iTunes, the overall jukebox app, works with other players, too. It's only the DRM'ed AAC files one buys from the iTunes Music Store that play only on iPods. There are plenty of reasons to use iTunes (and the iPod, for that matter) that have nothing to do with the iTMS. Both iTunes and the iPod were around a long time, being used by lots of people, before Apple ever even announced the iTMS.
The Microsoft exec's comments are FUDful, as always - "choice"? Giving Windows users iTunes and the iTMS just gives them another choice (or set of choices), rather than taking choices away. Windows users can get iTunes and/or iPod (they don't have to use one to use the other, and don't have to use the iTMS to use either) and use them with other options.
It's true iTunes and the iPod don't play WMA files (DRM'ed or otherwise), but how is that different from other Windows players (software and hardware) not playing AACs (or Ogg, or whatever)? It's also true the iTMS files don't play on players other than iTunes and the iPod, but how is that different from BuyMusic's (or similar services') files not playing in anything except Windows Media Player and DRM WMA-capable portable players? (Ok, there is a bit of difference there, since there's a greater variety of portables that play WMA files, but one might argue none of them are as good as the iPod anyway.) The point is that Apple's "vendor lock-in" for Windows iTunes/iPod customers isn't substantially different, if different at all, from that of most other legit music download outfits for Windows (at least, ones that offer lots of major label major releases). Moreover, iTMS files have far less obnoxious restrictions than most of them.
Fester's comments are just so much FUD, like most public comments by MS officials. I wouldn't trust anything they say any farther than I could comfortably spit an elephant.
Well, yeah, I think assuming anything not expressly forbidden is permissible; that's why so many ToS go out of their way to specifically limit as much as possible, or even say things along the lines of "the user has no rights to the product except as specifically permitted in these terms," or some such thing. I do think established accepted practices concerning fair use would tend to grant the user certain rights in this instance, which the terms would have to specifically deny in order for the user not to have them, and the terms don't specify that.
Given that the terms are highly precise (as most terms of service tend to be), and spell out any number of specific other things one can and cannot do, and the sheer obviousness that people are going to want to burn audio CDs of the files and then rip them to other formats, I'm certain Apple would have specifically stated one couldn't do this if they really didn't want people to do it. Yes, the terms forbid "circumventing the DRM," but honestly, I think it's clear what that means - they don't want people cracking the DRM and modding the files. It doesn't have anything to do with the CDs one might burn from those files. If one wanted to get really picky, in fact, one might provide a simple two-step justification - 1) burning the CDs is entirely permissible, and 2) the CDs one burns have no DRM, therefore ripping them is not circumvention.
Ok, so Apple doesn't specifically provide in the ToS a definition of "circumvention" that addresses ripping CDs burned from the files. There are a lot of terms it doesn't define, and believe me, if they seriously forbade people from doing it, they'd add a simple statement to the effect of "you may not use CDs burned from the files to make MP3s, unprotected AACs, Ogg Vorbis files, etc."
The CDs you burn from iTMS purchases are essentially ignored by Apple, AFAICT. It makes perfect sense - the music is already protected by copyright anyway, and subject to the same limitations on commercially mass-produced CDs you'd buy in a store. Apple frankly doesn't have any incentive to restrict your rights to it further; the only reason they have the DRM in the files is to prevent people from taking advantage of the even greater ease (compared to CDs) of illegally sharing music files that would exist if they were completely unrestricted.
Can you legally burn zillions of CDs and hand them out to random strangers in the street? No. Guess what? You can't legally do that with music you buy on ordinary CDs, either.
Interestingly, I entered the same account information I use on my Mac at home, but that does not allow me to re-download music already purchased onto this machine at the office; if I want it here again (outside of my home network), I need to buy it again.
Only if you don't want to go to the trouble of copying it yourself. You can put your purchases on up to three machines you authorize to play them, and from the info today it seems that includes whatever mix of Macs and PCs you want; you can move files from one comp to another with impunity. Just copy the music you bought at home to your portable storage thingie of choice and take them with you to the office and copy them to your work PC.
As Steve said back in March when introducing the iTMS, "We'll download it to one machine; you have to move it to the other two." If Apple let people download their purchases more than once, lots of people would opt to do it simply out of convenience, and Apple would inevitably spend tons of bandwidth serving up the same track 50 times to the same person for just one payment. Their attitude is that it's the same as any other purchase; once somebody buys a track and gets it from them, it's that customer's responsibility to keep it, put it where he/she wants, prevent it from getting damaged, etc., in sort of the same way Sam Goody won't replace your CD once you get it home and drop a bowling ball on it.
Apple doesn't mind you copying the tracks from one comp to another (as long as you don't put them on a total of more than three, and that's why they have the DRM); they just don't want to do it for you.
They mean, of course, that there isn't an extra fee to be able to burn CDs with iTMS purchases as there is with music from some of the other services (and also that it's a free app that will burn and encode your other, non-iTMS music - iTunes is a whole player/ripper/organizing/etc. app for all the other music you already have, not just the thing you use to access the iTunes Music Store, and you can get iTunes and use it for free, without ever having to buy anything from Apple).
And yet amazingly, Apple itself supports Hebrew, as do numerous third-party developers of Mac software that aren't Microsoft (and have a small fraction of its resources). If they can all support Hebrew, why can't the larger, more resource-laden MS???
Well, fine, the Supreme Court judged in a different case it wasn't compulsory. California seems not to have gotten the message, since their existing laws still mandated it (I already quoted this in another post, but here it is again, taken from the original court ruling; my emphasis added):
Newdow is an atheist whose daughter attends public elementary school in the Elk Grove Unified School District ("EGUSD") in California.
In accordance with state law and a school district rule, EGUSD teachers begin each school day by leading their students in a recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance ("the Pledge"). The California Education Code requires that public schools begin each school day with "appropriate patriotic exercises" and that "[t]he giving of the Pledge of Allegiance to the Flag of the United States of America shall satisfy" this requirement. Cal. Educ. Code 52720 (1989) (hereinafter "California statute").1 To implement the California statute, the school district that Newdow's daughter attends has promulgated a policy that states, in pertinent part: "Each elementary school class [shall] recite the pledge of allegiance to the flag once each day."
1 The relevant portion of California Education Code 52720 reads:
In every public elementary school each day during the school year at the beginning of the first regularly scheduled class or activity period at which the majority of the pupils of the school normally begin the schoolday, there shall be conducted appropriate patriotic exercises. The giving of the Pledge of Allegiance to the Flag of the United States of America shall satisfy the requirements of this section.
There is definately something wrong with coercing someone to pledge their allegance, which is why the pledge IS NOT COMPULSORY. Nor should it ever be.
According to the California laws that were challenged thus getting this whole issue going in the first place, it was compulsory. And yes, I agree it's wrong for it to be so.
Is there anything wrong with the Pledge? Is there anything wrong with saying it? Is there anything wrong with believing what you are saying? Is there anything wrong with having pride in your country, even if you don't agree with its government sometimes?
Is there anything wrong with not saying it? What if the kids don't believe what they're saying? Perhaps you think they should be... made to. Brrrr...
For that matter, is patriotism so essential and good that we must mandate it? Should people be forced to love America? Can one force genuine, heartfelt patriotic sentiment, even? If the students are being made to pledge their allegiance, what value do their pledges really have? It appears to me the main "value" in forced recitations isn't to provide an avenue of expression for all those 8-year-olds' preexisting strongly-felt patriotism for which they simply can't find their own words, but rather to inculcate such sentiments in them. Is it desirable to stir such feelings in the youth? Maybe, but by forced indoctrination?
Anti-Americanism within America is really annoying.
I'm unaware of any laws that LEGALLY REQUIRE a given student to recite the Pledge. I agree with laws that require schools to have students recite the Pledge, just as I did. But if there are any laws that require the STUDENT to participate I would be in favor of having THAT law overturned.
Well, for starters, the set of laws objected to by the atheist whose objections to having his daughter recite the Pledge got this ball rolling in the first place say as much, according to the original court ruling:
Newdow is an atheist whose daughter attends public elementary school in the Elk Grove Unified School District ("EGUSD") in California.
In accordance with state law and a school district rule, EGUSD teachers begin each school day by leading their students in a recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance ("the Pledge"). The California Education Code requires that public schools begin each school day with "appropriate patriotic exercises" and that "[t]he giving of the Pledge of Allegiance to the Flag of the United States of America shall satisfy" this requirement. Cal. Educ. Code 52720 (1989) (hereinafter "California statute").1 To implement the California statute, the school district that Newdow's daughter attends has promulgated a policy that states, in pertinent part: "Each elementary school class [shall] recite the pledge of allegiance to the flag once each day."
1 The relevant portion of California Education Code 52720 reads:
In every public elementary school each day during the school year at the beginning of the first regularly scheduled class or activity period at which the majority of the pupils of the school normally begin the schoolday, there shall be conducted appropriate patriotic exercises. The giving of the Pledge of Allegiance to the Flag of the United States of America shall satisfy the requirements of this section.
(emphasis added)
That's the law there. According to some news coverage of the issue, there are similar laws in other localities.
Those that somehow bring slavery into this discussion lose site of the relative magnitude and importance of each of the issues--especially their impact on those "affected."
I never made any claims about the relative magnitude and importance of the issues; of course slavery had a worse effect than coerced recitation of the Pledge. That's not the point, though - the principles are the same. In both instances a minority is unjustly made to do something by the majority. I can't agree just because 51%, 99%, or any percentage of the people in between believes in God, gives them the right to make the schoolchildren of the remaining people recite a pledge making a (completely superfluous) reference to God and avowing His existence. Nobody is making Christian kids swear oaths avowing the existence of Zeus or Shiva; why should kids who don't believe in God be forced to make pledges acknowledging His existence? If yours were the minority belief system, woud you want your kids made to recite a pledge acknowledging some deity you don't recognize?
Congress HASN'T made any law respecting an establishment of religion. There is no law that requires anyone to recite the Pledge, nor is there any law that says the official religion of the country is Christian or otherwise.
Oh? The 1954 law that codified the current, God-invoking Pledge as the official Pledge of Allegiance certainly respected an establishment of religion - the whole point of the law was to add an explicit reference to a divine being to an already-existing pledge that remained otherwise unchanged. If that law didn't "respect an establishment of religion," just what did it do???
Moreover, there are laws requiring kids to recite the Pledge (at the local/regional/state levels, though, not nationally), and they make reference to the standard pledge as codified in the '50s by the Congressional act.
No, there's no law decreeing an official national religion, but the rest does exist.
But there's a real reason to play the Mexican national anthem in Mexico, obviously. There's no similarly compelling reason to make US elementary schoolkids avow the existence of God. It's completely extraneous. Sure, schoolkids should respect one another's beliefs, but why should the state make an issue of forcing the kids to state their beliefs, even if held by the majority of them (and especially when not universally shared)?
Freedom OF religion is not freedom FROM religion. You have no right to not hear God mentioned in everyday life. Get used to it.
I agree no one has a "right" not to hear God mentioned in everyday life. I don't agree no one has a right not to be coerced into making a pledge avowing the existence of God. There's a difference. It's one thing if others want to mention God around other people; it's quite another to force those other people to make pledges referring to Him.
If it's a non-important reference, why is it so important that it not be changed? The fact is, millions of kids all over the US are legally required to recite a pledge that just so happens to invoke God, regardless of their beliefs or the values their parents wish to instill in them. Moreover, it certainly does refer to a specific religion; the fact that the name "God" in the pledge as it stands can possibly be interpreted as referring to a being other than "the" God doesn't change that, and it certainly doesn't make it equally applicable to all conceivable belief systems - it remains emphatically not so.
So what if 90% of the citizens of the United States want to leave it as it is now? Why should they be able to dictate how or what the remaining 10%'s kids pledge allegiance to? Should sheer majority rule have decided whether or not slavery was to be permitted?
Mind you, I think an involuntary pledge of allegiance (which it is, for many) is wrong whether it refers to God or not; I'd rather see the whole thing done away with, or at least made optional...
There certainly was the meme in the Mac community during the dark days of the G4 450Mhz that a G4 was "twice as fast" as a Pentium of the same clock.
I think the official meme has always been "up to twice as fast" (insert alternative value of choice for "twice"), which keeps it fair. The two platforms perform differently for different applications, obviously, and a given PC might outperform a given Mac at one thing, while the same Mac outperforms that same PC at something else.
Moreover, lots of Mac people I've come across were certainly conceding PCs were faster on the whole long before the beginning of 2003, though. Not in 1999, mind you, but back then, it was "up to twice as fast" (or up to thrice as fast, or as fast, or whatever) as the fastest PCs - depending on what one was doing with it.;)
You obviously haven't been paying attention. The Mac world stopped crowing about the G4's superiority over other systems once it became clear it no longer was (if it had been to begin with), i.e., as the MHz gap got wider and wider. Prior to the G5 intro at WWDC, Steve hadn't run one of his keynote Photoshop bake-offs in a while; even he wasn't claiming dual ~1 GHz G4 systems were faster than what the Wintel world could offer. Many people pointed out (correctly) that there was still a MHz myth and that the Macs weren't as slower than the Wintel systems as the numbers might imply, but on the whole, most Mac people were certainly conceding at the beginning of this year that the fastest PCs were faster than the fastest Macs.
1. The Emperor's name from the classic trilogy has been commonly known to be PALPATINE since his action figure was released back in 1983/84 with RETURN OF THE JEDI.
2. Emperor Palpatine in 1983's RETURN OF THE JEDI wears the same style robe as DARTH SIDIOUS of 1999's THE PHANTOM MENACE and 2002's ATTACK OF THE CLONES. Darth Vader is clearly the Emperor's apprentice in EMPIRE STRIKES BACK and RETURN OF THE JEDI. So common sense would lead you to conclude that Palpatine is...
It's been known longer than that, actually - the novelization of the original movie has a prologue discussing the rise of an ambitious senator named Palpatine who eventually made himself Emperor, and that novelization was first published in November of 1976, a good six months before even the actual original movie itself came out.
Right, but the mandates not to mess with the DRM very clearly apply to the AAC files you buy and download from Apple, not to burned CDs you make from those files. All the language concerning what you can do with the DRMed files is specific to those, not to CDs; as far as Apple is concerned, CDs you burn with the files are like any other CD - the DRM protects the AAC files and affords just enough of a limited protection to make it difficult to be bad with them without specifically cracking the DRM, which is both forbidden and difficult; once you have audio CDs, though, it's incumbent upon the buyer to stay within the same legal boundaries he/she would have to with any other audio CD of copyrighted material. If making rips from CDs burned from the files weren't allowed, you can be sure the ToS would be quite specific about it.
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So which robots are selling better - ones with or without Genuine People Personalities?
The Microsoft exec's comments are FUDful, as always - "choice"? Giving Windows users iTunes and the iTMS just gives them another choice (or set of choices), rather than taking choices away. Windows users can get iTunes and/or iPod (they don't have to use one to use the other, and don't have to use the iTMS to use either) and use them with other options.
It's true iTunes and the iPod don't play WMA files (DRM'ed or otherwise), but how is that different from other Windows players (software and hardware) not playing AACs (or Ogg, or whatever)? It's also true the iTMS files don't play on players other than iTunes and the iPod, but how is that different from BuyMusic's (or similar services') files not playing in anything except Windows Media Player and DRM WMA-capable portable players? (Ok, there is a bit of difference there, since there's a greater variety of portables that play WMA files, but one might argue none of them are as good as the iPod anyway.) The point is that Apple's "vendor lock-in" for Windows iTunes/iPod customers isn't substantially different, if different at all, from that of most other legit music download outfits for Windows (at least, ones that offer lots of major label major releases). Moreover, iTMS files have far less obnoxious restrictions than most of them.
Fester's comments are just so much FUD, like most public comments by MS officials. I wouldn't trust anything they say any farther than I could comfortably spit an elephant.
Well, yeah, I think assuming anything not expressly forbidden is permissible; that's why so many ToS go out of their way to specifically limit as much as possible, or even say things along the lines of "the user has no rights to the product except as specifically permitted in these terms," or some such thing. I do think established accepted practices concerning fair use would tend to grant the user certain rights in this instance, which the terms would have to specifically deny in order for the user not to have them, and the terms don't specify that.
Ok, so Apple doesn't specifically provide in the ToS a definition of "circumvention" that addresses ripping CDs burned from the files. There are a lot of terms it doesn't define, and believe me, if they seriously forbade people from doing it, they'd add a simple statement to the effect of "you may not use CDs burned from the files to make MP3s, unprotected AACs, Ogg Vorbis files, etc."
Can you legally burn zillions of CDs and hand them out to random strangers in the street? No. Guess what? You can't legally do that with music you buy on ordinary CDs, either.
Only if you don't want to go to the trouble of copying it yourself. You can put your purchases on up to three machines you authorize to play them, and from the info today it seems that includes whatever mix of Macs and PCs you want; you can move files from one comp to another with impunity. Just copy the music you bought at home to your portable storage thingie of choice and take them with you to the office and copy them to your work PC.
As Steve said back in March when introducing the iTMS, "We'll download it to one machine; you have to move it to the other two." If Apple let people download their purchases more than once, lots of people would opt to do it simply out of convenience, and Apple would inevitably spend tons of bandwidth serving up the same track 50 times to the same person for just one payment. Their attitude is that it's the same as any other purchase; once somebody buys a track and gets it from them, it's that customer's responsibility to keep it, put it where he/she wants, prevent it from getting damaged, etc., in sort of the same way Sam Goody won't replace your CD once you get it home and drop a bowling ball on it.
Apple doesn't mind you copying the tracks from one comp to another (as long as you don't put them on a total of more than three, and that's why they have the DRM); they just don't want to do it for you.
They mean, of course, that there isn't an extra fee to be able to burn CDs with iTMS purchases as there is with music from some of the other services (and also that it's a free app that will burn and encode your other, non-iTMS music - iTunes is a whole player/ripper/organizing/etc. app for all the other music you already have, not just the thing you use to access the iTunes Music Store, and you can get iTunes and use it for free, without ever having to buy anything from Apple).
That includes QuickTime 6.4, of course.
And yet amazingly, Apple itself supports Hebrew, as do numerous third-party developers of Mac software that aren't Microsoft (and have a small fraction of its resources). If they can all support Hebrew, why can't the larger, more resource-laden MS???
According to the California laws that were challenged thus getting this whole issue going in the first place, it was compulsory. And yes, I agree it's wrong for it to be so.
Well, heck - haven't all the Slashdotters with 5-or-fewer-digit ID #s long since invested in those already?
;)
Is there anything wrong with not saying it? What if the kids don't believe what they're saying? Perhaps you think they should be... made to. Brrrr...
For that matter, is patriotism so essential and good that we must mandate it? Should people be forced to love America? Can one force genuine, heartfelt patriotic sentiment, even? If the students are being made to pledge their allegiance, what value do their pledges really have? It appears to me the main "value" in forced recitations isn't to provide an avenue of expression for all those 8-year-olds' preexisting strongly-felt patriotism for which they simply can't find their own words, but rather to inculcate such sentiments in them. Is it desirable to stir such feelings in the youth? Maybe, but by forced indoctrination?
Nothing like fascism, though.
Well, for starters, the set of laws objected to by the atheist whose objections to having his daughter recite the Pledge got this ball rolling in the first place say as much, according to the original court ruling:
That's the law there. According to some news coverage of the issue, there are similar laws in other localities.
Those that somehow bring slavery into this discussion lose site of the relative magnitude and importance of each of the issues--especially their impact on those "affected."
I never made any claims about the relative magnitude and importance of the issues; of course slavery had a worse effect than coerced recitation of the Pledge. That's not the point, though - the principles are the same. In both instances a minority is unjustly made to do something by the majority. I can't agree just because 51%, 99%, or any percentage of the people in between believes in God, gives them the right to make the schoolchildren of the remaining people recite a pledge making a (completely superfluous) reference to God and avowing His existence. Nobody is making Christian kids swear oaths avowing the existence of Zeus or Shiva; why should kids who don't believe in God be forced to make pledges acknowledging His existence? If yours were the minority belief system, woud you want your kids made to recite a pledge acknowledging some deity you don't recognize?
Oh? The 1954 law that codified the current, God-invoking Pledge as the official Pledge of Allegiance certainly respected an establishment of religion - the whole point of the law was to add an explicit reference to a divine being to an already-existing pledge that remained otherwise unchanged. If that law didn't "respect an establishment of religion," just what did it do???
Moreover, there are laws requiring kids to recite the Pledge (at the local/regional/state levels, though, not nationally), and they make reference to the standard pledge as codified in the '50s by the Congressional act.
No, there's no law decreeing an official national religion, but the rest does exist.
But there's a real reason to play the Mexican national anthem in Mexico, obviously. There's no similarly compelling reason to make US elementary schoolkids avow the existence of God. It's completely extraneous. Sure, schoolkids should respect one another's beliefs, but why should the state make an issue of forcing the kids to state their beliefs, even if held by the majority of them (and especially when not universally shared)?
I agree no one has a "right" not to hear God mentioned in everyday life. I don't agree no one has a right not to be coerced into making a pledge avowing the existence of God. There's a difference. It's one thing if others want to mention God around other people; it's quite another to force those other people to make pledges referring to Him.
So what if 90% of the citizens of the United States want to leave it as it is now? Why should they be able to dictate how or what the remaining 10%'s kids pledge allegiance to? Should sheer majority rule have decided whether or not slavery was to be permitted?
Mind you, I think an involuntary pledge of allegiance (which it is, for many) is wrong whether it refers to God or not; I'd rather see the whole thing done away with, or at least made optional...
I think the official meme has always been "up to twice as fast" (insert alternative value of choice for "twice"), which keeps it fair. The two platforms perform differently for different applications, obviously, and a given PC might outperform a given Mac at one thing, while the same Mac outperforms that same PC at something else.
Moreover, lots of Mac people I've come across were certainly conceding PCs were faster on the whole long before the beginning of 2003, though. Not in 1999, mind you, but back then, it was "up to twice as fast" (or up to thrice as fast, or as fast, or whatever) as the fastest PCs - depending on what one was doing with it. ;)
You obviously haven't been paying attention. The Mac world stopped crowing about the G4's superiority over other systems once it became clear it no longer was (if it had been to begin with), i.e., as the MHz gap got wider and wider. Prior to the G5 intro at WWDC, Steve hadn't run one of his keynote Photoshop bake-offs in a while; even he wasn't claiming dual ~1 GHz G4 systems were faster than what the Wintel world could offer. Many people pointed out (correctly) that there was still a MHz myth and that the Macs weren't as slower than the Wintel systems as the numbers might imply, but on the whole, most Mac people were certainly conceding at the beginning of this year that the fastest PCs were faster than the fastest Macs.
It's been known longer than that, actually - the novelization of the original movie has a prologue discussing the rise of an ambitious senator named Palpatine who eventually made himself Emperor, and that novelization was first published in November of 1976 , a good six months before even the actual original movie itself came out.
Touche.
Let's see... the story has the M$ BillBorg, the Tech/IT mobo, security, and business icons - but where's the Python foot for humor??
Right, but the mandates not to mess with the DRM very clearly apply to the AAC files you buy and download from Apple, not to burned CDs you make from those files. All the language concerning what you can do with the DRMed files is specific to those, not to CDs; as far as Apple is concerned, CDs you burn with the files are like any other CD - the DRM protects the AAC files and affords just enough of a limited protection to make it difficult to be bad with them without specifically cracking the DRM, which is both forbidden and difficult; once you have audio CDs, though, it's incumbent upon the buyer to stay within the same legal boundaries he/she would have to with any other audio CD of copyrighted material. If making rips from CDs burned from the files weren't allowed, you can be sure the ToS would be quite specific about it.