Yeah. Isn't this exactly what we heard about Microsoft's PlaysForSure platform? "It's a whole multivendor platform. Apple is just one company. Of course PlaysForSure will win." How did that turn out again?
I'm not necessarily saying the iPhone will become (and remain) as dominant in the smart phone market as the iPod is in the music player market, mind you. But the specific reasoning behind this specific prediction is clearly faulty. Tech industry analysts tend to assume that there's something inherently attractive to consumers about multivendor platforms, but the consumer market has demonstrated several times that this is just not the case. Consumers don't care about multivendor platforms in any abstract sense; consumers buy products, not platforms. They'll only gravitate toward multivendor platforms because of the specific products offered within those platforms.
If, for most people, there is no specific Android product (i.e. combination of device and software) that is superior to the iPhone, there is no reason the iPhone cannot outsell all Android products combined.
Note, again, that I'm not necessarily saying this will happen, just that there's no inherent reason to believe it can't.
Why would we spend extra money to have a closed source semi broken non configurable standard hating version of linux?
Your obvious personal bias aside, the Mac is an alternative computing platform. People who go out of their way to choose to use an alternative platform are likely to be more interested in computing (and therefore probably more tech savvy) than people who accept the "default choice" of Windows.
This is a survey about households, not individual owners, so the fact that most Macs exist in households that also have Windows machines is largely just an expected result of Microsoft's high market share. Even if one person in a household has a Mac, others are statistically like to have Windows machines because, statistically, most people have Windows machines.
You probably wouldn't own the batteries; you'd just be sort of leasing them. This would also have the effect of substantially reducing the up-front cost of electric cars and relieving end-users of the need to worry about battery life cycle issues.
As far as the weight goes, there are companies working on fully automated battery changing robots.
A satellite in geostationary orbit is in sunlight almost all the time; worst case scenario is at the equinoxes, when it's still only in shadow for ~70 minutes a day.
It cost $1M to develop. It would probably be a lot cheaper if produced in thousand-lot quantities. Plus, it performs 1000 trials a day, keeping track of the results flawlessly; you'd need a lot of grad students to keep up with a facility with a few dozen of these. Or a few hundred. Or a few thousand.
This sort of thing is going to be a very big deal over the coming decades. There is a very good chance that more than one person reading this post will have their life saved at some point by a cure that results from massive automated biosciences research. (Although once our software models of biological systems get good enough, automated research will rarely require the actual robot.)
The Chinese Room is misdirection, pure and simple. We're supposed to conclude that because the person in the room doesn't have the subjective experience of understanding Chinese, the system as a whole (the person, the data tables, the rules) doesn't "really" understand Chinese.
But there's no logical reason to assume a specific part of the system should have a subjective experience of understanding something that the system as a whole understands. This becomes obvious if you follow the logic a few more steps. Do you believe each specific part of your brain subjectively experiences understanding? How about individual neurons? How about the atoms that comprise the neurons in your brain? If you don't believe these things have the subjective experience of understanding the things that your brain as a whole understands, then your brain is incapable of "really" understanding anything, according to the logic of the Chinese Room.
You WANT something like that? Remember what happened whenever the government started giving grants to modernize America with phone lines? The AT&T monopoly was formed.
That's exactly what I don't want. The government should improve telecom by investing in publicly owned infrastructure, not by handing money to private companies. That was bad enough when those companies were regulated monopolies. These days they're unregulated monopolies.
The solution is to just have the government own the infrastructure (which is where all the monopolistic abuse occurs anyway), not provide any of the data services. The government would be completely out of the loop with respect to what content was flowing across the network. They wouldn't be your ISP, just your line provider. You'd probably even see services catering to the extra-paranoid, where the ISP would encrypt everything before sending over the government fiber to your home.
Conceptually, think of this working the way Internet access used to work in the days before broadband. You'd dial into your ISP over the phone network, but the company that owned the phone lines was just carrying an electrical signal; they had no involvement with what that signal was. This would be the same thing, but with a government-owned packet-switched digital fiber network serving a role analogous to the analog phone network.
The most logical structure for telecom networks is to have the government own the physical infrastructure (which is a natural monopoly) and then allow any private company that wants to to provide services (Internet, television, phone, whatever) over that infrastructure. This would create an actual competitive market for telecom services, which is something we're never going to see otherwise.
Of course the existing telecom companies have lots of lobbyists, give lots of money to both parties, and are quite happy with things just the way they are, so this is unlikely to ever happen.
This is incorrect. Quartz models the PDF object graph. It even has the legacy bottom-left coordinate origin in its views which you must flip in your custom view (if you prefer). In the data sense, it does use PDF for screen drawing, which is why a PDF graphics context is available for any view that wishes to render one.
A PDF object graph only exists if you're drawing into a PDF context, which isn't how most on-screen drawing occurs. If you're drawing into a bitmap or window graphics context, you're using C functions to put pixels on the screen; no PDF data exists anywhere along the way.
See here. That doesn't describe a system for drawing to the screen by creating objects in a PDF object graph.
It's also why a view can use the same drawing commands to render to a printer as it does to the screen, and why for many years, screenshots you took in OS X created PDF files on the desktop.
Those PDF files simply contained (and contain; you can still enable saving screen shots in PDF) a single bitmap image of the entire screen. If the contents of the screen were represented in memory as PDF data, one would instead expect to see those files contain separate bitmaps for each bitmap displayed on the screen, vector data for text and shapes drawn via Quartz, etc.
Common misconception. OS X doesn't use PDF for screen drawing. Its graphics engine (Quartz) can generate PDF data with the same commands it uses for screen drawing, and has built in support for PDF rendering. And PDF is used commonly throughout the system to store things like vector graphics elements and documents sitting in the print queue. But things that are drawn on screen by Quartz commands don't exist as PDF data anywhere along the way.
Pre-X versions of Mac OS didn't have PDF integrated at all.
NeXTSTEP did use PostScript (officially licensed from Adobe) for on-screen drawing, but PDF and PostScript are very different. PDF is data and PostScript is executable code, so the notion of doing on-screen drawing with PostScript code makes some sense, while the notion of doing on-screen drawing by generating PDF data and then rendering it doesn't make a whole lot of sense.
The subject of certainty in science is best covered by teaching about the scientific method, not by pausing during lectures about one particular bit of science that some people don't like to remind students that science can't say for certain that it's true.
The fact that there are two providers is just a historical artifact, a result of the fact that these providers used to provide different services which required different infrastructure. As such, it does absolutely nothing to demonstrate that last-mile infrastructure isn't a natural monopoly.
The environmental impact of large-scale solar deployment is almost certainly less than that of most conventional power generation mechanisms. So continuing on the way we're going while we wait for some long study of the impact of solar doesn't seem very clever. In fact, it insisting that we wait on such studies seems like a pretty transparent ploy to protect existing power generation industry from the market forces that might otherwise undermine it.
In order for it to make sense for a bank to assume the same level of risk that would be involved in a direct real estate investment, it would have to charge an interest rate so high that it stood to make at least as much money as it would make from a direct real estate investment. (A "direct real estate investment" here meaning the bank just buying the property in its own name, and probably renting it out while waiting for it to appreciate in value.)
Charging interest rates that high wouldn't just put home ownership out of the reach of a huge fraction of buyers, it would also remove a major incentive for home ownership. You'd be paying interest rates so high that they would, on average, offset any appreciation in the value of your property.
There would be virtually no takers for such loans. As a result, housing prices would probably drop significantly (there would be much less demand), but you'd basically have to pay for a house with cash up front. Financial institutions and those few individuals with hundreds of thousands of dollars or more in liquid assets would end up snapping up all the property at severely reduced rates, and everyone else would simply have to rent, ultimately resulting in a massive ongoing wealth transfer away from the middle class.
I realized that was because none of them supported multi-touch. To zoom in you had to go press a little software button, and it would zoom in one level. The levels are all arbitrary. Dragging the map was often relatively unresponsive, if you were even allowed to do it. Compared to the small amount of time I've messed with iPhones (I don't own one) it was just annoying. The interface on the iPhone is just so much better for the map.
This is an important point. Touch screen interfaces are much less abstract than non-touch interfaces. You're actually physically manipulating real little "objects", rather than issuing commands. The problem with this is, the first time you try to drag something, or scroll or zoom, and the interface element you're working with doesn't follow your finger, you're sunk. The whole illusion is shattered, and the UI feels extremely awkward.
This requires a fair bit of graphics processing capability, certainly by the standards of portable devices.
Even the iPhone's hardware isn't quick enough to scroll e.g. complex web pages like this -- so what Apple did, rather cleverly, is, rather than slowing down scrolling (failing to track the finger) until the device catches up, the device simply keeps on smoothly scrolling, filling spaces it hasn't had a chance to draw yet with a checkerboard pattern, which provides a spacial reference.
There are other little things like this that make the device feel more responsive as well. For instance, if you try to scroll off the top of a web page (or other vertically scrollable view), the phone will let you -- the scroll will keep right on following your finger. Then, once you let go, the view will bounce back.
These kinds of tricks were not particularly obvious. Natural-feeling touch UI requires an entirely new vocabulary of UI behaviors, and that's just starting to emerge now.
If you read my post, you'd see that lots has changed. For one, Java is now the "native platform" on these other small multimedia devices like DVB/ATSC/BDP. You'd see that I proposed mobile objects with precisely the purpose of delivering native UIs from remote devices. Let's see native iPhone apps do that - without rewriting Java, that is.
You know, it's like you didn't read my post. I'm talking about a functional market for developing and distributing third-party apps. There is essentially no third-party app market for the devices you're talking about, and Java isn't the native environment for the iPhone. You tell me Java can produce apps up to native standards, but... try telling to to someone who hasn't used Java apps.
Anyway, you seem to think a market for third-party Java apps might emerge on the iPhone and carry over onto other devices. Why? How many actual use cases are there where it's actually useful to be able to run the same code on your iPhone and your TV? As far as remote objects making the iTunes App Store unnecessary, well, this really doesn't make any sense. OK, so remote loading of objects is a way to get code onto an iPhone. But it's going to suck over EDGE (or even 3G), there's no model for charging money for code delivered that way, and what's the point, really? These devices have huge amounts of local storage, by the standards of the mobile application market. Why not just put real apps on them, and just exchange plain old data via nice lightweight protocols rather than shuffling objects around?
You seem to be really hung up on the technical elegance of the notion of a bunch of devices all seamlessly exchanging objects. It's neat, but it doesn't actually get you anything of substantial value.
Java ME is already part of the default platform for DVB/ATSC (European / N American cableTV clients), most mobile phones, and Blu-Ray (so all HD videodiscs). When it's on the iPhone, JME will get high visibility as a development platform (DVB/ATSC/BD-J and even most mobile phone development is nearly all done by a small niche of developers).
The same JME applets will run on any of those devices. In fact, the Java classloader lets any running Java program load a class from any other Java device connected by the network, load it and run it (safely) locally.
Look, we've been hearing this message of cross-platform utopia for a decade now. The truth is that while Java might be a useful platform technology for developers of embedded systems or whatever, it has largely been a failure in terms of creating a market for third-party applications that are acquired and used by actual end-users. In the mobile space we've got a lot of J2ME apps, but most are trivial or poorly executed (or both), and the market is in disarray; most users of J2ME phones have never installed an app and don't think of their devices as applications platforms, carriers erect high barriers to selling apps, and the widely varying capabilities of handsets make a mockery of "write once, run anywhere".
Java's problems delivering apps that perform at the same level as native apps are more significant in the mobile space than on the desktop. Its problems matching the native UI and the fit-and-finish of native apps are going to matter more on the iPhone than on any other platform, because of iPhone-specific features that cross-platform J2ME apps probably won't take advantage of (multi-touch, etc.), and because of the extremely high standards for UI that Apple has created with its own iPhone software (which third-party developers using the native SDK, having largely Mac roots, mostly will live up to.
As such, the notion that the iPhone represents a new opportunity for J2ME is a fantasy. Quite the opposite is true. Let Sun port J2ME to the iPhone. It will be widely ignored. In six months there's going to be a rich collection of fully-native apps on the iPhone -- something that has really never happened in the mobile space before, because nobody has taken hardware this capable and combined it with excellent marketing, first-rate interaction design, a software platform made for today's devices (which have as much RAM and storage as desktop computers circa 2001), and a straightforward easy-to-use application distribution and update model -- all while shipping enough units (remember the iPod Touch!) to create a single large unified user base to target with apps.
I'm talking about exact iPod clones made by the same plants making them for Apple, if you're truely throwing out IP let's even put the apple brand on them and the Apple phone support number while we're at it - it's not "real" property, right? The same applies to many companies whose primary creations are intellectual.
There are possibilities besides billing college students $10K for downloading songs (the current situation), and the complete elimination of all IP protections (what you seem to be discussing above). My impression is that very few people support eliminating protections that apply to for-profit operations, e.g. patents on industrial processes or laws that make it illegal to set up a factory turning out millions of copies of pirated movies. People primarily object to the criminalization of non-commercial copying of material for personal use.
So when these "kids" grow up and believe that stealing any content is "ok" and they start to steal other stuff should those companies also "find a new business model"?
Copyright infringement isn't "stealing". One important distinction is that when something is stolen, the person or organization from which it is stolen is deprived of an object of value. When copyright infringement occurs, whoever owned the relevant intellectual property rights is not deprived of anything except possibly for potential income. And the statistics on downloading vs. legal sales (which basically show that the former doesn't do much if anything to actually decrease the latter) seem to demonstrate that the potential income in question would only rarely, in the absence of infringement, translate into actual income.
The vast majority of people who don't believe that downloading a movie off of BitTorrent is immoral will almost certainly tell you that shoplifting is immoral. And the above-mentioned difference is a large part of the reason for that.
1. That could glow pretty bright in the night sky. Environmentalists may complain.
Only if they can see microwaves.
2. So much for real-estate savings.
The sort of rectenna you'd use for something like this amounts of a grid of wires suspended on polls. It wouldn't block much of the visible light. Just put on existing farmland, and keep growing crops under it. The energy densities aren't nearly high enough to fry stuff... and anyway, the rectenna catches most of it. (That's the point.)
But in 1000 years, what machine will be able to read the DVD?
The machine that the civilization of 1000 years from now will be able to trivially build for that purpose.
The notion that an archival format is unacceptable if a future civilization might have to actually expend some effort to read it is rather silly. People constantly confuse the economic inconvenience imposed by format obsolesce with some sort of "Oh no! Our entire civilization will be lost!" information apocalypse scenario. Starting with a DVD glass master, the future's "information archeologists" should be able to figure out how to read ones and zeros off of it it and how to decode many common file formats with relatively little effort. Encrypted or compressed formats might be tricky, but the most likely format for an archived film would be DPX or TIFF image sequences, which would be pretty simple to reverse engineer assuming you were familiar with the notion of storing images as collections of RGB pixels.
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Yeah. Isn't this exactly what we heard about Microsoft's PlaysForSure platform? "It's a whole multivendor platform. Apple is just one company. Of course PlaysForSure will win." How did that turn out again?
I'm not necessarily saying the iPhone will become (and remain) as dominant in the smart phone market as the iPod is in the music player market, mind you. But the specific reasoning behind this specific prediction is clearly faulty. Tech industry analysts tend to assume that there's something inherently attractive to consumers about multivendor platforms, but the consumer market has demonstrated several times that this is just not the case. Consumers don't care about multivendor platforms in any abstract sense; consumers buy products, not platforms. They'll only gravitate toward multivendor platforms because of the specific products offered within those platforms.
If, for most people, there is no specific Android product (i.e. combination of device and software) that is superior to the iPhone, there is no reason the iPhone cannot outsell all Android products combined.
Note, again, that I'm not necessarily saying this will happen, just that there's no inherent reason to believe it can't.
Why would we spend extra money to have a closed source semi broken non configurable standard hating version of linux?
Your obvious personal bias aside, the Mac is an alternative computing platform. People who go out of their way to choose to use an alternative platform are likely to be more interested in computing (and therefore probably more tech savvy) than people who accept the "default choice" of Windows.
This is a survey about households, not individual owners, so the fact that most Macs exist in households that also have Windows machines is largely just an expected result of Microsoft's high market share. Even if one person in a household has a Mac, others are statistically like to have Windows machines because, statistically, most people have Windows machines.
The Graffiti entry area on early Palms provided no visual feedback, and could be used to enter commands as well as characters.
You probably wouldn't own the batteries; you'd just be sort of leasing them. This would also have the effect of substantially reducing the up-front cost of electric cars and relieving end-users of the need to worry about battery life cycle issues.
As far as the weight goes, there are companies working on fully automated battery changing robots.
A satellite in geostationary orbit is in sunlight almost all the time; worst case scenario is at the equinoxes, when it's still only in shadow for ~70 minutes a day.
It cost $1M to develop. It would probably be a lot cheaper if produced in thousand-lot quantities. Plus, it performs 1000 trials a day, keeping track of the results flawlessly; you'd need a lot of grad students to keep up with a facility with a few dozen of these. Or a few hundred. Or a few thousand.
This sort of thing is going to be a very big deal over the coming decades. There is a very good chance that more than one person reading this post will have their life saved at some point by a cure that results from massive automated biosciences research. (Although once our software models of biological systems get good enough, automated research will rarely require the actual robot.)
The Chinese Room is misdirection, pure and simple. We're supposed to conclude that because the person in the room doesn't have the subjective experience of understanding Chinese, the system as a whole (the person, the data tables, the rules) doesn't "really" understand Chinese.
But there's no logical reason to assume a specific part of the system should have a subjective experience of understanding something that the system as a whole understands. This becomes obvious if you follow the logic a few more steps. Do you believe each specific part of your brain subjectively experiences understanding? How about individual neurons? How about the atoms that comprise the neurons in your brain? If you don't believe these things have the subjective experience of understanding the things that your brain as a whole understands, then your brain is incapable of "really" understanding anything, according to the logic of the Chinese Room.
That's exactly what I don't want. The government should improve telecom by investing in publicly owned infrastructure, not by handing money to private companies. That was bad enough when those companies were regulated monopolies. These days they're unregulated monopolies.
The solution is to just have the government own the infrastructure (which is where all the monopolistic abuse occurs anyway), not provide any of the data services. The government would be completely out of the loop with respect to what content was flowing across the network. They wouldn't be your ISP, just your line provider. You'd probably even see services catering to the extra-paranoid, where the ISP would encrypt everything before sending over the government fiber to your home.
Conceptually, think of this working the way Internet access used to work in the days before broadband. You'd dial into your ISP over the phone network, but the company that owned the phone lines was just carrying an electrical signal; they had no involvement with what that signal was. This would be the same thing, but with a government-owned packet-switched digital fiber network serving a role analogous to the analog phone network.
The most logical structure for telecom networks is to have the government own the physical infrastructure (which is a natural monopoly) and then allow any private company that wants to to provide services (Internet, television, phone, whatever) over that infrastructure. This would create an actual competitive market for telecom services, which is something we're never going to see otherwise.
Of course the existing telecom companies have lots of lobbyists, give lots of money to both parties, and are quite happy with things just the way they are, so this is unlikely to ever happen.
A PDF object graph only exists if you're drawing into a PDF context, which isn't how most on-screen drawing occurs. If you're drawing into a bitmap or window graphics context, you're using C functions to put pixels on the screen; no PDF data exists anywhere along the way.
See here. That doesn't describe a system for drawing to the screen by creating objects in a PDF object graph.
Those PDF files simply contained (and contain; you can still enable saving screen shots in PDF) a single bitmap image of the entire screen. If the contents of the screen were represented in memory as PDF data, one would instead expect to see those files contain separate bitmaps for each bitmap displayed on the screen, vector data for text and shapes drawn via Quartz, etc.
Common misconception. OS X doesn't use PDF for screen drawing. Its graphics engine (Quartz) can generate PDF data with the same commands it uses for screen drawing, and has built in support for PDF rendering. And PDF is used commonly throughout the system to store things like vector graphics elements and documents sitting in the print queue. But things that are drawn on screen by Quartz commands don't exist as PDF data anywhere along the way.
Pre-X versions of Mac OS didn't have PDF integrated at all.
NeXTSTEP did use PostScript (officially licensed from Adobe) for on-screen drawing, but PDF and PostScript are very different. PDF is data and PostScript is executable code, so the notion of doing on-screen drawing with PostScript code makes some sense, while the notion of doing on-screen drawing by generating PDF data and then rendering it doesn't make a whole lot of sense.
Anyway, PDF licensing is royalty-free.
The subject of certainty in science is best covered by teaching about the scientific method, not by pausing during lectures about one particular bit of science that some people don't like to remind students that science can't say for certain that it's true.
The fact that there are two providers is just a historical artifact, a result of the fact that these providers used to provide different services which required different infrastructure. As such, it does absolutely nothing to demonstrate that last-mile infrastructure isn't a natural monopoly.
The environmental impact of large-scale solar deployment is almost certainly less than that of most conventional power generation mechanisms. So continuing on the way we're going while we wait for some long study of the impact of solar doesn't seem very clever. In fact, it insisting that we wait on such studies seems like a pretty transparent ploy to protect existing power generation industry from the market forces that might otherwise undermine it.
In order for it to make sense for a bank to assume the same level of risk that would be involved in a direct real estate investment, it would have to charge an interest rate so high that it stood to make at least as much money as it would make from a direct real estate investment. (A "direct real estate investment" here meaning the bank just buying the property in its own name, and probably renting it out while waiting for it to appreciate in value.)
Charging interest rates that high wouldn't just put home ownership out of the reach of a huge fraction of buyers, it would also remove a major incentive for home ownership. You'd be paying interest rates so high that they would, on average, offset any appreciation in the value of your property.
There would be virtually no takers for such loans. As a result, housing prices would probably drop significantly (there would be much less demand), but you'd basically have to pay for a house with cash up front. Financial institutions and those few individuals with hundreds of thousands of dollars or more in liquid assets would end up snapping up all the property at severely reduced rates, and everyone else would simply have to rent, ultimately resulting in a massive ongoing wealth transfer away from the middle class.
Oops.
How would that ever work? The bank would effectively be assuming all risk for a decline in property values, but wouldn't share in any upside.
This is an important point. Touch screen interfaces are much less abstract than non-touch interfaces. You're actually physically manipulating real little "objects", rather than issuing commands. The problem with this is, the first time you try to drag something, or scroll or zoom, and the interface element you're working with doesn't follow your finger, you're sunk. The whole illusion is shattered, and the UI feels extremely awkward.
This requires a fair bit of graphics processing capability, certainly by the standards of portable devices.
Even the iPhone's hardware isn't quick enough to scroll e.g. complex web pages like this -- so what Apple did, rather cleverly, is, rather than slowing down scrolling (failing to track the finger) until the device catches up, the device simply keeps on smoothly scrolling, filling spaces it hasn't had a chance to draw yet with a checkerboard pattern, which provides a spacial reference.
There are other little things like this that make the device feel more responsive as well. For instance, if you try to scroll off the top of a web page (or other vertically scrollable view), the phone will let you -- the scroll will keep right on following your finger. Then, once you let go, the view will bounce back.
These kinds of tricks were not particularly obvious. Natural-feeling touch UI requires an entirely new vocabulary of UI behaviors, and that's just starting to emerge now.
You know, it's like you didn't read my post. I'm talking about a functional market for developing and distributing third-party apps. There is essentially no third-party app market for the devices you're talking about, and Java isn't the native environment for the iPhone. You tell me Java can produce apps up to native standards, but... try telling to to someone who hasn't used Java apps.
Anyway, you seem to think a market for third-party Java apps might emerge on the iPhone and carry over onto other devices. Why? How many actual use cases are there where it's actually useful to be able to run the same code on your iPhone and your TV? As far as remote objects making the iTunes App Store unnecessary, well, this really doesn't make any sense. OK, so remote loading of objects is a way to get code onto an iPhone. But it's going to suck over EDGE (or even 3G), there's no model for charging money for code delivered that way, and what's the point, really? These devices have huge amounts of local storage, by the standards of the mobile application market. Why not just put real apps on them, and just exchange plain old data via nice lightweight protocols rather than shuffling objects around?
You seem to be really hung up on the technical elegance of the notion of a bunch of devices all seamlessly exchanging objects. It's neat, but it doesn't actually get you anything of substantial value.
Look, we've been hearing this message of cross-platform utopia for a decade now. The truth is that while Java might be a useful platform technology for developers of embedded systems or whatever, it has largely been a failure in terms of creating a market for third-party applications that are acquired and used by actual end-users. In the mobile space we've got a lot of J2ME apps, but most are trivial or poorly executed (or both), and the market is in disarray; most users of J2ME phones have never installed an app and don't think of their devices as applications platforms, carriers erect high barriers to selling apps, and the widely varying capabilities of handsets make a mockery of "write once, run anywhere".
Java's problems delivering apps that perform at the same level as native apps are more significant in the mobile space than on the desktop. Its problems matching the native UI and the fit-and-finish of native apps are going to matter more on the iPhone than on any other platform, because of iPhone-specific features that cross-platform J2ME apps probably won't take advantage of (multi-touch, etc.), and because of the extremely high standards for UI that Apple has created with its own iPhone software (which third-party developers using the native SDK, having largely Mac roots, mostly will live up to.
As such, the notion that the iPhone represents a new opportunity for J2ME is a fantasy. Quite the opposite is true. Let Sun port J2ME to the iPhone. It will be widely ignored. In six months there's going to be a rich collection of fully-native apps on the iPhone -- something that has really never happened in the mobile space before, because nobody has taken hardware this capable and combined it with excellent marketing, first-rate interaction design, a software platform made for today's devices (which have as much RAM and storage as desktop computers circa 2001), and a straightforward easy-to-use application distribution and update model -- all while shipping enough units (remember the iPod Touch!) to create a single large unified user base to target with apps.
There are possibilities besides billing college students $10K for downloading songs (the current situation), and the complete elimination of all IP protections (what you seem to be discussing above). My impression is that very few people support eliminating protections that apply to for-profit operations, e.g. patents on industrial processes or laws that make it illegal to set up a factory turning out millions of copies of pirated movies. People primarily object to the criminalization of non-commercial copying of material for personal use.
Copyright infringement isn't "stealing". One important distinction is that when something is stolen, the person or organization from which it is stolen is deprived of an object of value. When copyright infringement occurs, whoever owned the relevant intellectual property rights is not deprived of anything except possibly for potential income. And the statistics on downloading vs. legal sales (which basically show that the former doesn't do much if anything to actually decrease the latter) seem to demonstrate that the potential income in question would only rarely, in the absence of infringement, translate into actual income.
The vast majority of people who don't believe that downloading a movie off of BitTorrent is immoral will almost certainly tell you that shoplifting is immoral. And the above-mentioned difference is a large part of the reason for that.
1. That could glow pretty bright in the night sky. Environmentalists may complain.
Only if they can see microwaves.
2. So much for real-estate savings.
The sort of rectenna you'd use for something like this amounts of a grid of wires suspended on polls. It wouldn't block much of the visible light. Just put on existing farmland, and keep growing crops under it. The energy densities aren't nearly high enough to fry stuff... and anyway, the rectenna catches most of it. (That's the point.)
The machine that the civilization of 1000 years from now will be able to trivially build for that purpose.
The notion that an archival format is unacceptable if a future civilization might have to actually expend some effort to read it is rather silly. People constantly confuse the economic inconvenience imposed by format obsolesce with some sort of "Oh no! Our entire civilization will be lost!" information apocalypse scenario. Starting with a DVD glass master, the future's "information archeologists" should be able to figure out how to read ones and zeros off of it it and how to decode many common file formats with relatively little effort. Encrypted or compressed formats might be tricky, but the most likely format for an archived film would be DPX or TIFF image sequences, which would be pretty simple to reverse engineer assuming you were familiar with the notion of storing images as collections of RGB pixels.