Yes, you have access to it -- but "having the full Office 365 experience" means you're not limited to editing documents in Web-based apps, you can use the desktop Office suite. There are components that integrate the desktop Office apps with the Office 365 services (albeit not very well, in my experience). The catch is that you need Office 2007 or later. So what it's saying is, if you want the full experience, including the ability to use a real word processor, spreadsheet, etc., with Office 365's hosted services, then you will need to have Office 2007+ installed. Office 2003 won't work, just like OpenOffice won't work. If you don't have Office 2007+ installed, you can still use the Office 365 services, but you will not get "the full experience."
Also, there are some price tiers for Office 365 that include a copy of the desktop version of Office 2010 for every seat. You download the suite from the Office 365 servers and each copy is automatically licensed.
I believe that there should be a free version for peronal use, but this is still a great tool.
You're probably just a troll, but why should there be a free version for personal use when there isn't any "personal use" for the product? Pretty much everything you get from Office 365 is for collaborating and communicating with other people (SharePoint Server, Exchange Server, Lync, etc.). If all you want is the Office Web Apps, cloud storage from Microsoft, Webmail, and stuff like that, then there are other ways to get that from Microsoft free for personal use.
We adopted MSFT's big-brand business suite, SharePoint 2010, several months before it launched last May. It took a full 6 months to set up the environment, plus additional time to make it even remotely useful for the enterprise. The level of in-house expertise and infrastructure needed to make a business run on MSFT products (Outlook, SharePoint, etc) is obscene.
I'm not surprised to hear this, or the other comments agreeing with you. I looked at Office 365 when it launched in beta, and my impression was that it had some things to offer businesses, particularly smaller business who don't want the hassles of managing their own Exchange Servers. But when it came to SharePoint, I was kind of taken aback that Microsoft had just... given you a SharePoint Server. "Here ya go!" Not only did the SharePoint UI not resemble the UI of the rest of the Office 365 suite at all -- click the link and it's like you've navigated to a different service entirely -- but there were no starter templates, no walk-throughs, no nothing. Just a SharePoint Server. "Do with it what you want!" I imagined exactly what you say -- just getting it into a state where it would be useful for a small business would take months, and even then, you could never be sure you'd "done it the right way" unless you hired professionals to build it out for you.
Black Markets doesn't need to be a shady dealings. It is just illegal sales of products.
Uh... a little contradictory there? Doing illegal things isn't "shady," to you?
People buy stuff black market all the time, the one of the highest Black Market product is Unpasteurized milk.
Seriously dude? You think there is more money being spent on unpasteurized milk than on fake Gucci bags, stolen guns, or cocaine? Let me guess: You live in rural Wisconsin?
The point here is that a dog produced in an illegal market is not going to have any medical records. It's not going to have any evidence of pedigree. You're not going to know anything about how it was bred or raised, except that both were done in secret (because it's illegal). Breeding and raising dogs in secret, which probably means exclusively indoors, is almost always going to result in unhealthy, poorly socialized dogs.
On the other hand, you can go to an animal shelter and get an animal that you know has been well-treated, vaccinated, and spayed or neutered. And it's free (or will typically cost less than $50 if you're asked to cover the cost of medical procedures). So why would you go out of your way to pay ten times more for an animal on the black market? Just because it's more fun, because it's illegal?
I agree, homophobia is funny. However, this particular joke is a little tired, considering that gerbils are illegal to sell, import, or keep as pets in the state of California, and have been since at least the 90s and probably longer.
If there is demand, and supply then there will be sale of good/services. If it is illegal or over taxed it will be under the black market.
Really? So you want a dog so badly that you'd drive out to some house in a secluded neighborhood and pay a guy whom you've never met before a few hundred dollars for a dog that has no papers, no history, and you have no idea how it was bred or raised... when you could just as easily go to an animal shelter and get the same dog legally, for free?
SF does not want to ban circumcisions. That campaign is being run by an organization based out of San Diego. Unless you really think anybody in San Francisco would try to promote a ballot measure by publishing racist comic books that feature demonic Jews stealing babies because they hate Aryans.
Here's an idea. If you want to do that you could, you know, like, dude, ban factory farming of pets.
As a city legislature, you can only ban puppy mills within the city limits. That doesn't stop a pet store within your city limits from importing animals from out of state puppy mills (and in fact I'm reasonably certain there are no puppy mills within the 49 square miles of San Francisco, except perhaps pit bull breeding for illegal dog fighting). Most puppy mills are located in the Midwest -- Missouri, I'm looking at you. Similarly, a city can't pass laws regulating interstate commerce; in other words, there's nothing it can do to stop a pet store from buying from out of state puppy mills. The only thing the city can do that will prevent stores from buying from puppy mills is to ban pet stores, which is what the law proposes.
In my experience, few pet lovers in San Francisco buy purebred dogs as it is. There is a strong SPCA culture here, where I would say the majority of people adopt dogs and cats from shelters (or get kittens or puppies from friends).
If you really must have a specific breed, however, there's nothing stopping you from driving 20 minutes across the Bay Bridge to buy one. Hopefully, however, the law will make you think twice about whom you buy from, and that you'll be reminded to deal with breeders whose operations you've personally inspected and whose bona fides are sound.
I feel like the initial attraction of the BlackBerry was that it was the only device of its kind. Then other smartphones started appearing, but they would only poll your inboxes every so often, and they didn't seem as well integrated as the BlackBerry. Now that's largely changed. I'm not sure how it works (or how it jibes with RIM's patents), but my Motorola handset features email delivery that's at least "pseudo-push" if not actual push. Stuff like Exchange ActiveSync policies are supported on a lot of handsets now, too (even including the iPhone, I believe). BlackBerry's competitive advantage is narrowing, and at the same time, its handsets don't seem to be keeping up with what's happening in the rest of the industry. Thus, BlackBerry just doesn't look as attractive as it once did -- apparently, since I jumped ship myself, the last time I was pricing new phones.
Just look at PhoneGap's featured apps examples. Almost every single one of them is written for iOS. If you bring them to Android users wont accept them as native.
And then, don't most Android handsets have custom vendor skins? Web apps won't ever blend seamlessly with every Android UI. And the user experience on Android 3.x is fairly distinct from Android 2.x, too. Any development tool that really aims to help your apps be more "cross-platform" will let you target different platforms, not shoehorn the same UI into all of them.
Seriously, why can they not implement proper IMAP support in a device that's designed mainly for email?
What did you find deficient about it? What did you want it to do that it couldn't do?
(I'm really still a POP guy myself, because IMAP has always seemed clunky and prone to data loss, to me. I'd rather download multiple copies of messages to different devices than trust my phone or some random client not to do something catastrophic to my mail folders. If I remember right, actually, what I did was setup a forwarding rule on my mail server to send copies of my incoming mail to my BlackBerry email address. Doing it this way, instead of polling my mail accounts every 9 minutes or whatever, new mail would arrive on my handset within seconds.)
That's because like every other Blackberry user I ever knew, you NEVER LEFT THE EMAIL CLIENT.
It's more than that. On the BlackBerry, the email client is more of a unified inbox. Your text messages arrive in the same inbox, as do voicemail notifications. The whole thing is organized in a way that makes sense to me: chronologically, just like my inbox on Thunderbird. That's one reason why I seem to be one of the few people on Earth who actually likes Motorola's Motoblur skin for Android. It gives me a UI that's pretty much how the BlackBerry does it, but it also throws Facebook messages into the same inbox, plus it automatically updates my contacts with information my Facebook friends have provided about themselves -- so I magically have some folks' phone numbers without having to ask for them and enter them myself. To me, this package is about the most useful thing a communications device can do. It's what attracted me to the BlackBerry platform and it's one of the things that made me choose my particular Android phone over some others.
Not even to talk...
Don't know about that. I used the one phone for everything. I think if you saw people keeping a BlackBerry plus a separate phone for voice calls, it was probably because work gave them the BlackBerry but they already had their own phone with all their phone numbers in it. Also, a lot of people like to text their friends as well as call them, and businesses are sometimes reluctant to pay for unlimited SMS plans, so it makes more sense to do your "phone-y" business on your own phone (where your contacts will be able to text or dial the same number) and just do the email on the business BlackBerry.
I haven't had a BlackBerry for a while now, but if I remember right, I may have kept an SSH client on there, and I think once I downloaded an Infocom player, just for fun. But overall, I just never considered downloading apps to be part of the BlackBerry experience. Maybe that's why I find the "DOODZ, WHERE DA APPS AT??" attitude of a lot of iPhone/Android users a little baffling. To me, BlackBerry's software was well-designed and reliable, and it allowed me to do pretty much everything I expect a communications device to do, so I couldn't really picture what else I'd need to downlaod. But then again, I guess to me, a mobile phone is something that spends most of its time in your pocket. That doesn't seem to be how a lot of phone users see it.
Can you define the difference between a digital lock pick and a physical one ? I can't so I can see no reason why they should be treated differently.
I actually kind of lean this way myself, so...
I think you were close with "own moral Geiger counter" but went wayward with "Maybe it's more honest to talk about right and wrong, and then think about the best way to define laws around that." We already have.
We do have the laws, but they seem to be laws that a lot of people disagree with. They either disagree with them the way a lot of Slashdotters do, using a number of arguments about the validity of intellectual property or the lack thereof. Or they simply disagree with them in the sense that they still use BitTorrent to download CDs and movies; they don't think of themselves as criminals and yet they consistently break the law. A while back the MPAA ran ads saying something to the effect of, "You wouldn't steal a DVD from a store, so why do you think it's OK to download them?" To me it sounds like a very sound argument, and yet a lot of people just shrugged it off. "Why do I? I don't know. Whatever."
I think one reason why is that while we have the laws defined, we've failed to define the shape of the justice to go along with those laws. The MPAA's tactic of prosecuting BitTorrent users and suing them for tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars based on specious-sounding calculations is completely off-base, and on a gut level, I think a lot of Americans think that what the MPAA is doing should itself be illegal. On the other hand, if there was a way to "catch" me downloading a movie and issue me a ticket for a fine of $50 or $100, I think a lot of people would just say, "Damn, I got busted!" And a lot of them wouldn't try it again.
How many of us have been caught shoplifting at some point in our lives? How long did we keep shoplifting after that? That's where the "You wouldn't steal a DVD from a store" argument falls apart -- not only does downloading feel nothing like shoplifting, but the law enforcement surrounding the act of illegal downloading resembles nothing like how law enforcement deals with shoplifting.
None of this changes whether the act of copyright infringement is right or wrong, though. A lot of Slashdotters seem to want to argue that copyright infringement defensible on the basis that the laws are unfair, or because copyright lasts too long, or because DRM makes it OK, or that intellectual property isn't "real." I don't think any of these arguments really stands up to scrutiny. But even if we determine that copyright infringement is just as wrong as shoplifting the same item, the industry seems to want to act as though it's actually many thousands of times worse than shoplifting -- and that doesn't make sense to anyone.
The problem in the scenario you outline is that two instances of copyright infringement provoke different feelings of guilt to you.
My point is that most everybody makes such distinctions. If I asked you whether thieves should go to prison for their first offense, you might say yes. If I then told you that we had captured such a person, and it was your fourteen-year-old niece, you might just as quickly come up with a rationalization why she deserved a second chance.
The distinction made in each of my examples is not the difference between copyright infringement and theft and whether one crime is worse than another. The distinction in each case is as simple as an action that seems to take place in a vacuum and one that seems to have specific effects to a specific person or organization.
That's why using Transdroid seems "wrong" to people. It's the difference between the idea that you're going to commit copyright infringement and some store, somewhere, could potentially lose a sale, versus the idea that you're standing right here in this particular store and this is the store that you've decided not to pay for the thing that you're going to gain through copyright infringement, a crime.
That's why Transdroid seems like it's "crossing a line" to the earlier poster and to myself; it's simply a matter of putting a human face on the crime. It's the same reason why stealing a physical object from Wal-Mart doesn't seem as bad as stealing the same object from a neighborhood shop, even though the law makes no distinction between the two.
So if using Transdroid to get things from BitTorrent feels wrong when you do it to an independent record store, there's a good case to be made that it's wrong all the time, and it's the human tendency to rationalize that's out of whack.
Are you under the impression the Android Market is the only source available for installing apps to your Android device?
For a lot of people it is, because that checkbox is clicked in their preferences, or it's the only one they want to use (for fear of viruses or whatever).
Furthermore, I think it wouldn't be off-base to characterize the kind of people who use this particular app as the kind of people who like to get things the easy way.
Well, if it then vaporized the item in front of it, it might be analogous to theft I guess. Theft is really more about depriving something from someone else than gaining it for yourself; in this case, the outlet still has the physical item.
Nonetheless, I think almost everybody understands on a gut level that this sort of thing is ethically wrong.
A lot of people, if they found an envelope full of money, would keep the money. At the same time, if the envelope had someone's name written on it, I think a great many people would try to think of a way to get that money back to the named person before they just walked off with it.
Similarly, I think a great many people make a distinction between downloading something using BitTorrent from their computer at home and actually walking into a CD store, spending a half hour browsing the new releases, and then using a magic wand to download all of the ones they like without paying the store a dime. For the first one, I think a lot of people might not think they're doing anything wrong at all. But I think most of us recognize that doing the second one just kind of makes you a dick.
When I first heard about this app, I, like a lot of people I'm sure, said, "Wow awesome! I totally want to try this out!" But when I imagined this scenario in my mind, I was imagining walking into someplace like a Best Buy or a Wal-Mart and fucking them over, while at the same time snickering about how high-tech and clever I was. I wasn't imagining walking into Aquarius Records or some other independent record store and using it to save myself some money.
To give another example, if you go to sci-fi conventions or other places where celebrities make appearances, often times they will charge you some money to pose for a photograph. Often it's actually more money than the cost of a typical CD, which on the face of it sounds crazy. And hell, you could easily stand in front of their table with your thumb up and have your friend shoot the picture and walk away. (You'd even own the copyright on that photo!) But most of us understand that this kind of thing makes you a dick. You can walk away thinking, "I can't believe that has-been so-and-so charges so much for a photo," but you don't just screw them over while they're sitting right there -- even though you're not technically "stealing" anything.
It all comes down to what makes your own moral Geiger counter start clicking. I think most of us know when we're straying into the darker areas, in general. So I don't really think it's necessary to draw this hard-line distinction between "theft" and "copyright infringement." Maybe it's more honest to talk about right and wrong, and then think about the best way to define laws around that.
Slashdot Mirror
Do you have access to all functionality?
Yes, you have access to it -- but "having the full Office 365 experience" means you're not limited to editing documents in Web-based apps, you can use the desktop Office suite. There are components that integrate the desktop Office apps with the Office 365 services (albeit not very well, in my experience). The catch is that you need Office 2007 or later. So what it's saying is, if you want the full experience, including the ability to use a real word processor, spreadsheet, etc., with Office 365's hosted services, then you will need to have Office 2007+ installed. Office 2003 won't work, just like OpenOffice won't work. If you don't have Office 2007+ installed, you can still use the Office 365 services, but you will not get "the full experience."
Also, there are some price tiers for Office 365 that include a copy of the desktop version of Office 2010 for every seat. You download the suite from the Office 365 servers and each copy is automatically licensed.
I believe that there should be a free version for peronal use, but this is still a great tool.
You're probably just a troll, but why should there be a free version for personal use when there isn't any "personal use" for the product? Pretty much everything you get from Office 365 is for collaborating and communicating with other people (SharePoint Server, Exchange Server, Lync, etc.). If all you want is the Office Web Apps, cloud storage from Microsoft, Webmail, and stuff like that, then there are other ways to get that from Microsoft free for personal use.
We adopted MSFT's big-brand business suite, SharePoint 2010, several months before it launched last May. It took a full 6 months to set up the environment, plus additional time to make it even remotely useful for the enterprise. The level of in-house expertise and infrastructure needed to make a business run on MSFT products (Outlook, SharePoint, etc) is obscene.
I'm not surprised to hear this, or the other comments agreeing with you. I looked at Office 365 when it launched in beta, and my impression was that it had some things to offer businesses, particularly smaller business who don't want the hassles of managing their own Exchange Servers. But when it came to SharePoint, I was kind of taken aback that Microsoft had just ... given you a SharePoint Server. "Here ya go!" Not only did the SharePoint UI not resemble the UI of the rest of the Office 365 suite at all -- click the link and it's like you've navigated to a different service entirely -- but there were no starter templates, no walk-throughs, no nothing. Just a SharePoint Server. "Do with it what you want!" I imagined exactly what you say -- just getting it into a state where it would be useful for a small business would take months, and even then, you could never be sure you'd "done it the right way" unless you hired professionals to build it out for you.
Black Markets doesn't need to be a shady dealings. It is just illegal sales of products.
Uh... a little contradictory there? Doing illegal things isn't "shady," to you?
People buy stuff black market all the time, the one of the highest Black Market product is Unpasteurized milk.
Seriously dude? You think there is more money being spent on unpasteurized milk than on fake Gucci bags, stolen guns, or cocaine? Let me guess: You live in rural Wisconsin?
The point here is that a dog produced in an illegal market is not going to have any medical records. It's not going to have any evidence of pedigree. You're not going to know anything about how it was bred or raised, except that both were done in secret (because it's illegal). Breeding and raising dogs in secret, which probably means exclusively indoors, is almost always going to result in unhealthy, poorly socialized dogs.
On the other hand, you can go to an animal shelter and get an animal that you know has been well-treated, vaccinated, and spayed or neutered. And it's free (or will typically cost less than $50 if you're asked to cover the cost of medical procedures). So why would you go out of your way to pay ten times more for an animal on the black market? Just because it's more fun, because it's illegal?
I agree, homophobia is funny. However, this particular joke is a little tired, considering that gerbils are illegal to sell, import, or keep as pets in the state of California, and have been since at least the 90s and probably longer.
Most "pet retailers" in San Francisco already do not sell pets. They sell supplies for people's pets. People get pets from animal shelters.
If selling oxygen is illegal then only criminals will be able to breathe.
If there is demand, and supply then there will be sale of good/services. If it is illegal or over taxed it will be under the black market.
Really? So you want a dog so badly that you'd drive out to some house in a secluded neighborhood and pay a guy whom you've never met before a few hundred dollars for a dog that has no papers, no history, and you have no idea how it was bred or raised ... when you could just as easily go to an animal shelter and get the same dog legally, for free?
SF does not want to ban circumcisions. That campaign is being run by an organization based out of San Diego. Unless you really think anybody in San Francisco would try to promote a ballot measure by publishing racist comic books that feature demonic Jews stealing babies because they hate Aryans.
Here's an idea. If you want to do that you could, you know, like, dude, ban factory farming of pets.
As a city legislature, you can only ban puppy mills within the city limits. That doesn't stop a pet store within your city limits from importing animals from out of state puppy mills (and in fact I'm reasonably certain there are no puppy mills within the 49 square miles of San Francisco, except perhaps pit bull breeding for illegal dog fighting). Most puppy mills are located in the Midwest -- Missouri, I'm looking at you. Similarly, a city can't pass laws regulating interstate commerce; in other words, there's nothing it can do to stop a pet store from buying from out of state puppy mills. The only thing the city can do that will prevent stores from buying from puppy mills is to ban pet stores, which is what the law proposes.
In my experience, few pet lovers in San Francisco buy purebred dogs as it is. There is a strong SPCA culture here, where I would say the majority of people adopt dogs and cats from shelters (or get kittens or puppies from friends).
If you really must have a specific breed, however, there's nothing stopping you from driving 20 minutes across the Bay Bridge to buy one. Hopefully, however, the law will make you think twice about whom you buy from, and that you'll be reminded to deal with breeders whose operations you've personally inspected and whose bona fides are sound.
I personally don't give a rat's arse about pets, but in this case, the pet industry got my support.
Actually, that sounds like a perfectly natural position for someone who doesn't give a rat's arse about pets.
I feel like the initial attraction of the BlackBerry was that it was the only device of its kind. Then other smartphones started appearing, but they would only poll your inboxes every so often, and they didn't seem as well integrated as the BlackBerry. Now that's largely changed. I'm not sure how it works (or how it jibes with RIM's patents), but my Motorola handset features email delivery that's at least "pseudo-push" if not actual push. Stuff like Exchange ActiveSync policies are supported on a lot of handsets now, too (even including the iPhone, I believe). BlackBerry's competitive advantage is narrowing, and at the same time, its handsets don't seem to be keeping up with what's happening in the rest of the industry. Thus, BlackBerry just doesn't look as attractive as it once did -- apparently, since I jumped ship myself, the last time I was pricing new phones.
Mine does 24 hours now, no sweat. 48 hours is pushing it. My BlackBerry definitely outperformed my current phone on battery.
Just look at PhoneGap's featured apps examples. Almost every single one of them is written for iOS. If you bring them to Android users wont accept them as native.
And then, don't most Android handsets have custom vendor skins? Web apps won't ever blend seamlessly with every Android UI. And the user experience on Android 3.x is fairly distinct from Android 2.x, too. Any development tool that really aims to help your apps be more "cross-platform" will let you target different platforms, not shoehorn the same UI into all of them.
Those are valid points. I just don't have the same usage pattern, or (apparently) the same mail volume.
A real geek would have done it from an HP 48g emulated on an Android phone.
we've been making the transition from "ruled by braun" to "ruled by brain".
Some of us, anyway. Richard Stallman made the transition long ago.
Seriously, why can they not implement proper IMAP support in a device that's designed mainly for email?
What did you find deficient about it? What did you want it to do that it couldn't do?
(I'm really still a POP guy myself, because IMAP has always seemed clunky and prone to data loss, to me. I'd rather download multiple copies of messages to different devices than trust my phone or some random client not to do something catastrophic to my mail folders. If I remember right, actually, what I did was setup a forwarding rule on my mail server to send copies of my incoming mail to my BlackBerry email address. Doing it this way, instead of polling my mail accounts every 9 minutes or whatever, new mail would arrive on my handset within seconds.)
That's because like every other Blackberry user I ever knew, you NEVER LEFT THE EMAIL CLIENT.
It's more than that. On the BlackBerry, the email client is more of a unified inbox. Your text messages arrive in the same inbox, as do voicemail notifications. The whole thing is organized in a way that makes sense to me: chronologically, just like my inbox on Thunderbird. That's one reason why I seem to be one of the few people on Earth who actually likes Motorola's Motoblur skin for Android. It gives me a UI that's pretty much how the BlackBerry does it, but it also throws Facebook messages into the same inbox, plus it automatically updates my contacts with information my Facebook friends have provided about themselves -- so I magically have some folks' phone numbers without having to ask for them and enter them myself. To me, this package is about the most useful thing a communications device can do. It's what attracted me to the BlackBerry platform and it's one of the things that made me choose my particular Android phone over some others.
Not even to talk...
Don't know about that. I used the one phone for everything. I think if you saw people keeping a BlackBerry plus a separate phone for voice calls, it was probably because work gave them the BlackBerry but they already had their own phone with all their phone numbers in it. Also, a lot of people like to text their friends as well as call them, and businesses are sometimes reluctant to pay for unlimited SMS plans, so it makes more sense to do your "phone-y" business on your own phone (where your contacts will be able to text or dial the same number) and just do the email on the business BlackBerry.
I haven't had a BlackBerry for a while now, but if I remember right, I may have kept an SSH client on there, and I think once I downloaded an Infocom player, just for fun. But overall, I just never considered downloading apps to be part of the BlackBerry experience. Maybe that's why I find the "DOODZ, WHERE DA APPS AT??" attitude of a lot of iPhone/Android users a little baffling. To me, BlackBerry's software was well-designed and reliable, and it allowed me to do pretty much everything I expect a communications device to do, so I couldn't really picture what else I'd need to downlaod. But then again, I guess to me, a mobile phone is something that spends most of its time in your pocket. That doesn't seem to be how a lot of phone users see it.
When did the particular particular owner of property make a difference in peoples mind as to if stealing it 'seems so bad' ?
In a nutshell, it's the old "big, faceless corporation" argument. Don't try to pretend you haven't heard it a million times before.
Can you define the difference between a digital lock pick and a physical one ? I can't so I can see no reason why they should be treated differently.
I actually kind of lean this way myself, so...
I think you were close with "own moral Geiger counter" but went wayward with "Maybe it's more honest to talk about right and wrong, and then think about the best way to define laws around that." We already have.
We do have the laws, but they seem to be laws that a lot of people disagree with. They either disagree with them the way a lot of Slashdotters do, using a number of arguments about the validity of intellectual property or the lack thereof. Or they simply disagree with them in the sense that they still use BitTorrent to download CDs and movies; they don't think of themselves as criminals and yet they consistently break the law. A while back the MPAA ran ads saying something to the effect of, "You wouldn't steal a DVD from a store, so why do you think it's OK to download them?" To me it sounds like a very sound argument, and yet a lot of people just shrugged it off. "Why do I? I don't know. Whatever."
I think one reason why is that while we have the laws defined, we've failed to define the shape of the justice to go along with those laws. The MPAA's tactic of prosecuting BitTorrent users and suing them for tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars based on specious-sounding calculations is completely off-base, and on a gut level, I think a lot of Americans think that what the MPAA is doing should itself be illegal. On the other hand, if there was a way to "catch" me downloading a movie and issue me a ticket for a fine of $50 or $100, I think a lot of people would just say, "Damn, I got busted!" And a lot of them wouldn't try it again.
How many of us have been caught shoplifting at some point in our lives? How long did we keep shoplifting after that? That's where the "You wouldn't steal a DVD from a store" argument falls apart -- not only does downloading feel nothing like shoplifting, but the law enforcement surrounding the act of illegal downloading resembles nothing like how law enforcement deals with shoplifting.
None of this changes whether the act of copyright infringement is right or wrong, though. A lot of Slashdotters seem to want to argue that copyright infringement defensible on the basis that the laws are unfair, or because copyright lasts too long, or because DRM makes it OK, or that intellectual property isn't "real." I don't think any of these arguments really stands up to scrutiny. But even if we determine that copyright infringement is just as wrong as shoplifting the same item, the industry seems to want to act as though it's actually many thousands of times worse than shoplifting -- and that doesn't make sense to anyone.
The problem in the scenario you outline is that two instances of copyright infringement provoke different feelings of guilt to you.
My point is that most everybody makes such distinctions. If I asked you whether thieves should go to prison for their first offense, you might say yes. If I then told you that we had captured such a person, and it was your fourteen-year-old niece, you might just as quickly come up with a rationalization why she deserved a second chance.
The distinction made in each of my examples is not the difference between copyright infringement and theft and whether one crime is worse than another. The distinction in each case is as simple as an action that seems to take place in a vacuum and one that seems to have specific effects to a specific person or organization.
That's why using Transdroid seems "wrong" to people. It's the difference between the idea that you're going to commit copyright infringement and some store, somewhere, could potentially lose a sale, versus the idea that you're standing right here in this particular store and this is the store that you've decided not to pay for the thing that you're going to gain through copyright infringement, a crime.
That's why Transdroid seems like it's "crossing a line" to the earlier poster and to myself; it's simply a matter of putting a human face on the crime. It's the same reason why stealing a physical object from Wal-Mart doesn't seem as bad as stealing the same object from a neighborhood shop, even though the law makes no distinction between the two.
So if using Transdroid to get things from BitTorrent feels wrong when you do it to an independent record store, there's a good case to be made that it's wrong all the time, and it's the human tendency to rationalize that's out of whack.
Are you under the impression the Android Market is the only source available for installing apps to your Android device?
For a lot of people it is, because that checkbox is clicked in their preferences, or it's the only one they want to use (for fear of viruses or whatever).
Furthermore, I think it wouldn't be off-base to characterize the kind of people who use this particular app as the kind of people who like to get things the easy way.
Well, if it then vaporized the item in front of it, it might be analogous to theft I guess. Theft is really more about depriving something from someone else than gaining it for yourself; in this case, the outlet still has the physical item.
Nonetheless, I think almost everybody understands on a gut level that this sort of thing is ethically wrong.
A lot of people, if they found an envelope full of money, would keep the money. At the same time, if the envelope had someone's name written on it, I think a great many people would try to think of a way to get that money back to the named person before they just walked off with it.
Similarly, I think a great many people make a distinction between downloading something using BitTorrent from their computer at home and actually walking into a CD store, spending a half hour browsing the new releases, and then using a magic wand to download all of the ones they like without paying the store a dime. For the first one, I think a lot of people might not think they're doing anything wrong at all. But I think most of us recognize that doing the second one just kind of makes you a dick.
When I first heard about this app, I, like a lot of people I'm sure, said, "Wow awesome! I totally want to try this out!" But when I imagined this scenario in my mind, I was imagining walking into someplace like a Best Buy or a Wal-Mart and fucking them over, while at the same time snickering about how high-tech and clever I was. I wasn't imagining walking into Aquarius Records or some other independent record store and using it to save myself some money.
To give another example, if you go to sci-fi conventions or other places where celebrities make appearances, often times they will charge you some money to pose for a photograph. Often it's actually more money than the cost of a typical CD, which on the face of it sounds crazy. And hell, you could easily stand in front of their table with your thumb up and have your friend shoot the picture and walk away. (You'd even own the copyright on that photo!) But most of us understand that this kind of thing makes you a dick. You can walk away thinking, "I can't believe that has-been so-and-so charges so much for a photo," but you don't just screw them over while they're sitting right there -- even though you're not technically "stealing" anything.
It all comes down to what makes your own moral Geiger counter start clicking. I think most of us know when we're straying into the darker areas, in general. So I don't really think it's necessary to draw this hard-line distinction between "theft" and "copyright infringement." Maybe it's more honest to talk about right and wrong, and then think about the best way to define laws around that.