Supporting based on "need" (who determines it? how?) isn't much better. I don't want to pay people who aren't popular because they don't make good music.
But, I just came up with a new argument. You said:
I will continue to support the blank cd levy as a form of voluntary taxation to support musicians
So what if that doesn't actually work?
Suppose you have a budget of $100 a month to buy music, which you spend on albums that cost $15 each. That gives you 6 albums. Additionally, you buy 6 CDs to make copies to listen in the car, to keep the originals at home. The bulk price of a CD here is about $0.3, while the tax per CD is $0.25. Which means, you spend about $1.8 on the CDs, and $1.5 on the tax.
Over a year, you'll spend: $21.6 on CDs, and $18 on the tax.
Notice how in a year, the tax adds up to enough to buy an album.
Now the question, which do you think is better? To spread the $18 between a lot of artists depending on popularity, or to buy another album from an artist you like?
I think that even if an artist earns just $1 from an album, they've got to be pretty damn popular for their share of the $18 to be a 5%. So they're probably not a starving artist in the first place. If you buy anything that's not from the top 10 charts, the artist you like would probably benefit more from another album, and would definitely benefit more if you went to a concert instead, which you could probably afford if you didn't buy the CDs at all, and instead just used a mp3 player.
But I do not agree that they should stop with the levy entirely... as a country, we don't do enough to support our starving artists, and seem to really only recognize them when they've achieved popularity. Until that cultural bias changes, I will continue to support the blank cd levy as a form of voluntary taxation to support musicians.
No. The levy is a perversion of the rightful order of things.
It doesn't support "starving artists", it supports whoever gets played on radio, and those generally don't need that much support as they're fairly popular already. The starving artists that barely get played if ever on radio don't benefit from it.
Supporting based on "need" (who determines it? how?) isn't much better. I don't want to pay people who aren't popular because they don't make good music.
Also, the amount of money that results from the money doesn't have that much to do with music. In some countries, hard disks are taxed. If some development results in the sales of hard disks going up significantly, every artist will get richer, even if the disks were bought by datacenters to store sales databases. That's wrong. Conversely, if the datacenters decide they have enough storage and stop buying more, artists will suffer, which is also wrong.
There's a very simple way of rewarding music creation: The artist makes a song and sells it, and I buy it. That way only the right person gets rewarded for the right act. They make better music, they get richer. They make crap, they don't get money. That's how it should be.
Until that cultural bias changes, I will continue to support the blank cd levy as a form of voluntary taxation to support musicians.
And I'll continue to oppose it, buy less than I used to before it existed, and find ways of avoid paying for it (legally).
I'm all for encouraging people to buy more music legally, but unless you can guarantee that a *significant* portion of the money I'm sending you is actually going to the artist, then I won't be willing to sign up for it.
Funny, that's precisely the reason I'm against the levy.
But there are many different ways an artist can collect money from a fan or a potential fan.
I agree with one and one only of them: the fan buys music from the artist.
I disagree with any taxes or any systems where any artist except the one's music I'm playing gets paid. It's simple - if anybody but you would get paid in exchange for me having your music, I won't pay anybody at all.
I just think they should bring back the iPod levy. They used to have it- something like $40 ontop of every ipod- but now they don't have it due to the increase of legitimate online sales through itunes.
No freaking way.
If they do that here, I'm not buying another player, and will listen to music from my laptop until I can figure a way of getting an untaxed player (such as shipping it from another country, or buying one while on holidays there)
It's fair too, I guess. But anyways back to the main point- the article is talking about giving Colleges a blanket license for music, and being able to prevent the students from being liable. That just makes no sense to me. What could they possibly gain out of that?
No, it isn't fair. I don't torrent music and refuse to pay for any such system. If such a system is mandatory whether I want it or not, I'll refuse to use it and complain until I get my share of the money back.
Well to be honest, if you don't get played on the radio- then you're not at the level to care about how important royalties are to an artist. That's fine. Indie artists and Niche artists have their following too, but generally to make a living off music you need it on the radio/charts
Radio stats don't necessarily match the popularity in other mediums though. Here radio stations keep playing various 80s stuff everybody heard 500 times before. So long radio stations keep playing ancient hits those people will keep getting paid, even if nobody cares anymore.
A correction on the SOCAN payouts- If you do get played, and counted by Neilson, your money sits with SOCAN until you sign up- if you haven't already. Your money doesn't go to another artist like you mentioned. They'll get payed for their own material.
We're talking about different things.
You're saying that the part SOCAN has to pay you according to how much you get played on radio doesn't go to somebody else if you're not signed up. Right.
But what I'm saying is two things.
First, if I pay $1 of tax on some CDs, and put some of your music there, and you don't get any significant airtime, that money doesn't go to you -- most of it will go to Celine Dion and other popular artists, even if it's your music what I'm storing. I consider that fundamentally unfair -- why should any of my tax go to people I don't care about? As a result I choose not to buy media, which means I don't pay tax, which means neither you nor she get paid.
Second, if I pay $1 of tax on some CDs in Spain, and put some music there, the money gets spread between local artists, and Celine Dion never sees a cent of it even if it's her music there. Spanish artists for some reason do get paid, while I absolutely don't care about their music and don't want to support it. Again, same thing, I consider this to be unfair and choose to act in such a way that nobody gets paid.
The Canadian Private Copying Collective has developed a methodology by which the proceeds are distributed to rights holders based on commercial radio airplay and commercial sales samples, ignoring radio/college airplay and independent record sales not logged by Soundscan.
Which means that if I copy your music, and you don't get played on radio, you don't get a cent from it. Celine Dion does though. Which IMO is completely bizarre and a perversion of how things should be. If somebody's going to get paid I'd rather it be the right person.
In other countries with the same system the money goes to local artists. So in Germany, a german artist would be getting paid for your music.
and in general yeah- Blank CDs are mostly used to copy copy written material
You must be kidding. Who carries burned music CDs around anymore? I buy CDs pretty much exclusively to burn Linux distros, my brother to distribute his own (graphics) work. Nobody uses CDs to pass music around anymore. They use portable hard drives, laptops, and so on, and carry their music on portable MP3 players. Most of those are taxed too, but the proportion is much lower than for a CD, and they're all rewritable so the payment is a one time one regardless of how much music goes through it.
I object on principle to this system and avoid buying CDs and CD-Rs because of it.
The problem with this idea- letting users get a subscription to all the music they want. It has to expire. As an artist, no way would I let someone download my entire library of songs for a monthly fee. It's simply not fair.
Anyway, why do you feel it would be damaging? In my view, if all they want was adopted things would be quite a lot better. Some things will suffer damage of course, but most of those are ones I want to be damaged anyway.
It won't win because it addresses a very limited set of concerns. What's their position on Iraq for instance? They may not even have one.
They're not trying to win, but to gain enough influence to push their point of view.
Imagine for instance that the polls show they may get 10% of the vote. Well, in the tight republican vs democrat race, 10% is quite a lot, so it may make sense for one of those to adopt the same policies. Then the other one will as well.
Zombies are moving corpses that aren't interested in anything besides your brains. You can't talk to them, convince of the errors of their ways, or let them be. You can't make them normal again. They're the perfect target to mindlessly slaughter with no regrets.
Robots, aliens and even monsters are very often humanized. They often have human level intelligence, and some sort of motivation. It takes a lot more effort to come up with a reason to kill something sentient. If you don't do it right people are going to root for the "wrong" side.
Going by brute force, there are 98569 lines in my/usr/share/dict/words. Double that to account for that some words are capitalized.
There are only 26 characters, double to account for uppercase.
197138 ^ 11 is a much bigger number than 52 ^ 11. Of course it's also longer to type. But if brute force resistance is what you want it makes no sense to weaken it.
No, Linux is benefitting from Open Source drivers.
The internal kernel API changes whenever needed, they just fix every driver as well, since they can. And Microsoft can't, so each new API obsoletes everything before it, unless the manufacturer does the work, and they rarely have any incentive.
Yes they are. Even the most inefficient plants are still vastly more efficient than a car's engine, with transmission losses accounted for.
Finally, how good are the batteries for the enviornment? Can they be recycled cleanly? And how often do they need to be replaced? After a few months of steady use?
Batteries are very recyclable, and are designed to last the life of the car.
Nowadays, the politically correct religion is the assertion that all ethnic groups and all racial groups are genetically identical. Therefore, researchers should not study ethnic or racial differences in the efficacy of various drugs.
Does it make sense to put much weight on this though?
Nowadays, somebody from Australia can travel to the other side of the planet and have children with somebody born there. Formerly some areas were very separate and would tend to have some consistency in the genetics, but these days with the easy availability of travel from anywhere to anywhere on the planet, genes are going to get mixed quite a lot.
IMO it doesn't make sense to classify people by race. If something like lactose intolerance matters for some purpose, then we should simply test the person for it, instead of making an assumption.
In their lawsuit, Apple's claim is that OS X does not run or install on generic PCs without modification.
Why, it's not possible to modify the machine itself (BIOS, etc) so that OS X runs on it?
If the modifications involves replacement of system libraries and files, Apple has more of a case.
I don't really buy that argument either. Reverse engineering for compatibility reasons is permitted in most countries, and replacing a library with one that performs some workaround then calls the original wouldn't involve touching any Apple code.
The way you wrote it makes it sound like the N900 will provide an API that's already scheduled for deprecation. But what the article actually says is that the N900 will use Maemo 5, which won't be backwards with the Maemo 4 used in earlier products.
I think the "new" word is the confusing part, if you said "the current MAEMO APIs will become deprecated" then it'd have made more sense.
That's a trademark issue though, and is trivial to solve: Just sell it under its own brand, like "Psystar Open Computer" or whatever they were calling it.
Most users don't need root, nor have any need for source code access. Most users have access to support from the manufacturer, and are fine with that.
But I'm not "most users" and will choose precisely on criteria like this. I assume I'm the intended audience. Not everything has to be written for the layman.
In practice, any Gnome/KDE GUI app will simply not run properly in the display resolution of a phone, and not lend itself well to a touch screen interface. When you want to talk about the great stuff you can do with MAEMO, and you decide to illustrate with XEYES, I say you are out of touch with reality.
But this is mostly unimportant. It may not look perfect, but it should be fairly simple to fix the UI, especially when compared with writing from scratch or rewriting significant amounts of the codebase.
The xeyes thing IMO simply illustrates that you can run any random thing on it without fuss -- which has huge value in my view.
Android forces a rewrite of even Java code, but it also provides full application isolation. Nowhere the security advantages of it were considered.
As somebody who wants an advanced phone that can be used as a computer and not as a restricted platform I don't really find it much of an advantage. What I want is pretty much a tiny Linux box that fits in my pocket and makes calls. And it looks like that's what it'll be.
Android is also offered with root access from Google (ADP) and with the Geekphone from Spain. The fact that you can also buy it in a locked state, doesn't disqualify the platform.
Ok, this is interesting, didn't know. Still, that I'm one of the few people with good access to the device lowers its value for me. I may be able to mess all I want with it, but if other people have to jump through hoops to use anything I come up with then that's annoying.
As a developer, I also care about the fact that the new MAEMO APIs are scheduled for deprecation before its release. Having a stable, well documented API matters. A lot.
Do you have permission to use that copyrighted chair design? If the holder says you only have permission to use his exotic wood for the project, then so be it. Leave the project at home or design your own chair. You can even resell the boxed design kit along side whichever materials you want and probably get away with it.
If they're buying a copy of OS X per machine they're not really infringing on the copyright.
I don't see how this would be more infringement than tech support is -- if I can bring my computer to tech support to have things I don't like removed, or new software installed, then logically there should be nothing wrong with buying a computer set up in such a way in the first place.
You cannot sell furniture fashioned from someone else's design without their permission, end of story.
Which is the reason for the vase example: You buy a product as-is (vase/OS X), add your own changes to it (painting/EFI), then resell. Vase/OS X is paid for and not illegally duplicated, the changes are your own or designs/programs somebody else allowed you to use.
As an end user, and potential programmer for the platform this is precisely the sort of review I wanted. It doesn't work for the non-technical user maybe, but there will be plenty reviews for those.
Personally as an user I want lack of restrictions and don't give a damn about support -- I've never ever called it for anything I own.
It's one thing to sell a product "as is". Retail stores does this all the time. It's another thing to take a product, modify it and then re-sell it without the permission of the OEM
I don't see why permission would be needed.
Do you need permission from the provider of wood to make chairs with it that you will sell? If I buy a vase and paint it, do I need to ask the maker for permission to resell it?
For SLC it's easy, as there are two possible states for the cell: 0 and 1. For MLC you have 4 states: 00, 01, 10 and 11. Which means that there may be 4 levels of charge inside the gate and you have to measure it precisely to tell which value it has.
As things smaller, less electrons fit inside the gate, and there's less margin for error. Since MLC needs greater measurement precision it'll bump into limitations first.
But if it's a USB connector on the end, it will have to abide by that standard, since the spec says "maximum 5V, 500mA" and this universal connector can then be hooked up to your other device, that is not expecting a non standard voltage across those pins and dies when you plug it in.
The reason for that requirement is to specify that an USB device can demand at most 500mA of current from the port. So any normal USB device must work with that much, unless external power is provided.
It also makes life much easier for laptops. 2.5W * 4 ports = 10W, which is quite a bit, considering some laptops use just 20W by themselves.
There's nothing wrong with providing more than necessary though. If something happens to be willing to give you 5W, there's nothing wrong with using it. It's very common already. There are universal chargers that will provide 10W from an USB socket.
BTW, nobody said anything about non-standard voltages. Providing more current never hurts anything. (Yes, I know some things like LEDs do care, but you never plug those directly into a power supply without current limiting circuitry in the middle)
The whole point about it being standard is that you can absolutely rely on the specification when you make a product that fits with it - wether that be the width of a rack mount unit, the voltage across 2 pins in a connector, or the diameter of the tyres for your car.
But it does fit the spec exactly. The connector is the right shape, the wiring is what it should be, the voltage is 5V, and it will provide 500mA.
The rack has a specified width, height, screws, etc. But I bet the standard doesn't forbid making the rack out of titanium to make it bear more weight than a rack made of steel would. If the standard says "Rack must bear 20KG in each 1U slot", it doesn't mean you can't make a rack that can bear 40KG.
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No, I saw it just fine. My reply was:
But, I just came up with a new argument. You said:
So what if that doesn't actually work?
Suppose you have a budget of $100 a month to buy music, which you spend on albums that cost $15 each. That gives you 6 albums.
Additionally, you buy 6 CDs to make copies to listen in the car, to keep the originals at home. The bulk price of a CD here is about $0.3, while the tax per CD is $0.25.
Which means, you spend about $1.8 on the CDs, and $1.5 on the tax.
Over a year, you'll spend: $21.6 on CDs, and $18 on the tax.
Notice how in a year, the tax adds up to enough to buy an album.
Now the question, which do you think is better? To spread the $18 between a lot of artists depending on popularity, or to buy another album from an artist you like?
I think that even if an artist earns just $1 from an album, they've got to be pretty damn popular for their share of the $18 to be a 5%. So they're probably not a starving artist in the first place. If you buy anything that's not from the top 10 charts, the artist you like would probably benefit more from another album, and would definitely benefit more if you went to a concert instead, which you could probably afford if you didn't buy the CDs at all, and instead just used a mp3 player.
No. The levy is a perversion of the rightful order of things.
It doesn't support "starving artists", it supports whoever gets played on radio, and those generally don't need that much support as they're fairly popular already. The starving artists that barely get played if ever on radio don't benefit from it.
Supporting based on "need" (who determines it? how?) isn't much better. I don't want to pay people who aren't popular because they don't make good music.
Also, the amount of money that results from the money doesn't have that much to do with music. In some countries, hard disks are taxed. If some development results in the sales of hard disks going up significantly, every artist will get richer, even if the disks were bought by datacenters to store sales databases. That's wrong. Conversely, if the datacenters decide they have enough storage and stop buying more, artists will suffer, which is also wrong.
There's a very simple way of rewarding music creation: The artist makes a song and sells it, and I buy it. That way only the right person gets rewarded for the right act. They make better music, they get richer. They make crap, they don't get money. That's how it should be.
And I'll continue to oppose it, buy less than I used to before it existed, and find ways of avoid paying for it (legally).
Funny, that's precisely the reason I'm against the levy.
I agree with one and one only of them: the fan buys music from the artist.
I disagree with any taxes or any systems where any artist except the one's music I'm playing gets paid. It's simple - if anybody but you would get paid in exchange for me having your music, I won't pay anybody at all.
No freaking way.
If they do that here, I'm not buying another player, and will listen to music from my laptop until I can figure a way of getting an untaxed player (such as shipping it from another country, or buying one while on holidays there)
No, it isn't fair. I don't torrent music and refuse to pay for any such system. If such a system is mandatory whether I want it or not, I'll refuse to use it and complain until I get my share of the money back.
Radio stats don't necessarily match the popularity in other mediums though. Here radio stations keep playing various 80s stuff everybody heard 500 times before. So long radio stations keep playing ancient hits those people will keep getting paid, even if nobody cares anymore.
We're talking about different things.
You're saying that the part SOCAN has to pay you according to how much you get played on radio doesn't go to somebody else if you're not signed up. Right.
But what I'm saying is two things.
First, if I pay $1 of tax on some CDs, and put some of your music there, and you don't get any significant airtime, that money doesn't go to you -- most of it will go to Celine Dion and other popular artists, even if it's your music what I'm storing. I consider that fundamentally unfair -- why should any of my tax go to people I don't care about? As a result I choose not to buy media, which means I don't pay tax, which means neither you nor she get paid.
Second, if I pay $1 of tax on some CDs in Spain, and put some music there, the money gets spread between local artists, and Celine Dion never sees a cent of it even if it's her music there. Spanish artists for some reason do get paid, while I absolutely don't care about their music and don't want to support it. Again, same thing, I consider this to be unfair and choose to act in such a way that nobody gets paid.
No, it doesn't. Wikipedia says this:
Which means that if I copy your music, and you don't get played on radio, you don't get a cent from it. Celine Dion does though. Which IMO is completely bizarre and a perversion of how things should be. If somebody's going to get paid I'd rather it be the right person.
In other countries with the same system the money goes to local artists. So in Germany, a german artist would be getting paid for your music.
You must be kidding. Who carries burned music CDs around anymore? I buy CDs pretty much exclusively to burn Linux distros, my brother to distribute his own (graphics) work. Nobody uses CDs to pass music around anymore. They use portable hard drives, laptops, and so on, and carry their music on portable MP3 players. Most of those are taxed too, but the proportion is much lower than for a CD, and they're all rewritable so the payment is a one time one regardless of how much music goes through it.
I object on principle to this system and avoid buying CDs and CD-Rs because of it.
It's not a blanket license then, is it?
You're not required to accept the GPL though. You can use the software anyway and mess with it all you want.
You just can't distribute, not because the GPL forbids it, but because copyright law does.
Ack, just realized I replied to the wrong post.
Anyway, why do you feel it would be damaging? In my view, if all they want was adopted things would be quite a lot better. Some things will suffer damage of course, but most of those are ones I want to be damaged anyway.
It won't win because it addresses a very limited set of concerns. What's their position on Iraq for instance? They may not even have one.
They're not trying to win, but to gain enough influence to push their point of view.
Imagine for instance that the polls show they may get 10% of the vote. Well, in the tight republican vs democrat race, 10% is quite a lot, so it may make sense for one of those to adopt the same policies. Then the other one will as well.
So vote for the Pirate Party for instance, which opposes all this nonsense.
It probably won't win, but it will at least show people's concerns, which may get results.
Why odd?
Zombies are moving corpses that aren't interested in anything besides your brains. You can't talk to them, convince of the errors of their ways, or let them be. You can't make them normal again. They're the perfect target to mindlessly slaughter with no regrets.
Robots, aliens and even monsters are very often humanized. They often have human level intelligence, and some sort of motivation. It takes a lot more effort to come up with a reason to kill something sentient. If you don't do it right people are going to root for the "wrong" side.
Actually, it will have a LOT more entropy.
Going by brute force, there are 98569 lines in my /usr/share/dict/words. Double that to account for that some words are capitalized.
There are only 26 characters, double to account for uppercase.
197138 ^ 11 is a much bigger number than 52 ^ 11. Of course it's also longer to type. But if brute force resistance is what you want it makes no sense to weaken it.
No, Linux is benefitting from Open Source drivers.
The internal kernel API changes whenever needed, they just fix every driver as well, since they can. And Microsoft can't, so each new API obsoletes everything before it, unless the manufacturer does the work, and they rarely have any incentive.
Yes they are. Even the most inefficient plants are still vastly more efficient than a car's engine, with transmission losses accounted for.
Batteries are very recyclable, and are designed to last the life of the car.
Does it make sense to put much weight on this though?
Nowadays, somebody from Australia can travel to the other side of the planet and have children with somebody born there. Formerly some areas were very separate and would tend to have some consistency in the genetics, but these days with the easy availability of travel from anywhere to anywhere on the planet, genes are going to get mixed quite a lot.
IMO it doesn't make sense to classify people by race. If something like lactose intolerance matters for some purpose, then we should simply test the person for it, instead of making an assumption.
Why, it's not possible to modify the machine itself (BIOS, etc) so that OS X runs on it?
I don't really buy that argument either. Reverse engineering for compatibility reasons is permitted in most countries, and replacing a library with one that performs some workaround then calls the original wouldn't involve touching any Apple code.
The way you wrote it makes it sound like the N900 will provide an API that's already scheduled for deprecation. But what the article actually says is that the N900 will use Maemo 5, which won't be backwards with the Maemo 4 used in earlier products.
I think the "new" word is the confusing part, if you said "the current MAEMO APIs will become deprecated" then it'd have made more sense.
Which exact Apple code is being modified and redistributed?
My impression was that Psystar was selling hardware + OS X (of which they bought a copy for you) + various things like drivers.
That's a trademark issue though, and is trivial to solve: Just sell it under its own brand, like "Psystar Open Computer" or whatever they were calling it.
But I'm not "most users" and will choose precisely on criteria like this. I assume I'm the intended audience. Not everything has to be written for the layman.
But this is mostly unimportant. It may not look perfect, but it should be fairly simple to fix the UI, especially when compared with writing from scratch or rewriting significant amounts of the codebase.
The xeyes thing IMO simply illustrates that you can run any random thing on it without fuss -- which has huge value in my view.
As somebody who wants an advanced phone that can be used as a computer and not as a restricted platform I don't really find it much of an advantage. What I want is pretty much a tiny Linux box that fits in my pocket and makes calls. And it looks like that's what it'll be.
Ok, this is interesting, didn't know. Still, that I'm one of the few people with good access to the device lowers its value for me. I may be able to mess all I want with it, but if other people have to jump through hoops to use anything I come up with then that's annoying.
Please elaborate on this?
If they're buying a copy of OS X per machine they're not really infringing on the copyright.
I don't see how this would be more infringement than tech support is -- if I can bring my computer to tech support to have things I don't like removed, or new software installed, then logically there should be nothing wrong with buying a computer set up in such a way in the first place.
Which is the reason for the vase example: You buy a product as-is (vase/OS X), add your own changes to it (painting/EFI), then resell. Vase/OS X is paid for and not illegally duplicated, the changes are your own or designs/programs somebody else allowed you to use.
I still fail to see anything wrong with it.
There's more than one kind of end user.
As an end user, and potential programmer for the platform this is precisely the sort of review I wanted. It doesn't work for the non-technical user maybe, but there will be plenty reviews for those.
Personally as an user I want lack of restrictions and don't give a damn about support -- I've never ever called it for anything I own.
I don't see why permission would be needed.
Do you need permission from the provider of wood to make chairs with it that you will sell? If I buy a vase and paint it, do I need to ask the maker for permission to resell it?
Flash traps electrons inside the floating gate.
For SLC it's easy, as there are two possible states for the cell: 0 and 1.
For MLC you have 4 states: 00, 01, 10 and 11. Which means that there may be 4 levels of charge inside the gate and you have to measure it precisely to tell which value it has.
As things smaller, less electrons fit inside the gate, and there's less margin for error. Since MLC needs greater measurement precision it'll bump into limitations first.
The reason for that requirement is to specify that an USB device can demand at most 500mA of current from the port. So any normal USB device must work with that much, unless external power is provided.
It also makes life much easier for laptops. 2.5W * 4 ports = 10W, which is quite a bit, considering some laptops use just 20W by themselves.
There's nothing wrong with providing more than necessary though. If something happens to be willing to give you 5W, there's nothing wrong with using it. It's very common already. There are universal chargers that will provide 10W from an USB socket.
BTW, nobody said anything about non-standard voltages. Providing more current never hurts anything. (Yes, I know some things like LEDs do care, but you never plug those directly into a power supply without current limiting circuitry in the middle)
But it does fit the spec exactly. The connector is the right shape, the wiring is what it should be, the voltage is 5V, and it will provide 500mA.
The rack has a specified width, height, screws, etc. But I bet the standard doesn't forbid making the rack out of titanium to make it bear more weight than a rack made of steel would. If the standard says "Rack must bear 20KG in each 1U slot", it doesn't mean you can't make a rack that can bear 40KG.
That's just what the current USB standard says a port must provide.
But it doesn't stop a wall charger from providing as much as the cable can bear, which has got to be quite a bit more.