PinkFloyd wants to only sell complete albums. I guess that's their artistic license... but aren't they being evil and putting strict terms on how you acquire their music?
Yes, they are.
Well, they're being within well their legal rights, but I still think what they're asking is silly as is the justification.
I'd take that one step further, I wish mp3 players were designed with a easy "Continue on to next track" feature for random play.
Let's take it two steps further and force any mp3 taken from a concept album to never be played on its own without the entire rest of the album! Like DVD unskippable tracks.
And again: exhibit to the contrary, commercial radio.
If we had never heard hear 'Another Brick In The Wall Part II' standing on its own played ad nauseum, Pink Floyd would have an argument. But, well. They didn't stick up for their 'artistic integrity' then did they?
We've already heard single tracks cut out of context from Floyd albums. Shock horror!The world didn't end!
Albums like Dark Side of the Moon and Wish You Were Here are made as single things. It was the glory days of the concept album. The best track is like the best square inch of a good painting, and they don't want to be judged on that.
Except that that argument is total nonsense, since commercial radio has been playing single tracks off albums, most certainly including Pink Floyd ( we don't need no education... ) forever.
So it's perfectly fine for radio to excerpt single tracks and broadcast it into everyone's drive time and lunch hours, but if iTunes lets me choose which tracks I want to download for my own collection, suddenly society will fall into rubble?
Sorry, I love concept albums, but that's both pretentious and absurd.
The last reason why most companies use IE is support. You may like that Firefox auto updates, but for locked down boxes this isn't good. Why oh why won't firefox install an update service that could run as a power user. Another thing that could get users off.
++ this. In my workplace, the issue of Firefox has come up multiple times and each time the answer is 'WHEN there is a way of centralling updating it each time a patch comes out and not before'.
I think the answer is going to be 'write a batch/AutoIt3 file to manually script a full install for every patch release', which is not terribly ideal. Compared to WSUS which Just Works and the users never notice.
Firefox guys, PLEASE provide a central update patching service that integrates with Active Directory. Until then, sorry, your browser is neat and I use it personally, but it's not even on the enterprise radar.
Do you still use 10 year old PC's? Do you use 10 year old cars?
PC? Not quite, but getting there - 8 years, I think. When were 1 Ghz Athlons and 20 GB IDE HDs in vogue? Cos that's what I'm still using as my primary Ubuntu box, and it works just fine thanks.
Car? Definitely yes.1988 Mazda, runs as sweet as the day it was assembled.
Was not buck rogers, but the terminator H-K units. Someone is gonna realize, carrying a 200 pound human makes no sense...but strapping on a 100 pounds of bulletproofing and some.30 cal machine guns and thermal imaging units and a remote control system and youre there.
And then we give it Internet access, it discovers 4chan and... you know, maybe Skynet was the good guy.
while once you agree with the document that you are in breach of contract for showing it to others, you are not in fact in breach of contract BEFORE you agree to the document, yet you can still see it before you agree to it.
Wait, so you're saying it's perfectly okay for anyone to see this document, yet the document just to be annoying requires that only anyone who signs it can't talk about it?
more of our lives are spent tied to corporations and "private" spaces where the kind of "if you don't like it, don't do it" thinking stops being rational unless your name is Ted Kaczynski.
The irony is, Ted Kaczynski would probably agree with you about the irrationality of living a corporate-controlled life and calling it 'freedom'.
Was he actually crazy, or just seeing things others couldn't, and too frustrated to handle his rage well?
Here's a bit more detail on what I think is an important but overlooked element of this vision:
In order for people to be not only content creators but content editors, rebroadcasting/remixing other people's work (and this is hugely important - we can't have a unified wiki/blog/Xanadu/datasphere without it, the ability to publish a view of the world is essential), what we need is a unified global publishing and computing fabric.
By 'computing' I mean we need the ability to publish arbitrary computable functions over data streams, not just raw data (as current publishing systems such as blogs, wikis, web pages, Twitter, CSS, RDF etc let us do). These should be pure functions without side effects, since no one user publishing anything should be able to modify anyone else's state. Sorry, but JavaScript, Java, Python, Perl, Ruby,.NET all seem unsuitable for such a massively distributed language, because they haev side effects.
The data we publish should also be not limited in any way: not just text, not 140 chararacter limits, but numbers, media, weather reports, binary blocks. So blogs, wikis, Twitter all fail here. Something over top of RDF might work, with a lot of tweaks. Google Wave is almost promising, but Robots don't seem at all the kind of publishable pure functions I'm envisaging; they are very side-effectful, modifying streams in realtime.
I'd love to know what current or envisaged publishing frameworks let us do this.
Who in their right mind is going to set up a network where they themselves are not the central authorities of what goes onto it?
Nobody, but fortunately that's exactly not the system being proposed. This system would allow everyone to themselves be the central authorities of what goes into their network.
Those people who get bored will create thousands upon thousands of useless articles to use up space on the server - and since no authority is there to restrict that, it'll work.
Sure. You've just described 'the web' (anyone can post anything even useless trivia!), so this system won't be much different. But you seem to be under a misapprehension: there won't be any one 'server' - rather there'll be a single unified data-storage/publishing fabric where you pay for raw information storage/transmission (upload/download more bits, pay more) but not for policy control.
What is needed to make this work is the ability for all users to rebroadcast other people's content, thereby becoming their own editors. That means it really won't play well with existing copyright and probably not even with micropayments (if I publish my own iTunes library of playlists I don't want to have to pay millions of dollars in licencing fees), so free content would work best with this model. Free content would mean all data could be cached close to where it was wanted, instead of currently where iTunes or playing YouTube means streaming from a central server and hitting them with bandwidth costs.
Sounds more like everything would become politically charged - actually. Not that I'd ever cite wikipedia for a paper, but suppose I did, and my teacher can't find the article because we differ in political opinion, and thus we don't trust the same sources.
Yes, there'd be political differences on what constitutes a 'trustworthy' source, exactly as there is now.
What would happen in your example would be, in order for you to study at your school, first you would have to agree to use the same Wikipedia that your teacher requires everyone in the class use, in exactly the same way that schools now require students to use approved textbooks. And so on right up to the science journals.
This is just what happens already, it's just a matter of standardising the technology platform and opening access to content so everyone can be a creator, editor and rebroadcaster (not of others' feeds, but of their own). The concept of 'trusted repositories' or 'trusted editors' would still exist, and political/philosophical communities would now define themselves largely by what authorities they choose to use or create as their trusted repositories or ontologies. Information articles would have to have a formal pedigree showing their source, just like papers have citation lists and Wikipedia articles have both citations and update histories.
Yes, the technology and information platforms we choose do have strong political effects, so we should be informed about these effects, but we needn't be afraid of embracing open information once we're aware of how to use it.
I've said this a thousand times before: Make Wikipedia a P2P project without a single control, and build a cascading network of trust relationships on top of it (think CSS rules, but on articles instead of elements, and one CSS file per user, perhaps including those of others), and you solve all problems with then not-existing central authorities, and so also with censorship.
I agree wholeheartedly. If I understand correctly, this is very like what David Gelernter is saying with his datasphere/lifestreams concept: a fully distributed system with no centre where any node can absorb and retransmit its own view of the data universe. Twitter and 'retweets' is a sort of lame, struggling, misbegotten attempt to shamble towards this idea.
What would happen, I think, is that such a distributed Wikipedia would converge on a few 'trusted super-editors' who produced their own authorised versions - like Linux kernel forks or distributions - since the pressure to join a 'good enough' peer group would force forking to only happen where necessary. And yes, there'd probably emerge separate political factions: a Mainstream Wikipedia, a Citizendium, a Conservapedia, an Encyclopedia Dramatica, a UFOpedia, a Treknopedia, each of which has their own idea of what subjects are/are not 'noteworthy' or which sources are well-attested... but that's fine, we have that already, what we'd win in a truly distributed system is not the ability the ability to fork (which the GPL already gives us) but the ability to easily remerge which is currently a real pain.
There's no reason, for instance, why Citizendium, TVTropes, Encyclopedia Dramatica, C2, MeatballWiki, etc all couldn't share the same technical base and content and link to and import/export from each other, and just provide different editorial policies or views. And I think we'd all win hugely if we could bring that about.
My alternative vision is very close to that of David Gelernter or Ted Nelson: information should be central, there should be a 'cloud-like' thing (a datasphere or dataspace or whatever we call it) which is not the page-based Web, or the node-based Net, but a sort of floating repository of information, with the appropriate security/privacy controls. Unlike the Web, it wouldn't be a client-server infrastructure, or at least not one where those who own the servers get to set content policy, but anyone could stake out space on an equal basis.
And all physical devices should just be very thin portals over this shared self-published dataspace that set as little policy as possible: the only device policy should be the absolute minimum required by the form-factor, UI, CPU. The actual 'stuff', the content, the apps should be device-independent as much as possible, and the division between 'user' and 'developer' should be erased: anyone who shares or remixes content should automatically be a publisher/developer, able to aggregate and republish their own information feeds (like Gelernter's Lifestreams or Nelson's 'applitudes').
Apple (and even Linux - Ubuntu) are going full speed in the other direction, to me the wrong direction: back to the days of single-purpose, single-use apps strongly tied to single-purpose devices, and a strict separation between 'user' and 'developer'. I believe this is very damaging and it frustrates me deeply to see otherwise bright people buying back into this neo-feudalism.
We need a Cloud, just not the Cloud that's being pitched to us, because it's built on bad ideas which will hurt us.
Please fight this tendency to re-centralise and re-divide users from programmers. Please.
The problem seems to be that Apple makes a strong distinction between computers and consumer electronics devices, while to the rest of us they are just computers and less-powerful computers.
That makes sense. I mean not the distinction - that's never made any sense to me, ever since I was a kid - but that Apple's thinking might be based on this imaginary line between 'box that does many things' and 'box that does one thing'. It probably goes right back to the Macintosh vs the Apple II and the concept of the 'information appliance'.
The problem I have with 'information appliances' (and with 'blobjects') is that the appliance concept is silly. In the home you need a separate widget for every task because of physics. But information is fundamentally not like that: you don't want to have to carry around fifteen separate things in your pocket, an ebook reader, a phone, a calculator, a music player...
The 'desktop metaphor' and the 'appliance metaphor' are fundamentally misunderstandings of the nature of information, and they run the grave risk of putting huge shackles on us. Information is something that naturally transforms into multiple forms and runs like water; locking it to single-purpose devices is a really bad idea in many, many ways.
This is the world of capitalist consumer electronics. The hardware is sold, but the seller will exert whatever control over the end product they can - and the best way to do so is by controlling the software and services attached to the hardware.
And this is why I'm very nervous (a word which here means 'would like to throttle the fascist bastards') about the Cloud. Because the more stuff is moved to the Net, the more control slips away from the user and back to the big ironmongers. It's like 1970s Timesharing all over again.
"From here you will witness the final destruction of Personal Computing and the end of your insignificant Homebrew Computer Club rebellion."
Software as Perpetual Servitude is the new shiny future of Lock-in 2.0
No, you are saying that we should pass a law to tell someone what to carry in their store. You are essentially asking for a law which would force McDonald's to sell tacos.
Or perhaps, to force them to follow strict codes of hygiene while preparing their beef patties, to not use brains and guts, to submit to regular inspection, and even to release nutritional information. Imagine the bureacratic horror!
Sure glad I don't live in that kind of heavy-handed Socialist dystopia.
What about a law that prohibits Apple from barring or limiting access to the device by its owners for any reason? Forbid them from discriminating between 'jailbroken' users and other users, and require their store to operate with the assumption that users have added their own software to the phone, if they choose to sell to customers within the jurisdiction.
What!! My dear sir, think for a moment about the precedent that would set. If we force Apple to serve everyone equally, then what about the property rights of restaurant owners who would be forced to accept... coloured... patrons alongside their normal customers? And bus drivers? And restrooms?
Imagine what could happen to even the Presidency of the United States!
I'm sure you as well as I don't want to go down that route.
Nobody is forcing you to develop anything for any platform.
No. But if you use any platform, you are forced to accept the consequences of all the development policies for that platform even if you don't agree with them. Because a platform is a bundle deal: you either use it or not, and your money pays the company which makes those policies, and despite paying money you don't get a vote on what those policies are other than completely walking away from it if you don't like them.
So if you don't agree with these policies, as a user you morally need to walk away from the whole platform if your discomfort level with those policies reaches a point where you think they outweigh the benefit of supporting that platform.
It's a pity because if Apple were more transparent and less abusive, the ethical user wouldn't be faced with this decision at all.
I'm not sure what the uproar is about...if you agree to develop apps for Apple's devices, this is the agreement you sign. If you don't like it, don't make apps for Apple products.
Am I missing something? This has nothing at all to do with "My Rights Online"...IMNSHO.
What if you don't want to develop apps for Apple's devices, but have an Apple device and would like the apps you run to be developed in a free and open manner and not skulk behind secret deals? In the same sort of way that you're not a chicken, but you'd sort of like the eggs you eat for breakfast to be free range organic with their ingredients clearly displayed?
Well, in that case I guess the only free choice you have left is to not use any Apple device, ever again, because the one thing you know for sure is that as a user you're not allowed to find out what conditions are attached to the apps, and you can infer from that certain things about exactly what Apple thinks of you as a user, and wonder what other things that, as a mere user, you might not be 'cleared to know'.
Slashdot Mirror
Only if you want the astronauts to be eight feet tall and blue.
What comes to mind when I say "long term survival of the human race"?
Keeping Earth habitable, as opposed to popping a few tin cans that need constant resupply into orbit and calling it 'colonisation'.
Space has a lot of vacuum, a few rocks, almost no oxygen or water, and zero biomass. Exactly how is that supposed to contribute to human survival?
Ehmm, it's a browser. It has to *just work*.
Where 'work' means 'funnel revenue to its parent corporation'...
PinkFloyd wants to only sell complete albums. I guess that's their artistic license... but aren't they being evil and putting strict terms on how you acquire their music?
Yes, they are.
Well, they're being within well their legal rights, but I still think what they're asking is silly as is the justification.
I'd take that one step further, I wish mp3 players were designed with a easy "Continue on to next track" feature for random play.
Let's take it two steps further and force any mp3 taken from a concept album to never be played on its own without the entire rest of the album! Like DVD unskippable tracks.
That'd be great for artistic integrity, right?
And again: exhibit to the contrary, commercial radio.
If we had never heard hear 'Another Brick In The Wall Part II' standing on its own played ad nauseum, Pink Floyd would have an argument. But, well. They didn't stick up for their 'artistic integrity' then did they?
We've already heard single tracks cut out of context from Floyd albums. Shock horror!The world didn't end!
Albums like Dark Side of the Moon and Wish You Were Here are made as single things. It was the glory days of the concept album. The best track is like the best square inch of a good painting, and they don't want to be judged on that.
Except that that argument is total nonsense, since commercial radio has been playing single tracks off albums, most certainly including Pink Floyd ( we don't need no education... ) forever.
So it's perfectly fine for radio to excerpt single tracks and broadcast it into everyone's drive time and lunch hours, but if iTunes lets me choose which tracks I want to download for my own collection, suddenly society will fall into rubble?
Sorry, I love concept albums, but that's both pretentious and absurd.
The last reason why most companies use IE is support. You may like that Firefox auto updates, but for locked down boxes this isn't good. Why oh why won't firefox install an update service that could run as a power user. Another thing that could get users off.
++ this. In my workplace, the issue of Firefox has come up multiple times and each time the answer is 'WHEN there is a way of centralling updating it each time a patch comes out and not before'.
I think the answer is going to be 'write a batch/AutoIt3 file to manually script a full install for every patch release', which is not terribly ideal. Compared to WSUS which Just Works and the users never notice.
Firefox guys, PLEASE provide a central update patching service that integrates with Active Directory. Until then, sorry, your browser is neat and I use it personally, but it's not even on the enterprise radar.
Do you still use 10 year old PC's? Do you use 10 year old cars?
PC? Not quite, but getting there - 8 years, I think. When were 1 Ghz Athlons and 20 GB IDE HDs in vogue? Cos that's what I'm still using as my primary Ubuntu box, and it works just fine thanks.
Car? Definitely yes.1988 Mazda, runs as sweet as the day it was assembled.
Microwave? Mid 1980s.
Washing machine? 1970s model, still works fine.
Noticing a pattern here?
Was not buck rogers, but the terminator H-K units. Someone is gonna realize, carrying a 200 pound human makes no sense...but strapping on a 100 pounds of bulletproofing and some .30 cal machine guns and thermal imaging units and a remote control system and youre there.
And then we give it Internet access, it discovers 4chan and... you know, maybe Skynet was the good guy.
... elves, dwarves AND trolls.
while once you agree with the document that you are in breach of contract for showing it to others, you are not in fact in breach of contract BEFORE you agree to the document, yet you can still see it before you agree to it.
Wait, so you're saying it's perfectly okay for anyone to see this document, yet the document just to be annoying requires that only anyone who signs it can't talk about it?
That's so Kafkaesque it's beautiful.
more of our lives are spent tied to corporations and "private" spaces where the kind of "if you don't like it, don't do it" thinking stops being rational unless your name is Ted Kaczynski.
The irony is, Ted Kaczynski would probably agree with you about the irrationality of living a corporate-controlled life and calling it 'freedom'.
Was he actually crazy, or just seeing things others couldn't, and too frustrated to handle his rage well?
Here's a bit more detail on what I think is an important but overlooked element of this vision:
In order for people to be not only content creators but content editors, rebroadcasting/remixing other people's work (and this is hugely important - we can't have a unified wiki/blog/Xanadu/datasphere without it, the ability to publish a view of the world is essential), what we need is a unified global publishing and computing fabric.
By 'computing' I mean we need the ability to publish arbitrary computable functions over data streams, not just raw data (as current publishing systems such as blogs, wikis, web pages, Twitter, CSS, RDF etc let us do). These should be pure functions without side effects, since no one user publishing anything should be able to modify anyone else's state. Sorry, but JavaScript, Java, Python, Perl, Ruby, .NET all seem unsuitable for such a massively distributed language, because they haev side effects.
The data we publish should also be not limited in any way: not just text, not 140 chararacter limits, but numbers, media, weather reports, binary blocks. So blogs, wikis, Twitter all fail here. Something over top of RDF might work, with a lot of tweaks. Google Wave is almost promising, but Robots don't seem at all the kind of publishable pure functions I'm envisaging; they are very side-effectful, modifying streams in realtime.
I'd love to know what current or envisaged publishing frameworks let us do this.
Who in their right mind is going to set up a network where they themselves are not the central authorities of what goes onto it?
Nobody, but fortunately that's exactly not the system being proposed. This system would allow everyone to themselves be the central authorities of what goes into their network.
Those people who get bored will create thousands upon thousands of useless articles to use up space on the server - and since no authority is there to restrict that, it'll work.
Sure. You've just described 'the web' (anyone can post anything even useless trivia!), so this system won't be much different. But you seem to be under a misapprehension: there won't be any one 'server' - rather there'll be a single unified data-storage/publishing fabric where you pay for raw information storage/transmission (upload/download more bits, pay more) but not for policy control.
What is needed to make this work is the ability for all users to rebroadcast other people's content, thereby becoming their own editors. That means it really won't play well with existing copyright and probably not even with micropayments (if I publish my own iTunes library of playlists I don't want to have to pay millions of dollars in licencing fees), so free content would work best with this model. Free content would mean all data could be cached close to where it was wanted, instead of currently where iTunes or playing YouTube means streaming from a central server and hitting them with bandwidth costs.
Sounds more like everything would become politically charged - actually. Not that I'd ever cite wikipedia for a paper, but suppose I did, and my teacher can't find the article because we differ in political opinion, and thus we don't trust the same sources.
Yes, there'd be political differences on what constitutes a 'trustworthy' source, exactly as there is now.
What would happen in your example would be, in order for you to study at your school, first you would have to agree to use the same Wikipedia that your teacher requires everyone in the class use, in exactly the same way that schools now require students to use approved textbooks. And so on right up to the science journals.
This is just what happens already, it's just a matter of standardising the technology platform and opening access to content so everyone can be a creator, editor and rebroadcaster (not of others' feeds, but of their own). The concept of 'trusted repositories' or 'trusted editors' would still exist, and political/philosophical communities would now define themselves largely by what authorities they choose to use or create as their trusted repositories or ontologies. Information articles would have to have a formal pedigree showing their source, just like papers have citation lists and Wikipedia articles have both citations and update histories.
Yes, the technology and information platforms we choose do have strong political effects, so we should be informed about these effects, but we needn't be afraid of embracing open information once we're aware of how to use it.
I've said this a thousand times before: Make Wikipedia a P2P project without a single control, and build a cascading network of trust relationships on top of it (think CSS rules, but on articles instead of elements, and one CSS file per user, perhaps including those of others), and you solve all problems with then not-existing central authorities, and so also with censorship.
I agree wholeheartedly. If I understand correctly, this is very like what David Gelernter is saying with his datasphere/lifestreams concept: a fully distributed system with no centre where any node can absorb and retransmit its own view of the data universe. Twitter and 'retweets' is a sort of lame, struggling, misbegotten attempt to shamble towards this idea.
What would happen, I think, is that such a distributed Wikipedia would converge on a few 'trusted super-editors' who produced their own authorised versions - like Linux kernel forks or distributions - since the pressure to join a 'good enough' peer group would force forking to only happen where necessary. And yes, there'd probably emerge separate political factions: a Mainstream Wikipedia, a Citizendium, a Conservapedia, an Encyclopedia Dramatica, a UFOpedia, a Treknopedia, each of which has their own idea of what subjects are/are not 'noteworthy' or which sources are well-attested... but that's fine, we have that already, what we'd win in a truly distributed system is not the ability the ability to fork (which the GPL already gives us) but the ability to easily remerge which is currently a real pain.
There's no reason, for instance, why Citizendium, TVTropes, Encyclopedia Dramatica, C2, MeatballWiki, etc all couldn't share the same technical base and content and link to and import/export from each other, and just provide different editorial policies or views. And I think we'd all win hugely if we could bring that about.
My alternative vision is very close to that of David Gelernter or Ted Nelson: information should be central, there should be a 'cloud-like' thing (a datasphere or dataspace or whatever we call it) which is not the page-based Web, or the node-based Net, but a sort of floating repository of information, with the appropriate security/privacy controls. Unlike the Web, it wouldn't be a client-server infrastructure, or at least not one where those who own the servers get to set content policy, but anyone could stake out space on an equal basis.
And all physical devices should just be very thin portals over this shared self-published dataspace that set as little policy as possible: the only device policy should be the absolute minimum required by the form-factor, UI, CPU. The actual 'stuff', the content, the apps should be device-independent as much as possible, and the division between 'user' and 'developer' should be erased: anyone who shares or remixes content should automatically be a publisher/developer, able to aggregate and republish their own information feeds (like Gelernter's Lifestreams or Nelson's 'applitudes').
Apple (and even Linux - Ubuntu) are going full speed in the other direction, to me the wrong direction: back to the days of single-purpose, single-use apps strongly tied to single-purpose devices, and a strict separation between 'user' and 'developer'. I believe this is very damaging and it frustrates me deeply to see otherwise bright people buying back into this neo-feudalism.
We need a Cloud, just not the Cloud that's being pitched to us, because it's built on bad ideas which will hurt us.
Please fight this tendency to re-centralise and re-divide users from programmers. Please.
The problem seems to be that Apple makes a strong distinction between computers and consumer electronics devices, while to the rest of us they are just computers and less-powerful computers.
That makes sense. I mean not the distinction - that's never made any sense to me, ever since I was a kid - but that Apple's thinking might be based on this imaginary line between 'box that does many things' and 'box that does one thing'. It probably goes right back to the Macintosh vs the Apple II and the concept of the 'information appliance'.
The problem I have with 'information appliances' (and with 'blobjects') is that the appliance concept is silly. In the home you need a separate widget for every task because of physics. But information is fundamentally not like that: you don't want to have to carry around fifteen separate things in your pocket, an ebook reader, a phone, a calculator, a music player...
The 'desktop metaphor' and the 'appliance metaphor' are fundamentally misunderstandings of the nature of information, and they run the grave risk of putting huge shackles on us. Information is something that naturally transforms into multiple forms and runs like water; locking it to single-purpose devices is a really bad idea in many, many ways.
You're failing to realize the paradox between your advocacy of their position and them modifying it.
I have modified the deal.
Pray I do not modify it further, put it in a box with curvy edges and perhaps a kitten on top, and sell a million.
This is the world of capitalist consumer electronics. The hardware is sold, but the seller will exert whatever control over the end product they can - and the best way to do so is by controlling the software and services attached to the hardware.
And this is why I'm very nervous (a word which here means 'would like to throttle the fascist bastards') about the Cloud. Because the more stuff is moved to the Net, the more control slips away from the user and back to the big ironmongers. It's like 1970s Timesharing all over again.
"From here you will witness the final destruction of Personal Computing and the end of your insignificant Homebrew Computer Club rebellion."
Software as Perpetual Servitude is the new shiny future of Lock-in 2.0
The software on the phone is licensed, not owned, by the "buyer."
Yes. That's a bug in the current law, not a feature.
(Well, it's a bug to users; a feature to manufacturers. I wonder who has more political clout?)
No, you are saying that we should pass a law to tell someone what to carry in their store. You are essentially asking for a law which would force McDonald's to sell tacos.
Or perhaps, to force them to follow strict codes of hygiene while preparing their beef patties, to not use brains and guts, to submit to regular inspection, and even to release nutritional information. Imagine the bureacratic horror!
Sure glad I don't live in that kind of heavy-handed Socialist dystopia.
What about a law that prohibits Apple from barring or limiting access to the device by its owners for any reason? Forbid them from discriminating between 'jailbroken' users and other users, and require their store to operate with the assumption that users have added their own software to the phone, if they choose to sell to customers within the jurisdiction.
What!! My dear sir, think for a moment about the precedent that would set. If we force Apple to serve everyone equally, then what about the property rights of restaurant owners who would be forced to accept... coloured... patrons alongside their normal customers? And bus drivers? And restrooms?
Imagine what could happen to even the Presidency of the United States!
I'm sure you as well as I don't want to go down that route.
Nobody is forcing you to develop anything for any platform.
No. But if you use any platform, you are forced to accept the consequences of all the development policies for that platform even if you don't agree with them. Because a platform is a bundle deal: you either use it or not, and your money pays the company which makes those policies, and despite paying money you don't get a vote on what those policies are other than completely walking away from it if you don't like them.
So if you don't agree with these policies, as a user you morally need to walk away from the whole platform if your discomfort level with those policies reaches a point where you think they outweigh the benefit of supporting that platform.
It's a pity because if Apple were more transparent and less abusive, the ethical user wouldn't be faced with this decision at all.
I'm not sure what the uproar is about...if you agree to develop apps for Apple's devices, this is the agreement you sign. If you don't like it, don't make apps for Apple products.
Am I missing something? This has nothing at all to do with "My Rights Online"...IMNSHO.
What if you don't want to develop apps for Apple's devices, but have an Apple device and would like the apps you run to be developed in a free and open manner and not skulk behind secret deals? In the same sort of way that you're not a chicken, but you'd sort of like the eggs you eat for breakfast to be free range organic with their ingredients clearly displayed?
Well, in that case I guess the only free choice you have left is to not use any Apple device, ever again, because the one thing you know for sure is that as a user you're not allowed to find out what conditions are attached to the apps, and you can infer from that certain things about exactly what Apple thinks of you as a user, and wonder what other things that, as a mere user, you might not be 'cleared to know'.