an O/S really easily. There are plenty of folk who will put one together for you from components. There are even folk who sell PCs with bundled Linux.
The reason most PCs are sold with bundled Windows is because that is what the market demands. It does not appear that there are many PC makers in Europe demanding Windows without the Media Player option either.
What I object to is the fact that companies like Sun and Real decided that having lost the argument in the marketplace that they would win it in Congress and the courts. In the process they have changed the game from who can build the best system to who can bribe the most politicians. Guess what, not only is Microsoft also better at that particular game, it is much cheaper than writing code!
We had the same thing with the AV companies recently. Windows Vista has hooks in the O/S that are specifically designed to support A/V schemes. That was not good enough for Symantec and McAfee who demanded access to the kernel instead. The excuse they gave was that that is how they have always worked. After much bleating about how evil monopolist Microsoft was being the second tier A/V makers pointed out that they had no problem with using the new hooks and that there really was no need to deep link into the kernel. The astute will realize that the real complaint here was not Microsoft making life difficult for Symantec but that they were not making life hard enough for competitors. Once the need to deep link into the kernel goes away there is little difference between A/V offerings.
Slashdot makes putting an astroturf campaign together much too easy. All you need to do is to work out how your intended outcome can be achieved by ordering Microsoft to act in a particular way. The Slashdot editors will then publish the story regardless of whether the outcome you intend is good for consumers, all that matters is proving how evil Microsoft is.
Same thing happens with Congress. There is the Bush administration 'clear skies initiative' which means gutting the clean air act and the green forests initiative which means chopping them down. Then there is his plan to bring peace to the middle east by starting a war.
There is no registration or notice requirement anymore to assert copyright.
I was wondering quite where the assertion that there is no copyright in the letter comes from. Certainly its not a slam dunk, obviously abusive claim.
I think you could plausibly argue that publishing the letter is fair use in the circumstances, but that is fair use of a copyright material, not a demonstration that there is no copyright. The difference being that you would need to littigate rather a lot to establish a precedent.
Its still a very bad idea to bring up the claim since it reinforces the appearance that the intention is to suppress negative comment. That is not a clever thing to do in a defamation case, particularly in a US court. A particularly vindictive judge might well strike out the defamation case but not the copyright claims.
Now the threat to sue in Canada on the other hand is not such a great idea since there is more to Canada than strict defamation laws, they also have laws against abusive copyright claims.
Yes, hence the comment about grey-market imports. It's unlikely that AT&T would be happy with the iPhone being sold unlocked in any country, as those unlocked phones could then be imported into the US, despite the exclusivity agreement.
Happy, schmappy. AT&T knew what they were buying and Apple knew what they were selling.
Nobody in this thread knows how long the AT&T exclusivity deal lasts or what restrictions there are on sales of unlocked phones in other countries. The article's claim of a five year deal is not necessarily entirely accurate. I have also heard that its a two year deal.
It is also quite possible that whatever deal there was a few months back has changed since. Apple's price cut was probably made possible by new sweetners from AT&T.
AT&T has an interest in preventing unlocked phones becomming available in the US market. They also have an interest in the iPhone being as popular a phenomena as possible.
The Apple and AT&T execs may or may not have screwed up, we do not have the data to tell. The success of the iPhone suggests that they know what they are doing.
That's the good half of the meaning. The bad half of the meaning is that it also means "we intended for courts to award damages of 100,000 times the cost of stolen goods, and for a single mom to be bankrupted for stealing 23 music tracks."
Well what do you expect from this President, compassion?
This is the guy who used to enjoy a good execution in Texas and has made use of torture US state policy. He thinks that Enron shows only that accounting laws are too strict.
Last week he vetoed an act to extend health care coverage to poor kids. And you think carrying water for the RIAA is the worst he is capable of? In Bush world the right to life begins at conception and ends at birth.
If Bush got what he really wanted, single moms would be selected at random to be clubbed to death on prime time television for entertainment value. Bush is Michael Vick on (even more) steroids.
And the establishment media would bleat on endlessly about how fine his character is.
You forgot one other very important advantage to unix boxes (well, servers specifically)... they're always on and connected to the Internet.
Which is why they have always been a target. I have been telling anyone who would listen that Linux botnets are just as big a problem as Windows botnets for the past eight years. Both platforms have been targetted throughout.
The 'security of the platform' is irrelevant when it comes to the choice of the attacker. They only need one vulnerability. The number of genius coders who work on a platform is also irrelevant, as long as you have code that was written at the end of a cafine fueled, 24 hour coding binge you are going to have security holes.
What is a bigger issue in platform choice is what the cracker knows. Ten years ago Internet Criminals seemed to be mostly into Windows. The only platform that has a disproprotionately low number of attacks is the Apple platform. I suspect that the reason for that is that folk who can afford to pay a premium for a Mac are more likely to have a real job and less likely to be grinding out a minimum wage existence bot-herding.
Another interesting thing is that, averaged out, this adds up to $9250 per infringement. At that price the defendant could have physically stolen about 600 copies of each work (assuming around $15 per work).
I thought that when I read the story the first time, the case was not about her use of stolen music, it was sharing the music, thus allowing others to steal it.
Counting each work multiple times is not irrational in the circumstances. I was thinking there might be grounds for appeal against the amount of the loss but that does not look like it is the case.
Probably a big difference in the subwoofer, for one. Try playing a 20 Hz tone through your system.
Possible but irrelevant for my application. I already had a decent set of speakers. The reason I was buying a second surround system was to provide a sound system for my new computer and upgrade the amp on the home theatre to one that could switch video.
So I have the speakers that came with the new amp upstairs and the new amp downstairs with the old speakers which are better - as in smaller and less obtrusive. For some reason a full spec HT system was the same price as the high end computer audio systems. Oh yes, the reason was that people will pay.
I would not pay $1000 for better sounding speakers but paying for smaller, less unattractive speakers is a different issue entirely.
I don't notice a lot of difference between the Onkyo speakers and the Cambridge Soundworks speakers except for the subwoofer. On the other hand I am not at all convinced that paying $400 for the THX certification on the Onkyo buys you a $400 better subwoofer. I would suspect its the same subwoofer in a prettier box.
All d2a converters in the world are identical - do you really believe that? Wanna buy a bridge?
There are certainly differences, some are audible, but there is no distinction according to price. The market for $500 CD players is simply not big enough to allow a significantly bigger research budget for the high end models.
In fact, _deliberately_, all 1st generation commercial CD players were designed to have a horribly tinny treble-heavy sound, as that was the single feature that made them contrast greatly against vinyl, and the mass market was told that this was "better", when in fact it was just plain horrible (I remember an early Phillips from the 80s which suffered from this design).
That was not the worst feature of my 2nd gen Philips player, the sound made by the motor was much more significant, you could hear it over any quiet music.
But that was 20 years ago and nobody sells CD players based on that technology any more. Audiophiles were quite happy with CD in those early days because they still allowed them ample scope for gadget snobbery. In those days a $500 player represented another year of engineering design over the low end $250 player. By the time $50 players existed pretty much all the quality improvement work to be done had been done. The only thing left is the decision as to how to configure the poles on the output filter circuitry. Maybe the $500 player has a slightly better output filter but more likely its just different.
Randi missed his target - cause Monster cable is the same trick - just a lower price point.
Not at all, if you RTFA you will find that he was pretty skeptical about the monster cable as well.
But a bake off between a $80 pair of speaker cables and a pair at $10 would simply be another product test. The difference in price could easily be justified by factors that are not audible. Gold plated connectors will not sound any better in a one week lab test. They will however be much less likely to corrode which could lead to a scratching connection, overheating etc over several years.
A bake off between a $80 cable and a $8000 cable on the other hand is far more amusing. The person who buys monster cables is at worst out the price of a meal out for two. The person who buys the Anjou cables on the other hand could buy a two week vacation in Hawaii for two with the same money.
Audiophiles are an obnoxious bunch. They whine on about how CD is not as good as vinyl but what they really despise is not the quality of CD vs scratchy vinyl rubbish, its the deomocratization of quality sound that CD brought. There is no perceptible difference in the sound produced by a $50 player or a $500 player, none, zilch, nada. That really gets up audiophile people's noses because the resonse they get whey they show off their gear is not 'woot want one' but 'can't tell the difference'.
There isn't very much difference in amplifiers either. 5.1 speakers vs two makes a huge difference when listening to a movie but the idea that one amplifier sounds 'better' than another is just silly. There is certainly still something of a difference in the quality of loudspeakers but even that is not that great.
The only feature I have found to have a real effect on sound is the feedback system some of the mid range systems now offer. I recently bought an Onkyo system for about $500 which came with a microphone that you plug in and can use to calibrate all the speakers for the seating position. I strongly suspect that the $500 system is essentially identical to the $900 THX certified system.
Calibrating the signal delays for the seating position and balancing the sound to the room acoustics definitely has a real effect. Its not an effect that I would pay more than a few bucks for but it did have an effect. Once you have feedback in the system it simply does not matter much what the quality of any of your hifi components is, the balance can be made up using CPU power.
Yes, he designed it when baud rates were under 16k.
It is somewhat strange to see a name I have never heard cited as having been a creator of the Web. OK so reading the article it turns out that he was an Internet pioneer, its a common mistake.
But, "The Internet wasn't designed for people to watch television," he says. "I know because I designed it." - I have never heard Cerf or Postel or Metcalf or Khan or Clarke or any of that crowd make such a sweeping claim.
And so what?
What we are talking about here is whether the Internet is optimized for video. Clearly it is not. There are certainly optimizations that could be made. The question is whether the cost of optimizing for video is worth the benefit. The answer back in 1969 was no. The answer today might well still be no.
I suspect that there is much more to be gained by avoiding the need to move video over the backbone at all than optimizing its path. This is particularly the case with TV content. TV viewing is slightly more diverse than it was twenty years ago but not by a large amount. A 1Tb drive is more than sufficient to cache the major networks, Comedy Central, &ct. News feeds don't even need to be cached, you just need a means of detecting the fact that two or more people on the same local drop are watching the same content.
This can be done efficiently, but it should be done at the application layer, not the network layer. What is lacking is a business model that would encourage the ISPs to deploy intelligent cache appliances into their systems.
But the Iphone uses a modified OSX kernel. Which has protected memory. I seriously doubt they will ever open up the development for 3rd party apps. I think its exactly because Apple locked down the Iphone that others ( Nokia, Motoroloa, Google) will take the same approach to protect revenue schemes, plus the stability that you mentioned.
And the original MAC used a 68000 with a memory manager that was completely capable of supporting protected memory but Apple never used it.
The fact that the platform may have some protected memory capability built in does not mean that the O/S is configured to take advantage of it. Windows XP has protected memory but its still virus prone because few people use the accounts feature.
Lock in is a first mover strategy. If you are the second or the third the advantage of lock in is much less. So pretty much every scheme that starts off with a walled garden approach is challenged in time by an open one.
Perhaps it's also worth mentioning that the initial programs written for the iPhone exploited security holes in the software? It's possible that the death of the Installer.app applications was just a side effect of a security tightening.
I don't have an iPhone (yet), but I have had many PDA phones and I think Apple have made the right call here for iPhone v1.0 but they will have to change if they want iPhone v2.0 to be a success.
The big problem with most PDA phones is that they are worthless pieces of S**T. My Palm dies constantly, the browser is dreadful and third party apps make it unstable. My iPaq was worse, the bluetooth and WiFi were abysmal and the phone quality rubbish.
The problem with most computer phones is that they have puny processors and the operating system (such as it is) is 1980s style with no protected memory. Put a misbehaving application on the device and it becomes unstable.
Given the time that Apple had to put the iPhone together, I think they made the right call. It is far more important for the iPhone to work well as a phone than be an infinitely extensible computing platform.
This is not going to be the case for iPhone 2.0. Unlike the iPod competitors, Motorola, Nokia &ct. have the same commitment to usability, style etc. that Apple does. Google is also likely to enter the market. They are not going to respond with a Zune. If the iPhone is going to continue to be a success it is going to have to be available unlocked.
The iPhone exclusive deal looks to me like it is the last hurrah for a business model that has had its day. Carriers don't want to be in the business of selling phones, they have to give discounts on them in any case. The business of locking phones evolved because the carriers have to ease the customer into the deal by making the phone effectively free.
Free phones made a lot of sense when they became obsolete in a year, as they did a few years ago. The difference between the RAZR and predecessors was significant. The difference between modern phones is much less important. The iPhone marks the end of the 'disposable phone' era. People will abandon the 1st generation iPhone for the GPS and 3G capabilities in the second. But the idea of replacing a phone every year as a matter of course will go.
Yea Columbus should have just put a message in a bottle and pitched it in the ocean and waited for a message from India to come back.
Instead of, say, going over in person, stealing the property of the indigenous population and making them slaves?
Columbus lived in the age of bits, there was no choice but to go in person, going in person was an option.
If we take your analogy seriously we should honor centuries of proto-Columbus types who sailed out to the middle of the Atlantic and rowed around in circles for a few months before returning to their origin empty handed.
We can send unmanned probes to Mars today. We can only send manned missions to the space station. We can learn far more from the unmanned probes than from the ISS boondoggle. Time to de-orbit it.
I'm not sure if net neutrality is exactly their concern. Abortion is just hotly contested by two very vocal sides, with sufficient money and interest to see Verizon brought to court, and cause them to lose the ability to censor media not currently protected by the government. I doubt they care about abortion, or any other social issue that doesn't cost them any money.
The telco's do not want to be piggy in the middle here. Its a lose-lose situation for them. Common carrier status was created in the first place at the request of Ma Bell.
Net Neutrality is an economic concern but not a political one. Monopoly ISPs might in theory use their market position to charge access fees to content providers and block third party products (e.g. VOIP) that compete with their own.
The potential problem here is market failure due to the limited options for delivery of broadband access. Google could have checkmated the ISPs by simply creating 'Google Metrics', scoring ISPs according to the responsiveness of their networks as measured by Google. Any ISP that atempted to extort settlements from Google by penalizing their access speeds would suffer in the rankings. I have a choice of Verizon DSL or Comcast Cable at home. I am not happy with Comcast but the stories I hear from Verizon customers are little better.
Instead the Great Link (aka Google) has decided to go after Verizon head on and deploy deploying WiMax.
One can imagine the process that led to the decision. Senior executive picks up New York Times, Senior Executive calls CEO, CEO gives order, New York Times receives correction.
For any company to insert itself into such political situations is lose-lose proposition. The opposing side is only going to cheer a partisan ban that allows them to send messages while blocking the opposing side.
The critics were right, the Verizon ban is a precursor of what a net without net neutrality would look like: occasional partisan decisions by corporations are rapidly reversed as the businesses attempt to eliminate themselves from the decision process.
***Err, my read was the Americans are trying to get Russia and Europe to pick up more of the tab,***
You are all making a major error in considering this in nationalist terms. The space agencies have a common interest in screwing as much money as possible out of as many governments as possible. It is the agencies versus their governments.
Meanwhile the motives of the governments are pretty murky. Each government has its own pro-ISS and anti-ISS factions. And amongst the pro-ISS factions there are a range of motives: pork for congressional districts, making sure that their country is not embarassed by withdrawing from existing commitments, etc.
The reason that such projects are international collaborations is not that they need the money so much as they need to create a situation where nobody can withdraw without breaking a commitment.
So the statement by the US can be seen as a signal that maybe the anti-ISS faction has gained the upper hand and wants to signal to the others 'hey lets snip this thing'. To which the Russian faction might be responding 'hell no we want to stay' or more likely 'how much is it worth to let you out of this'.
The ISS is an utter waste of time and money. The original purpose of the ISS was to have something for the Shuttle to visit. The purpose of the Shuttle was to build the station. Both are merely staging posts for a manned trip to Mars that is not going to happen. We can do so much more with unmanned probes.
it's hard to say. osama bin laden has an obsessive hatred and knowledge of the united states it's scary. do you think deep down he wishes he was american? I don't think so. it's all for shock value.
The fact that X is the likely cause of outcome Y in situation Z does not mean that X must be the likely cause of outcome Y in all situations. That is a false generalization. This morning my telephone rang because I had placed a wake up call the night before. That does not mean that this is always the reason that a telphone rings or even the most likely reason for a telephone to ring, it is however the most likely reason in a hotel.
Bin Laden has a deep seated hatred of all the inconvenient obstacles that lie between him and control of Saudi Arabia. He was quite happy to co-operate with the US when it suited him. When he fell out with the Saudi monarchy he resented the fact that it would be difficult to replace them with so many US bases on Saudi soil.
Bin Laden has since fallen in with Zawahiri who has provided him with a means of rationalizing his hatred. Zawahiri in turn is obsessed with the idea of replacing the government of Egypt. He was instrumental in the assasination of Sadat in 1981 and took over the leadership of Islamic Jihad. Zawahiri's proximate complaint was the peace treaty with Israel.
It is difficult to discuss Bin Laden rationally due to the propensity of wingnuts to deliberately take statements out of context for their own purposes. Bill Moyer was quite right to point out that the epithet 'coward' is thrown arround as if it were a purely normative ethical statement. It is necessary to proceed in small steps. Understanding the enemy in their true light is always important. The flaw in Bin Laden's ideology is the fact that he starts from utterly false premises, not a mere flaw in his logic or an inability to apply logic (aka irrational). He is not irrational in the sense of being entirely unpredictable or acting from entirely arbitrary impulses. Nor is his behaviour is self-defeating, on the contrary he has been allowed to achieve many of his political goals, in particular the demand that every terrorist makes and almost none achivies: to be treated as a political actor rather than a common criminal.
Or a solution could just require downloading a database on a regular basis and then comparing the uRL to that database locally on your own machine.
The database is already large and the phishing gangs have learned how to inflate the size. They are using tricks like appending vast amounts of junk to their domain names requiring each one to be listed.
A while back I worked out a scheme to try to reduce the privacy compromise of the system by using hashes of the URLs and blacklists with multiple entries. Turned out to exactly not work. The problem being that the privacy compromise we care about is correlations between visitors to low to medium traffic sites. Throwing the crypto at the problem resulted in a scheme where an attacker could induce about 70% of the information they could from en-clair traffic.
When you are designing and testing a product, you don't only test for how you WANT the product to be used, you test for how people are likely to use it in ways you DON'T want.
The original post raises a number of questions, not least how the author managed to type in so much text and still be first post. Perhaps he is a subscriber.
There are many interesting questions here, not least being whether Apple does have an interest in locking the phone, it is AT&T that bears the loss. Only Apple is getting paid some form of bounty for each phone from AT&T in return for the exclusive status. This looks and smells to me like a subsidy and I will bet it would to a UK judge as well.
If this was Microsoft we were talking about there would be nobody defending the lock in strategy. OK, almost nobody since there are always some trolls.
Europe has decided as a matter of public policy that customers have the right to use their phone on any carrier they choose. Apple's marketing plans are irrelevant to them. If Steve Jobs does not want to play according to the rules they set there will be no iPhones in Europe as in none, zip, zero, nada, nyett, non-parle-iPhone.
Europe has come to a similar decision about DVD players, you can readily obtain unlocked DVD players in every part of Europe. The EU decided that the movie studios were using the zone system to enforce differential pricing. The RSS consortium has decided to ignore the fact that the manufacturers offering unlocked players are technically in breach of their agreement. They know that they would quite likely lose their patent rights entirely and suffer significant fines if they were to attempt to do so.
Public policy trumps Steve Jobs and any exclusive contracts he might sign. It is as simple as that. Wearing a black turtleneck does not provide immunity from the EU anti-trust laws.
And then I buy one phone to wipe my ass with, and throw out because it's dirty... Seriously, I liked your comment, but why do you need so many phones?:)
Running around the house looking for a phone gets boring. I want to have a phone/remote/Web tool wherever I am in the house. I want to be able to use it to control the thermostat on the furnace/central air, look at the security cameras, adjust lights, open/close the drawbridge, release the sharks with frick'n lasers, control the TV, etc.
At $400 a pop the iPhone is still a bit pricey for this. But make it $200 a pop and cost becomes a lot less of an issue.
Why is Vista "simply not an option at all"? If you're getting a quad CPU with 8GB, Vista will run extremely well on that, probably faster than XP.
Because if he buys Vista he won't be able to troll slashdot for pats on the head?
If you are really buying a quadcore system and you don't know whether to run XP or Linux then something odd is going on. Unless all the applications you plan to use run equally well under Windows and Linux you are not going to be put off by any of the alleged deficiencies of Vista (which I have been using for six months now and not noticed any of them).
And if you were in fact in the position of running only apps that work on both and you can afford to buy an 8Gb quadcore then isn't it more than likely that you would already have at least one Linux box? If you are doing full time Apache development using emacs or the like you are going to find it much easier on Linux. If on the other hand you are a full time Visual Studio developer than switching to Linux just is not an option.
And why specify an 8Gb box if you don't know the O/S? Unless you have some sort of RAM fetish there isn't really a lot of call for 8Gb unless you kinda know which O/S you are going to be using. Why specify 8Gb? In fact apart from hardcore gaming (which does not exactly argue for Linux) or data analysis type work (like you think Vista is going to be the determinant) or server systems (where the O/S choice is a no-brainer) why 8Gb?
So I call troll here. He might or might not be buying a new machine but his schtick sounds like one of those infomercials they have on late night TV. I once watched a show about a guy who was getting through a gastric bypass surgery. The same guy appears in a commercial during the break to hawk an exercise machine "do these abs lie", well yes they do because they were at least 90% the result of a non-trivial amount of surgery and at most the machine was used for strength training afterwards.
#1) Does it work well as a phone ?
#2) Does it work well as a phone ?
#3) Does it work well as a phone ?
Precisely and the thing that was actually amazing about the iPhone is that it is the first PDA phone that has not been a half baked POS. I have had a Blackberry, an iPaq and a Treo. They all suck. They crash, they drop connections, they are unreliable. The Treo is a vast improvement on the iPaq but its still a POS.
The iPhone on the other hand is competently engineered and actually works. What would it take for me to buy one?
For me to buy one for my personal use it would have to be really, really good. It would have to be good enough for me to carry a second phone around with me for a start. If it had GPS capability and I could use it to auto-navigate in the car that would make me buy it. In fact I would even buy one if there was a GPS adaptor kit available that I could fit in the car and then plug the iPhone in when I am driving the car without a GPS.
For the phone to be acceptable as a work phone it would have to meet two particular requirements. First it has to synch with Exchange email and calendar, either natively or through a third party plug in like Goodmail. Second the email capability must provide for a 'reset' facility in the case that the phone is reported lost or stolen. Without that capability I can't use the phone for work.
Those 'must have' items apart, I would like to be able to use my iPhone as a remote control for arbitrary devices in my home. I would also like to be able to use it as a one time password token.
Another very nice to have feature would be to be able to use the iPhone as a VOIP phone when in range of a suitable WiFi source. I doubt that will be an option until sometime after the AT&T exclusive deal expires though.
My list of nice to have is not actually very long, I don't want my phone to do absolutely everything. I don't even care about having a camera on my phone. But I certainly would like to see the way phones are sold change so that instead of having to buy the phone through my network provider I buy the phone and then decide what network to use it on. I want to see the phone become a commodity communications device.
If that happens then instead of having one phone and many batteries I would be just as happy taking a second phone with me on a trip. If one phone goes flat I switch to the other. I should be able to receive calls from either my home number or my 'mobile' number when I am out of the house and the phone should be able to reconfig itself to my wife's preferences if she needs to use it when I am out.
Instead of buying one phone per person I buy one for every room that currently has a telephone handset.
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This is an ITC action, not a patent infringement suit. The rules are very different and pretty corrupt.
Back in the 1980s when the US feared it was losing its edge a series of bills was passed to create non-tariff barriers to high tech trade. At the time the US HI-tech companies were complaining that their ideas were being stolen. So they created a kangeroo-court process to allow US companies to block competing imports.
Of course this started long before the effects of Reagans gutting of the USPTO review process were beginning to be realized. At the time a patent actually meant something.
Regardless the drive manufacturers will settle. Just think of it as a private tax.
That is not the case, never has been. English common law has always recognized tripwire offenses. If you are caught with the means to counterfeit money it is assumed that you did and sentenced accordingly. In the case of credit cards it is assumed that you stole $50 per card.
The prosecution does not need to prove the amount of the loss, it is not worth the courts spending my tax dollars to determine what the loss is or proving the amount of the loss. If someone has set up the means to perform credit card fraud they are almost certainly intending to commit fraud. There is no reason to require the FBI to prove that a fraud was committed beyond a reasonable doubt.
In the case of copyright infringement the deemed losses are well established in law.
Bullcrap. She tried to help millions of people steal music that didn't belong to them. She lied to the court and the jury awarded a penalty. Nothing unfair there.
Jury nullification only comes in if the Jury thought that the law was unjust, they didn't.
Like 'States Rights' Jury Nullification has a pretty sordid history. During the civil rights era southern juries sympathetic to the Klan refused to convict numerous white murderers of blacks.
And the same for Windows and Mac.
I know folk who still beleive that Genera is the one true operating system, all else is false. And then there are the people who swear that MVS is not the stinking pile of crud most take it for but that there are really cool things you can do with it.
You can buy a PC without an O/S really easily. There are plenty of folk who will put one together for you from components. There are even folk who sell PCs with bundled Linux.
The reason most PCs are sold with bundled Windows is because that is what the market demands. It does not appear that there are many PC makers in Europe demanding Windows without the Media Player option either.
What I object to is the fact that companies like Sun and Real decided that having lost the argument in the marketplace that they would win it in Congress and the courts. In the process they have changed the game from who can build the best system to who can bribe the most politicians. Guess what, not only is Microsoft also better at that particular game, it is much cheaper than writing code!
We had the same thing with the AV companies recently. Windows Vista has hooks in the O/S that are specifically designed to support A/V schemes. That was not good enough for Symantec and McAfee who demanded access to the kernel instead. The excuse they gave was that that is how they have always worked. After much bleating about how evil monopolist Microsoft was being the second tier A/V makers pointed out that they had no problem with using the new hooks and that there really was no need to deep link into the kernel. The astute will realize that the real complaint here was not Microsoft making life difficult for Symantec but that they were not making life hard enough for competitors. Once the need to deep link into the kernel goes away there is little difference between A/V offerings.
Slashdot makes putting an astroturf campaign together much too easy. All you need to do is to work out how your intended outcome can be achieved by ordering Microsoft to act in a particular way. The Slashdot editors will then publish the story regardless of whether the outcome you intend is good for consumers, all that matters is proving how evil Microsoft is.
Same thing happens with Congress. There is the Bush administration 'clear skies initiative' which means gutting the clean air act and the green forests initiative which means chopping them down. Then there is his plan to bring peace to the middle east by starting a war.
I was wondering quite where the assertion that there is no copyright in the letter comes from. Certainly its not a slam dunk, obviously abusive claim.
I think you could plausibly argue that publishing the letter is fair use in the circumstances, but that is fair use of a copyright material, not a demonstration that there is no copyright. The difference being that you would need to littigate rather a lot to establish a precedent.
Its still a very bad idea to bring up the claim since it reinforces the appearance that the intention is to suppress negative comment. That is not a clever thing to do in a defamation case, particularly in a US court. A particularly vindictive judge might well strike out the defamation case but not the copyright claims.
Now the threat to sue in Canada on the other hand is not such a great idea since there is more to Canada than strict defamation laws, they also have laws against abusive copyright claims.
Happy, schmappy. AT&T knew what they were buying and Apple knew what they were selling.
Nobody in this thread knows how long the AT&T exclusivity deal lasts or what restrictions there are on sales of unlocked phones in other countries. The article's claim of a five year deal is not necessarily entirely accurate. I have also heard that its a two year deal.
It is also quite possible that whatever deal there was a few months back has changed since. Apple's price cut was probably made possible by new sweetners from AT&T.
AT&T has an interest in preventing unlocked phones becomming available in the US market. They also have an interest in the iPhone being as popular a phenomena as possible.
The Apple and AT&T execs may or may not have screwed up, we do not have the data to tell. The success of the iPhone suggests that they know what they are doing.
Well what do you expect from this President, compassion?
This is the guy who used to enjoy a good execution in Texas and has made use of torture US state policy. He thinks that Enron shows only that accounting laws are too strict.
Last week he vetoed an act to extend health care coverage to poor kids. And you think carrying water for the RIAA is the worst he is capable of? In Bush world the right to life begins at conception and ends at birth.
If Bush got what he really wanted, single moms would be selected at random to be clubbed to death on prime time television for entertainment value. Bush is Michael Vick on (even more) steroids.
And the establishment media would bleat on endlessly about how fine his character is.
Which is why they have always been a target. I have been telling anyone who would listen that Linux botnets are just as big a problem as Windows botnets for the past eight years. Both platforms have been targetted throughout.
The 'security of the platform' is irrelevant when it comes to the choice of the attacker. They only need one vulnerability. The number of genius coders who work on a platform is also irrelevant, as long as you have code that was written at the end of a cafine fueled, 24 hour coding binge you are going to have security holes.
What is a bigger issue in platform choice is what the cracker knows. Ten years ago Internet Criminals seemed to be mostly into Windows. The only platform that has a disproprotionately low number of attacks is the Apple platform. I suspect that the reason for that is that folk who can afford to pay a premium for a Mac are more likely to have a real job and less likely to be grinding out a minimum wage existence bot-herding.
I thought that when I read the story the first time, the case was not about her use of stolen music, it was sharing the music, thus allowing others to steal it.
Counting each work multiple times is not irrational in the circumstances. I was thinking there might be grounds for appeal against the amount of the loss but that does not look like it is the case.
Possible but irrelevant for my application. I already had a decent set of speakers. The reason I was buying a second surround system was to provide a sound system for my new computer and upgrade the amp on the home theatre to one that could switch video.
So I have the speakers that came with the new amp upstairs and the new amp downstairs with the old speakers which are better - as in smaller and less obtrusive. For some reason a full spec HT system was the same price as the high end computer audio systems. Oh yes, the reason was that people will pay.
I would not pay $1000 for better sounding speakers but paying for smaller, less unattractive speakers is a different issue entirely.
I don't notice a lot of difference between the Onkyo speakers and the Cambridge Soundworks speakers except for the subwoofer. On the other hand I am not at all convinced that paying $400 for the THX certification on the Onkyo buys you a $400 better subwoofer. I would suspect its the same subwoofer in a prettier box.
There are certainly differences, some are audible, but there is no distinction according to price. The market for $500 CD players is simply not big enough to allow a significantly bigger research budget for the high end models.
In fact, _deliberately_, all 1st generation commercial CD players were designed to have a horribly tinny treble-heavy sound, as that was the single feature that made them contrast greatly against vinyl, and the mass market was told that this was "better", when in fact it was just plain horrible (I remember an early Phillips from the 80s which suffered from this design).
That was not the worst feature of my 2nd gen Philips player, the sound made by the motor was much more significant, you could hear it over any quiet music.
But that was 20 years ago and nobody sells CD players based on that technology any more. Audiophiles were quite happy with CD in those early days because they still allowed them ample scope for gadget snobbery. In those days a $500 player represented another year of engineering design over the low end $250 player. By the time $50 players existed pretty much all the quality improvement work to be done had been done. The only thing left is the decision as to how to configure the poles on the output filter circuitry. Maybe the $500 player has a slightly better output filter but more likely its just different.
Not at all, if you RTFA you will find that he was pretty skeptical about the monster cable as well.
But a bake off between a $80 pair of speaker cables and a pair at $10 would simply be another product test. The difference in price could easily be justified by factors that are not audible. Gold plated connectors will not sound any better in a one week lab test. They will however be much less likely to corrode which could lead to a scratching connection, overheating etc over several years.
A bake off between a $80 cable and a $8000 cable on the other hand is far more amusing. The person who buys monster cables is at worst out the price of a meal out for two. The person who buys the Anjou cables on the other hand could buy a two week vacation in Hawaii for two with the same money.
Audiophiles are an obnoxious bunch. They whine on about how CD is not as good as vinyl but what they really despise is not the quality of CD vs scratchy vinyl rubbish, its the deomocratization of quality sound that CD brought. There is no perceptible difference in the sound produced by a $50 player or a $500 player, none, zilch, nada. That really gets up audiophile people's noses because the resonse they get whey they show off their gear is not 'woot want one' but 'can't tell the difference'.
There isn't very much difference in amplifiers either. 5.1 speakers vs two makes a huge difference when listening to a movie but the idea that one amplifier sounds 'better' than another is just silly. There is certainly still something of a difference in the quality of loudspeakers but even that is not that great.
The only feature I have found to have a real effect on sound is the feedback system some of the mid range systems now offer. I recently bought an Onkyo system for about $500 which came with a microphone that you plug in and can use to calibrate all the speakers for the seating position. I strongly suspect that the $500 system is essentially identical to the $900 THX certified system.
Calibrating the signal delays for the seating position and balancing the sound to the room acoustics definitely has a real effect. Its not an effect that I would pay more than a few bucks for but it did have an effect. Once you have feedback in the system it simply does not matter much what the quality of any of your hifi components is, the balance can be made up using CPU power.
It is somewhat strange to see a name I have never heard cited as having been a creator of the Web. OK so reading the article it turns out that he was an Internet pioneer, its a common mistake.
But, "The Internet wasn't designed for people to watch television," he says. "I know because I designed it." - I have never heard Cerf or Postel or Metcalf or Khan or Clarke or any of that crowd make such a sweeping claim.
And so what?
What we are talking about here is whether the Internet is optimized for video. Clearly it is not. There are certainly optimizations that could be made. The question is whether the cost of optimizing for video is worth the benefit. The answer back in 1969 was no. The answer today might well still be no.
I suspect that there is much more to be gained by avoiding the need to move video over the backbone at all than optimizing its path. This is particularly the case with TV content. TV viewing is slightly more diverse than it was twenty years ago but not by a large amount. A 1Tb drive is more than sufficient to cache the major networks, Comedy Central, &ct. News feeds don't even need to be cached, you just need a means of detecting the fact that two or more people on the same local drop are watching the same content.
This can be done efficiently, but it should be done at the application layer, not the network layer. What is lacking is a business model that would encourage the ISPs to deploy intelligent cache appliances into their systems.
And the original MAC used a 68000 with a memory manager that was completely capable of supporting protected memory but Apple never used it.
The fact that the platform may have some protected memory capability built in does not mean that the O/S is configured to take advantage of it. Windows XP has protected memory but its still virus prone because few people use the accounts feature.
Lock in is a first mover strategy. If you are the second or the third the advantage of lock in is much less. So pretty much every scheme that starts off with a walled garden approach is challenged in time by an open one.
I don't have an iPhone (yet), but I have had many PDA phones and I think Apple have made the right call here for iPhone v1.0 but they will have to change if they want iPhone v2.0 to be a success.
The big problem with most PDA phones is that they are worthless pieces of S**T. My Palm dies constantly, the browser is dreadful and third party apps make it unstable. My iPaq was worse, the bluetooth and WiFi were abysmal and the phone quality rubbish.
The problem with most computer phones is that they have puny processors and the operating system (such as it is) is 1980s style with no protected memory. Put a misbehaving application on the device and it becomes unstable.
Given the time that Apple had to put the iPhone together, I think they made the right call. It is far more important for the iPhone to work well as a phone than be an infinitely extensible computing platform.
This is not going to be the case for iPhone 2.0. Unlike the iPod competitors, Motorola, Nokia &ct. have the same commitment to usability, style etc. that Apple does. Google is also likely to enter the market. They are not going to respond with a Zune. If the iPhone is going to continue to be a success it is going to have to be available unlocked.
The iPhone exclusive deal looks to me like it is the last hurrah for a business model that has had its day. Carriers don't want to be in the business of selling phones, they have to give discounts on them in any case. The business of locking phones evolved because the carriers have to ease the customer into the deal by making the phone effectively free.
Free phones made a lot of sense when they became obsolete in a year, as they did a few years ago. The difference between the RAZR and predecessors was significant. The difference between modern phones is much less important. The iPhone marks the end of the 'disposable phone' era. People will abandon the 1st generation iPhone for the GPS and 3G capabilities in the second. But the idea of replacing a phone every year as a matter of course will go.
Instead of, say, going over in person, stealing the property of the indigenous population and making them slaves?
Columbus lived in the age of bits, there was no choice but to go in person, going in person was an option.
If we take your analogy seriously we should honor centuries of proto-Columbus types who sailed out to the middle of the Atlantic and rowed around in circles for a few months before returning to their origin empty handed.
We can send unmanned probes to Mars today. We can only send manned missions to the space station. We can learn far more from the unmanned probes than from the ISS boondoggle. Time to de-orbit it.
The telco's do not want to be piggy in the middle here. Its a lose-lose situation for them. Common carrier status was created in the first place at the request of Ma Bell.
Net Neutrality is an economic concern but not a political one. Monopoly ISPs might in theory use their market position to charge access fees to content providers and block third party products (e.g. VOIP) that compete with their own.
The potential problem here is market failure due to the limited options for delivery of broadband access. Google could have checkmated the ISPs by simply creating 'Google Metrics', scoring ISPs according to the responsiveness of their networks as measured by Google. Any ISP that atempted to extort settlements from Google by penalizing their access speeds would suffer in the rankings. I have a choice of Verizon DSL or Comcast Cable at home. I am not happy with Comcast but the stories I hear from Verizon customers are little better.
Instead the Great Link (aka Google) has decided to go after Verizon head on and deploy deploying WiMax.
One can imagine the process that led to the decision. Senior executive picks up New York Times, Senior Executive calls CEO, CEO gives order, New York Times receives correction. For any company to insert itself into such political situations is lose-lose proposition. The opposing side is only going to cheer a partisan ban that allows them to send messages while blocking the opposing side. The critics were right, the Verizon ban is a precursor of what a net without net neutrality would look like: occasional partisan decisions by corporations are rapidly reversed as the businesses attempt to eliminate themselves from the decision process.
You are all making a major error in considering this in nationalist terms. The space agencies have a common interest in screwing as much money as possible out of as many governments as possible. It is the agencies versus their governments.
Meanwhile the motives of the governments are pretty murky. Each government has its own pro-ISS and anti-ISS factions. And amongst the pro-ISS factions there are a range of motives: pork for congressional districts, making sure that their country is not embarassed by withdrawing from existing commitments, etc.
The reason that such projects are international collaborations is not that they need the money so much as they need to create a situation where nobody can withdraw without breaking a commitment.
So the statement by the US can be seen as a signal that maybe the anti-ISS faction has gained the upper hand and wants to signal to the others 'hey lets snip this thing'. To which the Russian faction might be responding 'hell no we want to stay' or more likely 'how much is it worth to let you out of this'.
The ISS is an utter waste of time and money. The original purpose of the ISS was to have something for the Shuttle to visit. The purpose of the Shuttle was to build the station. Both are merely staging posts for a manned trip to Mars that is not going to happen. We can do so much more with unmanned probes.
The fact that X is the likely cause of outcome Y in situation Z does not mean that X must be the likely cause of outcome Y in all situations. That is a false generalization. This morning my telephone rang because I had placed a wake up call the night before. That does not mean that this is always the reason that a telphone rings or even the most likely reason for a telephone to ring, it is however the most likely reason in a hotel.
Bin Laden has a deep seated hatred of all the inconvenient obstacles that lie between him and control of Saudi Arabia. He was quite happy to co-operate with the US when it suited him. When he fell out with the Saudi monarchy he resented the fact that it would be difficult to replace them with so many US bases on Saudi soil.
Bin Laden has since fallen in with Zawahiri who has provided him with a means of rationalizing his hatred. Zawahiri in turn is obsessed with the idea of replacing the government of Egypt. He was instrumental in the assasination of Sadat in 1981 and took over the leadership of Islamic Jihad. Zawahiri's proximate complaint was the peace treaty with Israel.
It is difficult to discuss Bin Laden rationally due to the propensity of wingnuts to deliberately take statements out of context for their own purposes. Bill Moyer was quite right to point out that the epithet 'coward' is thrown arround as if it were a purely normative ethical statement. It is necessary to proceed in small steps. Understanding the enemy in their true light is always important. The flaw in Bin Laden's ideology is the fact that he starts from utterly false premises, not a mere flaw in his logic or an inability to apply logic (aka irrational). He is not irrational in the sense of being entirely unpredictable or acting from entirely arbitrary impulses. Nor is his behaviour is self-defeating, on the contrary he has been allowed to achieve many of his political goals, in particular the demand that every terrorist makes and almost none achivies: to be treated as a political actor rather than a common criminal.
Thompson's bizare actions on the other hand...
The database is already large and the phishing gangs have learned how to inflate the size. They are using tricks like appending vast amounts of junk to their domain names requiring each one to be listed.
A while back I worked out a scheme to try to reduce the privacy compromise of the system by using hashes of the URLs and blacklists with multiple entries. Turned out to exactly not work. The problem being that the privacy compromise we care about is correlations between visitors to low to medium traffic sites. Throwing the crypto at the problem resulted in a scheme where an attacker could induce about 70% of the information they could from en-clair traffic.
Its a hard problem.
The original post raises a number of questions, not least how the author managed to type in so much text and still be first post. Perhaps he is a subscriber.
There are many interesting questions here, not least being whether Apple does have an interest in locking the phone, it is AT&T that bears the loss. Only Apple is getting paid some form of bounty for each phone from AT&T in return for the exclusive status. This looks and smells to me like a subsidy and I will bet it would to a UK judge as well.
If this was Microsoft we were talking about there would be nobody defending the lock in strategy. OK, almost nobody since there are always some trolls.
Europe has decided as a matter of public policy that customers have the right to use their phone on any carrier they choose. Apple's marketing plans are irrelevant to them. If Steve Jobs does not want to play according to the rules they set there will be no iPhones in Europe as in none, zip, zero, nada, nyett, non-parle-iPhone.
Europe has come to a similar decision about DVD players, you can readily obtain unlocked DVD players in every part of Europe. The EU decided that the movie studios were using the zone system to enforce differential pricing. The RSS consortium has decided to ignore the fact that the manufacturers offering unlocked players are technically in breach of their agreement. They know that they would quite likely lose their patent rights entirely and suffer significant fines if they were to attempt to do so.
Public policy trumps Steve Jobs and any exclusive contracts he might sign. It is as simple as that. Wearing a black turtleneck does not provide immunity from the EU anti-trust laws.
Running around the house looking for a phone gets boring. I want to have a phone/remote/Web tool wherever I am in the house. I want to be able to use it to control the thermostat on the furnace/central air, look at the security cameras, adjust lights, open/close the drawbridge, release the sharks with frick'n lasers, control the TV, etc.
At $400 a pop the iPhone is still a bit pricey for this. But make it $200 a pop and cost becomes a lot less of an issue.
Because if he buys Vista he won't be able to troll slashdot for pats on the head?
If you are really buying a quadcore system and you don't know whether to run XP or Linux then something odd is going on. Unless all the applications you plan to use run equally well under Windows and Linux you are not going to be put off by any of the alleged deficiencies of Vista (which I have been using for six months now and not noticed any of them).
And if you were in fact in the position of running only apps that work on both and you can afford to buy an 8Gb quadcore then isn't it more than likely that you would already have at least one Linux box? If you are doing full time Apache development using emacs or the like you are going to find it much easier on Linux. If on the other hand you are a full time Visual Studio developer than switching to Linux just is not an option.
And why specify an 8Gb box if you don't know the O/S? Unless you have some sort of RAM fetish there isn't really a lot of call for 8Gb unless you kinda know which O/S you are going to be using. Why specify 8Gb? In fact apart from hardcore gaming (which does not exactly argue for Linux) or data analysis type work (like you think Vista is going to be the determinant) or server systems (where the O/S choice is a no-brainer) why 8Gb?
So I call troll here. He might or might not be buying a new machine but his schtick sounds like one of those infomercials they have on late night TV. I once watched a show about a guy who was getting through a gastric bypass surgery. The same guy appears in a commercial during the break to hawk an exercise machine "do these abs lie", well yes they do because they were at least 90% the result of a non-trivial amount of surgery and at most the machine was used for strength training afterwards.
#2) Does it work well as a phone ?
#3) Does it work well as a phone ?
Precisely and the thing that was actually amazing about the iPhone is that it is the first PDA phone that has not been a half baked POS. I have had a Blackberry, an iPaq and a Treo. They all suck. They crash, they drop connections, they are unreliable. The Treo is a vast improvement on the iPaq but its still a POS.
The iPhone on the other hand is competently engineered and actually works. What would it take for me to buy one?
For me to buy one for my personal use it would have to be really, really good. It would have to be good enough for me to carry a second phone around with me for a start. If it had GPS capability and I could use it to auto-navigate in the car that would make me buy it. In fact I would even buy one if there was a GPS adaptor kit available that I could fit in the car and then plug the iPhone in when I am driving the car without a GPS.
For the phone to be acceptable as a work phone it would have to meet two particular requirements. First it has to synch with Exchange email and calendar, either natively or through a third party plug in like Goodmail. Second the email capability must provide for a 'reset' facility in the case that the phone is reported lost or stolen. Without that capability I can't use the phone for work.
Those 'must have' items apart, I would like to be able to use my iPhone as a remote control for arbitrary devices in my home. I would also like to be able to use it as a one time password token.
Another very nice to have feature would be to be able to use the iPhone as a VOIP phone when in range of a suitable WiFi source. I doubt that will be an option until sometime after the AT&T exclusive deal expires though.
My list of nice to have is not actually very long, I don't want my phone to do absolutely everything. I don't even care about having a camera on my phone. But I certainly would like to see the way phones are sold change so that instead of having to buy the phone through my network provider I buy the phone and then decide what network to use it on. I want to see the phone become a commodity communications device.
If that happens then instead of having one phone and many batteries I would be just as happy taking a second phone with me on a trip. If one phone goes flat I switch to the other. I should be able to receive calls from either my home number or my 'mobile' number when I am out of the house and the phone should be able to reconfig itself to my wife's preferences if she needs to use it when I am out.
Instead of buying one phone per person I buy one for every room that currently has a telephone handset.