You cloud the issue. No one, as you might have noticed, is arguing that Apple doesn't have the right to do as they have, as no one is calling for a DoJ inquiry, antitrust investigation, or anything of the sort. But when some customers have had a feature for several years, and then it's yanked away and ransomed back to them for the cost of a pricey phone upgrade, the customers have every reason to feel slighted. Behavior like that can damage customer goodwill built up over many years.
Siri was, of course, available as an app for iPhones going back to the original 2G, correct? And on 4S launch day, Apple (having bought Siri from the original developer) disabled Siri for everyone who was already using it, in a naked attempt to force their loyal fanbase to upgrade, if I'm not mistaken?
It's amazing to me how Apple fanboys can continue to stay so fanatically loyal after every punch in the beanbag from Cupertino.
As has been pointed out previously in this thread, this has indeed already been overturned. It's interesting to note the dates in both articles, however. The article detailing the overturning of the Cali Supreme Court decision is dated September 21...while the OP's article is dated Oct. 4th. And the OP's article is from where? The Blaze. Which is? The Glenn Beck-founded "news" site. Either it's plain shoddy journalism on their part, or disingenuous and deliberately incitant. Ahh, Glenn Beck. Why let facts and reality interfere with the agenda?
...seems to me that this could end up being a good thing. IT staffer extorts students, making sure to conspicuously duplicate the RIAA's methods, and in court, he offers the RIAA defense. The jury rightfully swats this down and convicts him of extortion. Now, future victims of RIAA extortion lawsuits have a precedent to point to. Maybe he planned this whole thing to make noise and draw attention to the despicable RIAA methods, but then maybe I'm interpreting altruistic motives where none exist.
Here again we are faced with the common PvP griefer's refrain of "I'm not breaking any game rules". That's not the point. In real life, according to the "rules" (i.e. the physical laws of our universe), nothing is stopping me from walking up behind unsuspecting passers-by and bashing their brains out with a tire iron; but I don't, because we as humans have developed a society out of the framework of physical law which details CONSEQUENCES for such an action.
In the same way that God created the world (for the purposes of this metaphor, at least) but humans created society, the CoH/WoW/Eve/etc devs created the world, but players created the society. So if an 80 belf ret pally is griefing my little level 20 nub in Darkshire, it's "within the rules of the game", but it's unequivocally bullying. It's no longer a matter of skill; my little level 20 nub has exactly 0.00% chance of beating an 80. But like in real life, the WoW society has developed consequences; those same rules allow me to bring out my 80 rogue to slaughter and camp his ass til he logs whenever I see him from then on.
Under the faulty logic that anything the laws of the game world permit is socially acceptable, any bug or exploit is fair game. Counterstrike players remember the bug in cs_assault that let an unscrupulous player pop up through the ceiling of the warehouse onto the roof. It's permitted under the laws of the CS universe, but any server admin worth his salt would perma-ban the little s**t.
The point is that the rules that the player society develops are just as important (if not more) than the physical rules of the game world itself. And if you flagrantly, gleefully, maliciously disregard them, like in real life, there are consequences.
I'm quite familiar with the Accustream 170 - my company specializes in webcasting and this is the card we use, built into a Shuttle XPC, at conferences to capture Powerpoint presentations. It's pricey, but image quality is very good. That being said, there are drawbacks: 1) The card's software in its current release isn't so good at automatic format detection. You need to run it through a calibration routine every time you feed it a new signal/resolution. Switching sync during capture throws it off if resolutions are different. 2) It's a 64-bit PCI card. It is backwards-compatible with 32-bit PCI, but don't expect to get over 15fps in a 32-bit slot. 3) It's bloody expensive.
We've been experimenting with a USB device that captures a DVI signal, the DVI2USB from Epiphan. Nice image, and much better format detection, but the device is still very much in its infancy and its driver release shows. Their DirectShow driver was only released last week and is still buggy (stops serving frames randomly after running for more than an hour), and their proprietary capture interface is extremely feature-thin. Also, even on a relatively fast machine (3ghz P4 HT, 1gb RAM), it wouldn't pass 11fps.
Among the others the RIAA has announce plans to sue: a six-year-old orphan boy who walks with a crutch, a fuzzy kitten, and the nice old widow who lives down the hall and always bakes cookies for you.
You know, hunting criminals is always so much easier when you can just make up information about them.
Remember playing Where in (x) is Carmen Sandiego? You'd get frustrated trying to find that last elusive clue to get you a warrant, and so you'd just GUESS a hair or eye color? And what invariably happened? You SCREWED UP and caught the wrong guy.
While such a FreeNet would be a laudable idea, as someone with a B.A. in cynicism, I have to say it wouldn't last. Remember the death of Usenet? How it was, as you say, entirely for geeks, by geeks? Essentially, back in the day, it was a vast information resource...where the best and brightest gathered to exchange tips and info. Then AOL released their barbarian hordes upon the newsgroups. The poor dumb sheep couldn't distinguish between instant messages and Usenet posts...end result, only one post in a thousand had any useful information. The other 999 were either one-word responses like "me too" or "duh", or spammer ads. My point is that legal means aren't the only way to destroy innovation. Sometimes the ignorant masses will do it themselves.
_________________________________________
On a slightly related note, it's rather disturbing how, ever since September 11th, life is becoming more and more like Deus Ex.
Slashdot Mirror
Mr. Anderson's family was reportedly mortified when he reappeared at his own funeral as the blue sparkly ghost of Hayden Christensen.
You cloud the issue. No one, as you might have noticed, is arguing that Apple doesn't have the right to do as they have, as no one is calling for a DoJ inquiry, antitrust investigation, or anything of the sort. But when some customers have had a feature for several years, and then it's yanked away and ransomed back to them for the cost of a pricey phone upgrade, the customers have every reason to feel slighted. Behavior like that can damage customer goodwill built up over many years.
Siri was, of course, available as an app for iPhones going back to the original 2G, correct? And on 4S launch day, Apple (having bought Siri from the original developer) disabled Siri for everyone who was already using it, in a naked attempt to force their loyal fanbase to upgrade, if I'm not mistaken? It's amazing to me how Apple fanboys can continue to stay so fanatically loyal after every punch in the beanbag from Cupertino.
As has been pointed out previously in this thread, this has indeed already been overturned. It's interesting to note the dates in both articles, however. The article detailing the overturning of the Cali Supreme Court decision is dated September 21...while the OP's article is dated Oct. 4th. And the OP's article is from where? The Blaze. Which is? The Glenn Beck-founded "news" site. Either it's plain shoddy journalism on their part, or disingenuous and deliberately incitant. Ahh, Glenn Beck. Why let facts and reality interfere with the agenda?
Somebody call Starbuck and get some Hendrix records, we'll have this thing solved by dinner.
Jason and Vince are oscar mike, repeat, they are oscar mike.
Oscar mike oscar mike oscar mike oscar mike oscar mike.
...seems to me that this could end up being a good thing. IT staffer extorts students, making sure to conspicuously duplicate the RIAA's methods, and in court, he offers the RIAA defense. The jury rightfully swats this down and convicts him of extortion. Now, future victims of RIAA extortion lawsuits have a precedent to point to. Maybe he planned this whole thing to make noise and draw attention to the despicable RIAA methods, but then maybe I'm interpreting altruistic motives where none exist.
Here again we are faced with the common PvP griefer's refrain of "I'm not breaking any game rules". That's not the point. In real life, according to the "rules" (i.e. the physical laws of our universe), nothing is stopping me from walking up behind unsuspecting passers-by and bashing their brains out with a tire iron; but I don't, because we as humans have developed a society out of the framework of physical law which details CONSEQUENCES for such an action.
In the same way that God created the world (for the purposes of this metaphor, at least) but humans created society, the CoH/WoW/Eve/etc devs created the world, but players created the society. So if an 80 belf ret pally is griefing my little level 20 nub in Darkshire, it's "within the rules of the game", but it's unequivocally bullying. It's no longer a matter of skill; my little level 20 nub has exactly 0.00% chance of beating an 80. But like in real life, the WoW society has developed consequences; those same rules allow me to bring out my 80 rogue to slaughter and camp his ass til he logs whenever I see him from then on.
Under the faulty logic that anything the laws of the game world permit is socially acceptable, any bug or exploit is fair game. Counterstrike players remember the bug in cs_assault that let an unscrupulous player pop up through the ceiling of the warehouse onto the roof. It's permitted under the laws of the CS universe, but any server admin worth his salt would perma-ban the little s**t.
The point is that the rules that the player society develops are just as important (if not more) than the physical rules of the game world itself. And if you flagrantly, gleefully, maliciously disregard them, like in real life, there are consequences.
Didn't it already happen to a Senator?
Uh huh...did Bill offer $100 to this friend for every 10 people he showed the modded PSP to?
I'm quite familiar with the Accustream 170 - my company specializes in webcasting and this is the card we use, built into a Shuttle XPC, at conferences to capture Powerpoint presentations. It's pricey, but image quality is very good. That being said, there are drawbacks: 1) The card's software in its current release isn't so good at automatic format detection. You need to run it through a calibration routine every time you feed it a new signal/resolution. Switching sync during capture throws it off if resolutions are different. 2) It's a 64-bit PCI card. It is backwards-compatible with 32-bit PCI, but don't expect to get over 15fps in a 32-bit slot. 3) It's bloody expensive.
We've been experimenting with a USB device that captures a DVI signal, the DVI2USB from Epiphan. Nice image, and much better format detection, but the device is still very much in its infancy and its driver release shows. Their DirectShow driver was only released last week and is still buggy (stops serving frames randomly after running for more than an hour), and their proprietary capture interface is extremely feature-thin. Also, even on a relatively fast machine (3ghz P4 HT, 1gb RAM), it wouldn't pass 11fps.
Hope this helps!
Among the others the RIAA has announce plans to sue: a six-year-old orphan boy who walks with a crutch, a fuzzy kitten, and the nice old widow who lives down the hall and always bakes cookies for you.
You know, hunting criminals is always so much easier when you can just make up information about them. Remember playing Where in (x) is Carmen Sandiego? You'd get frustrated trying to find that last elusive clue to get you a warrant, and so you'd just GUESS a hair or eye color? And what invariably happened? You SCREWED UP and caught the wrong guy.
While such a FreeNet would be a laudable idea, as someone with a B.A. in cynicism, I have to say it wouldn't last. Remember the death of Usenet? How it was, as you say, entirely for geeks, by geeks? Essentially, back in the day, it was a vast information resource...where the best and brightest gathered to exchange tips and info. Then AOL released their barbarian hordes upon the newsgroups. The poor dumb sheep couldn't distinguish between instant messages and Usenet posts...end result, only one post in a thousand had any useful information. The other 999 were either one-word responses like "me too" or "duh", or spammer ads. My point is that legal means aren't the only way to destroy innovation. Sometimes the ignorant masses will do it themselves. _________________________________________ On a slightly related note, it's rather disturbing how, ever since September 11th, life is becoming more and more like Deus Ex.