Apple doesn't have a monopoly, so they can do whatever the fuck they want.
You don't need to have a monopoly to be anti-competitive. Nearly every cell phone company locks down its phones. Nobody can afford to open up the platform because that would mean that the company that did would be less competitive than the one that didn't. (It wouldn't have all that app store revenue.)
Nevertheless, the world would be a better place if mobile platforms in general were open. But because the market can't deliver that result, we need regulation to do it.
Does the iPhone becomes yours when you buy it? Yes... but only when that is the full retail price of the device.
Actually, I'd argue that it becomes my property either way. If I go to AT&T and purchase a contract, AT&T doesn't lease me the phone. I'm sold the phone. It looks like a sale, it's structured like a sale, and it's called a sale. That the contract is structured so as to recoup the cost of making that sale at a loss is irrelevant to the fact that the phone is now nevertheless my private property.
If the phone company really wants to retain ownership of the phone until the contract expires, then it needs to use a lease to express the concept. Leases are dependable, well-understood legal instruments that do exactly what the phone companies want.
Why don't cell phone companies just lease phones instead of selling them at a loss? Because everyone knows what a lease is, and customers would rightly scream bloody murder!
The device was sold specifically without that capability, so why is modding it to do so seen as a right?
It's my right because I OWN the device.
As a former owner, Microsoft has no control over what I do with the device. If I sell a house, I have no say over whether the new owner paints all the rooms lime green and puts in red shag carpeting. It's not my house anymore. Likewise, when I buy a 360, it's not Microsoft's 360 anymore.
It's called "private property", and it's been part of Western culture for at least 6,000 years. The burden of proof is on you to show why I shouldn't be allowed to do what I want with my own property.
The interesting moral and competitive question is whether or not Apple should be allowed to prevent other (non-Apple) app stores from distributing content to the device. And that's a hard question.
Right. My original post just expressed frustrating with people being so comfortable that Apple can do this at all that they're reduced to arguing about little details of the unjustifiable approval scheme.
People, the problem here is not that Apple rejected a C64 emulator. The problem is that by rejecting it, Apple is preventing people from running the C64 emulator at all. I can't believe you've actually gotten used to the idea.
...the government be able to tell Wal-Mart that they MUST sell Green Day CDs?
Of course not. I have no problem with Apple rejecting any application it wants from the app store. What angers me is that Apple uses DRM to prevent other people from setting up competing app stores.
That effectively gives Apple veto power over all applications run on the iPhone, even ones that have nothing to do with Apple. I doubt you wouldn't be happy with giving Wal-Mart veto power over any music played, or Microsoft power to reject applications written for Windows. The method Apple uses to give itself this power, DRM, should be illegal.
Actually, no, I wasn't comparing slavery and application installation.
If you'd read my post, you'd have realized that I was arguing that something a company has the ability and current legal authority to do isn't necessarily the best for society.
My position is that closed mass-market platforms like the iPhone should be opened by regulation. Companies shouldn't have the authority to decide what I can run on my own device.
You can agree or disagree with me, but I'm certainly not "nuts".
Right. Now you've discovered that Apple's restrictions don't have anything to do with technical quality. Instead, they're just designed to provide Apple an excuse to ban any application that might threaten Apple's revenue stream.
That kind of behavior shouldn't be allowed on a mass-market platform like the iPhone. Nobody should have the authority to tell me what applications I can run on a device I own, just like a publisher can't tell me not to resell a book.
Controlling what is available via their own app store != controlling what people can run.
Actually, that's exactly what it is. Apple uses DRM to ensure the app store is the only legitimate way to install applications. Banning an application from the app store is tantamount to banning it from the platform. (Jailbreaking isn't widespread enough to count.) If Apple simply ran an app store without the monopoly lock on applications, I'd have no problem whatsoever with its behavior.
If the iPhone doesn't do what you want it to do, or restricts you in any way that you don't like, then just don't fucking use it.
Oh, get off it yourself. There are many things we don't allow companies to do. They can't enslave people, dump acid into rivers, outright lie in advertisements, or collude to fix prices. Market mechanisms don't prevent companies from doing these things, so the law must. It's not enough to say "just don't use the product." We need something more powerful.
One more thing companies shouldn't be allowed to do is to make platforms and "reject" applications. Even if it's lucrative for Apple and a few developers, it's anticompetitive and harmful to society as a whole. Look at history: companies that create closed systems inevitably become rent-seeking parasites that stifle innovation.
Apple has a current legal basis for its behavior. But there's no reason it should continue to enjoy that privilege. Closed platforms like the iPhone ought to be regulated away.
High horse? At least I'm not stuck in the intellectual mud like you are. All of you people are ignoring the larger problem here, which is that Apple purports to control the applications a customer runs on a device he's purchased outright. It's ludicrous. Apple has no moral authority to set these rules at all.
The larger problem here is that Apple can reject applications at all. You people seem to have passively accepted it. It's as if you were in Salem arguing about whether a witch should have been burned or hanged while ignoring the larger question is whether you should execute the alleged "witch" at all!
Can you imagine going to a web site from a corporate locked down machine and attempting to install some untrusted codec?
As opposed to Flash, which is pretty much the ultimate untrusted codec? It's a huge binary blob that has had numerous security problems, and which has a huge attack surface. Even ignoring declared vulnerabilities, Flash allows web pages to do things like access the clipboard and bypass XMLHttpRequest same-origin restrictions. In short, installing flash makes a web browser demonstrably less secure.
It's remarkable, then, that an administrator would be comfortable installing this Trojan octopus of a plugin while ignoring a far simpler open source video codec that he can verify and compile himself.
Really, it just shows that people will trust the familiar without seriously questioning it, at least until a crisis shows up.
The last time Mozilla added support for a tag that had some automatic animated behavior
Err, <script>? Still going strong today. Essential, even. Don't pretend this is a revolutionary change when in reality we're taking about an evolutionary tweak.
I am sick and tired of this meme. You confuse authority and defensibility. Yes, Apple has the authority to do this. No, it is NOT ethically right for Apple to do this. It's not a new meme. In 1734, Alexander Pope published "An Essay on Man":
And spite of Pride, in erring Reason's spite, One truth is clear, Whatever is, is right.
The idea was corrosive back then, and it remains corrosive today. Knock it the fuck off.
Indeed! English has a perfectly good person pronoun: he in the subjective, him in the objective, and his in the possessive. It's not biased to write using that pronoun: it's standard. It's been used for centuries. You might say that Shakespeare used "they", but he used hefar more often, as most writers did for centuries.
For fuck's sake, it's a pronoun. Changing it won't erase gender equality! Of course any sensible reader will interpret "when a scientist runs a PCR on his genetic sample" to mean a male or female scientist. Obviously. It's just grammar. Mark Twain commented on the corresponding problem in German in his great "The Awful German Language"
Gretchen.
Wilhelm, where is the turnip? Wilhelm.
She has gone to the kitchen. Gretchen.
Where is the accomplished and beautiful English maiden? Wilhelm.
It has gone to the opera."
Yet nobody claims German is a sexist language. If you insist on twisting the fine English language to eliminate a purely grammatical gender distinction that's not actually a problem, you might as well go all the way and start talking about Newton's Rape Manual.
Actually, you can check that a server will allow a certain-sized upload. You do that using the HTTP 1.1 expect mechanism: the user-agent sends the normal headers plus a expect: 100-continue header. The server, after it reads the client headers but before it reads the body, replies with either a 100 continue or some error depending on the headers it saw, which can include content-length. The user-agent just holds off on sending the body until it receives a go-ahead from the server.
Britain is the world's capital of libel tourism. Because of that, the ubiquitous CCTV coverage, and the RIP act, it's on my list of places to never visit, along with, say, the Congo.
PARIS -- You're an investment bank in Iceland with a complaint about a tabloid newspaper in Denmark that published critical articles in Danish. Whom do you call?
A pricey London libel lawyer.
That is called libel tourism by lawyers in the media trade. And Britain remains a comfortable destination for the rich in search of friendly courts, which have already weighed complaints from people who consider themselves unfairly tarred with labels like tax dodger, terrorist financier or murky Qaeda operative.
Even the best programmers make mistakes. Having another set of eyes is invaluable for detecting bugs before they become problems. Having to explain in words the rationale for a design decision often helps you better understand your own design, and to see potential problems with it. Sometimes you come up with something better on the spot. Also, if you get hit by a bus, your fellow programmers can take over without having to reverse-engineer your thoughts. Please, more code reviews.
I prefer this grading style too; not only does it have the advantages you mention, but it also allows students who are overqualified for a class to get through it without wasting too much time on tedious assignments.
However in the US, it is illegal to publish software which would circumvent a digital lock, thanks to the DMCA. Some would argue the DMCA is unconstitutional in this regard, however the DMCA has been around for a long time. If this right were explicit, would that be the case?
The DMCA, and a host of other laws, blatantly violate the ideas of the enlightenment upon which the constitution was based. That the DMCA stands, far from demonstrating the nuances of our constitution, instead merely shows that generation after generation of negligence and corruption will lead to the rot of even the best-laid institution.
I agree that rights should be given in broad, technology-agnostic terms. But there should be particular and specific restrictions on the government that ensure that violations of a constitution's spirit are also egregious violations of its text.
In particular, "due process" is vague and hasn't stopped the United States from violating the rights of its citizens. One exception to the destruction of civil liberties, however, has been the right to a jury trial, which has not been touched, and will probably stand as long as the country does. What makes the right to a jury trial more durable than the other due process rights is that it's spelled out directly in the constitution, while other rights are merely implied by phrases like "due process" and qualified by exceptionally flexible words like "unreasonable".
IMHO, it's far better to spell out explicit restrictions directly in the constitution so that potential violations are blatant. Negative restrictions are useful because if the constitution claims "the government can do X", the government will invariably try to do Y and claim Y is a type of X. You breed monsters like the Commerce Clause
...in Katzenbach v. McClung (1964) the Court ruled that the federal government could regulate Ollie's Barbecue, which served mostly local clientele but sold food that had previously moved across state lines; and in Daniel v. Paul (1969), the Court ruled that the federal government could regulate a recreational facility because three out of the four items sold at its snack bar were purchased from outside the state.
It's much harder for the government to do Y when Y is explicitly listed as a thing the government may not do. In theory, the first amendment to the United States constitution is redundant. The Ninth and Tenth Amendments should provide all the necessary protection because they essentially say "the government is permitted to do nothing except what we've listed". Nevertheless, without the explicit guarantees of freedom of expression and of the press, those rights would have been trampled a long time ago.
"Digital rights" provisions may actually enter the constitution, and if they do, that's great. If they don't, the legislature can approximate their effect.
It's far more important to put provisions in the constitution that will slow the onset of corruption. Corruption rots a state from the inside out; no matter how well-protected rights are in a constitution, those protections are worthless if the government becomes an entity that serves the few, not the many. Keep in mind that the U.S.S.R., in its constitution, guaranteed freedom of expression. That didn't work out so well. The United States guarantees freedom from unreasonable search and seizure, yet we have civil forfeiture. The constitution only means something when there is some mechanism to hold accountable those who violate it.
First of all, if Diamond is an amateur, he must be the most cited amateur on earth.
Second, would you need to actually read a book that claimed aliens built the Pyramids, or would a review be sufficient to convince you that the book is full of shit? Hanson is just the latest in a long line of Western exceptionalists. War does not a civilization make, and war is generally won or lost before the first shot is fired. Hanson reverses cause and effect. Do you seriously think that if the Greeks hadn't invented the phalanx, the rest of Europe would never have developed as it did?
Also, perhaps you should think before assigning a "fascination" with Arab culture to me. It's hardly the case: it's just another culture like many others on the planet. It fell into decline, but in the time I mentioned, it was further along than the West.
Slashdot Mirror
You don't need to have a monopoly to be anti-competitive. Nearly every cell phone company locks down its phones. Nobody can afford to open up the platform because that would mean that the company that did would be less competitive than the one that didn't. (It wouldn't have all that app store revenue.)
Nevertheless, the world would be a better place if mobile platforms in general were open. But because the market can't deliver that result, we need regulation to do it.
Actually, I'd argue that it becomes my property either way. If I go to AT&T and purchase a contract, AT&T doesn't lease me the phone. I'm sold the phone. It looks like a sale, it's structured like a sale, and it's called a sale. That the contract is structured so as to recoup the cost of making that sale at a loss is irrelevant to the fact that the phone is now nevertheless my private property.
If the phone company really wants to retain ownership of the phone until the contract expires, then it needs to use a lease to express the concept. Leases are dependable, well-understood legal instruments that do exactly what the phone companies want.
Why don't cell phone companies just lease phones instead of selling them at a loss? Because everyone knows what a lease is, and customers would rightly scream bloody murder!
It's my right because I OWN the device.
As a former owner, Microsoft has no control over what I do with the device. If I sell a house, I have no say over whether the new owner paints all the rooms lime green and puts in red shag carpeting. It's not my house anymore. Likewise, when I buy a 360, it's not Microsoft's 360 anymore.
It's called "private property", and it's been part of Western culture for at least 6,000 years. The burden of proof is on you to show why I shouldn't be allowed to do what I want with my own property.
Right. My original post just expressed frustrating with people being so comfortable that Apple can do this at all that they're reduced to arguing about little details of the unjustifiable approval scheme.
People, the problem here is not that Apple rejected a C64 emulator. The problem is that by rejecting it, Apple is preventing people from running the C64 emulator at all. I can't believe you've actually gotten used to the idea.
Of course not. I have no problem with Apple rejecting any application it wants from the app store. What angers me is that Apple uses DRM to prevent other people from setting up competing app stores.
That effectively gives Apple veto power over all applications run on the iPhone, even ones that have nothing to do with Apple. I doubt you wouldn't be happy with giving Wal-Mart veto power over any music played, or Microsoft power to reject applications written for Windows. The method Apple uses to give itself this power, DRM, should be illegal.
Actually, no, I wasn't comparing slavery and application installation.
If you'd read my post, you'd have realized that I was arguing that something a company has the ability and current legal authority to do isn't necessarily the best for society.
My position is that closed mass-market platforms like the iPhone should be opened by regulation. Companies shouldn't have the authority to decide what I can run on my own device.
You can agree or disagree with me, but I'm certainly not "nuts".
Right. Now you've discovered that Apple's restrictions don't have anything to do with technical quality. Instead, they're just designed to provide Apple an excuse to ban any application that might threaten Apple's revenue stream.
That kind of behavior shouldn't be allowed on a mass-market platform like the iPhone. Nobody should have the authority to tell me what applications I can run on a device I own, just like a publisher can't tell me not to resell a book.
Actually, that's exactly what it is. Apple uses DRM to ensure the app store is the only legitimate way to install applications. Banning an application from the app store is tantamount to banning it from the platform. (Jailbreaking isn't widespread enough to count.) If Apple simply ran an app store without the monopoly lock on applications, I'd have no problem whatsoever with its behavior.
Oh, get off it yourself. There are many things we don't allow companies to do. They can't enslave people, dump acid into rivers, outright lie in advertisements, or collude to fix prices. Market mechanisms don't prevent companies from doing these things, so the law must. It's not enough to say "just don't use the product." We need something more powerful.
One more thing companies shouldn't be allowed to do is to make platforms and "reject" applications. Even if it's lucrative for Apple and a few developers, it's anticompetitive and harmful to society as a whole. Look at history: companies that create closed systems inevitably become rent-seeking parasites that stifle innovation.
Apple has a current legal basis for its behavior. But there's no reason it should continue to enjoy that privilege. Closed platforms like the iPhone ought to be regulated away.
High horse? At least I'm not stuck in the intellectual mud like you are. All of you people are ignoring the larger problem here, which is that Apple purports to control the applications a customer runs on a device he's purchased outright. It's ludicrous. Apple has no moral authority to set these rules at all.
The larger problem here is that Apple can reject applications at all. You people seem to have passively accepted it. It's as if you were in Salem arguing about whether a witch should have been burned or hanged while ignoring the larger question is whether you should execute the alleged "witch" at all!
As opposed to Flash, which is pretty much the ultimate untrusted codec? It's a huge binary blob that has had numerous security problems, and which has a huge attack surface. Even ignoring declared vulnerabilities, Flash allows web pages to do things like access the clipboard and bypass XMLHttpRequest same-origin restrictions. In short, installing flash makes a web browser demonstrably less secure.
It's remarkable, then, that an administrator would be comfortable installing this Trojan octopus of a plugin while ignoring a far simpler open source video codec that he can verify and compile himself.
Really, it just shows that people will trust the familiar without seriously questioning it, at least until a crisis shows up.
Err, <script>? Still going strong today. Essential, even. Don't pretend this is a revolutionary change when in reality we're taking about an evolutionary tweak.
I am sick and tired of this meme. You confuse authority and defensibility. Yes, Apple has the authority to do this. No, it is NOT ethically right for Apple to do this.
It's not a new meme. In 1734, Alexander Pope published "An Essay on Man":
The idea was corrosive back then, and it remains corrosive today. Knock it the fuck off.
Indeed! English has a perfectly good person pronoun: he in the subjective, him in the objective, and his in the possessive. It's not biased to write using that pronoun: it's standard. It's been used for centuries. You might say that Shakespeare used "they", but he used he far more often, as most writers did for centuries.
For fuck's sake, it's a pronoun. Changing it won't erase gender equality! Of course any sensible reader will interpret "when a scientist runs a PCR on his genetic sample" to mean a male or female scientist. Obviously. It's just grammar. Mark Twain commented on the corresponding problem in German in his great "The Awful German Language"
Yet nobody claims German is a sexist language. If you insist on twisting the fine English language to eliminate a purely grammatical gender distinction that's not actually a problem, you might as well go all the way and start talking about Newton's Rape Manual.
Actually, you can check that a server will allow a certain-sized upload. You do that using the HTTP 1.1 expect mechanism: the user-agent sends the normal headers plus a expect: 100-continue header. The server, after it reads the client headers but before it reads the body, replies with either a 100 continue or some error depending on the headers it saw, which can include content-length. The user-agent just holds off on sending the body until it receives a go-ahead from the server.
Britain is the world's capital of libel tourism. Because of that, the ubiquitous CCTV coverage, and the RIP act, it's on my list of places to never visit, along with, say, the Congo.
Even the best programmers make mistakes. Having another set of eyes is invaluable for detecting bugs before they become problems. Having to explain in words the rationale for a design decision often helps you better understand your own design, and to see potential problems with it. Sometimes you come up with something better on the spot. Also, if you get hit by a bus, your fellow programmers can take over without having to reverse-engineer your thoughts. Please, more code reviews.
What's up with those lately? They're all over the place with their brave and honest "-1 Overrated" judgments.
I prefer this grading style too; not only does it have the advantages you mention, but it also allows students who are overqualified for a class to get through it without wasting too much time on tedious assignments.
The DMCA, and a host of other laws, blatantly violate the ideas of the enlightenment upon which the constitution was based. That the DMCA stands, far from demonstrating the nuances of our constitution, instead merely shows that generation after generation of negligence and corruption will lead to the rot of even the best-laid institution.
I agree that rights should be given in broad, technology-agnostic terms. But there should be particular and specific restrictions on the government that ensure that violations of a constitution's spirit are also egregious violations of its text.
In particular, "due process" is vague and hasn't stopped the United States from violating the rights of its citizens. One exception to the destruction of civil liberties, however, has been the right to a jury trial, which has not been touched, and will probably stand as long as the country does. What makes the right to a jury trial more durable than the other due process rights is that it's spelled out directly in the constitution, while other rights are merely implied by phrases like "due process" and qualified by exceptionally flexible words like "unreasonable".
IMHO, it's far better to spell out explicit restrictions directly in the constitution so that potential violations are blatant. Negative restrictions are useful because if the constitution claims "the government can do X", the government will invariably try to do Y and claim Y is a type of X. You breed monsters like the Commerce Clause
and the "for limited times" part of the Copyright Clause.
It's much harder for the government to do Y when Y is explicitly listed as a thing the government may not do. In theory, the first amendment to the United States constitution is redundant. The Ninth and Tenth Amendments should provide all the necessary protection because they essentially say "the government is permitted to do nothing except what we've listed". Nevertheless, without the explicit guarantees of freedom of expression and of the press, those rights would have been trampled a long time ago.
"Digital rights" provisions may actually enter the constitution, and if they do, that's great. If they don't, the legislature can approximate their effect.
It's far more important to put provisions in the constitution that will slow the onset of corruption. Corruption rots a state from the inside out; no matter how well-protected rights are in a constitution, those protections are worthless if the government becomes an entity that serves the few, not the many. Keep in mind that the U.S.S.R., in its constitution, guaranteed freedom of expression. That didn't work out so well. The United States guarantees freedom from unreasonable search and seizure, yet we have civil forfeiture. The constitution only means something when there is some mechanism to hold accountable those who violate it.
The US is part of the West, and the West has invented quite a bit.
First of all, if Diamond is an amateur, he must be the most cited amateur on earth.
Second, would you need to actually read a book that claimed aliens built the Pyramids, or would a review be sufficient to convince you that the book is full of shit? Hanson is just the latest in a long line of Western exceptionalists. War does not a civilization make, and war is generally won or lost before the first shot is fired. Hanson reverses cause and effect. Do you seriously think that if the Greeks hadn't invented the phalanx, the rest of Europe would never have developed as it did?
Also, perhaps you should think before assigning a "fascination" with Arab culture to me. It's hardly the case: it's just another culture like many others on the planet. It fell into decline, but in the time I mentioned, it was further along than the West.