According to IMDB, it'll be coming out in Australia on May 26th. Here in Denmark, it doesn't come out until June 3rd, and the Czechs don't get it until August 18th...
Apple's support techs recently seem to be somewhat lax on checking for warranty information. Sometimes if you call up with a minor question, they'll take it without asking for your AppleCare information. I've done that one or two times (though I have an AppleCare contract, so it's not that big of a deal).
As for some techs sounding like they're reading off a sheet, that can be true now. However, I've had excellent experience with just moving up the chain of command. Apple techs generally seem more willing to bring someone else into the conversation, like a supervisor, than many other companies. This particularly held true for me during the snafu over the shipment of the delayed GeForce 6800 cards. Oftentimes just by asking once, I'd get someone higher up the chain who could answer my question.
You can also see it as partially financing the iTunes Music Store. After all, they take a slim margin, if not a downright loss, in order to sell iPods and the like.
Yeah, I agree. What Mom and Pop computer stores need is more people calling up asking why little Jimmy's Christmas gift of a new computer won't run any of the games they bought for him at Wal-Mart. They definitely have the time to tell Jimmy's parents about the great wonders of Linux on the desktop and how it's much better than that Windows that most everyone else runs.
Note, however, that the US (since Slashdot is US-centric, I'll assume that you're American for the moment) is not in fact a democracy, but a democratic republic. If we were, in fact, a complete democracy, the public could decide the laws. However, in a democratic republic, the democracy extends only to the point where we elect our representatives. These representatives then make the laws, not the general public. If these representatives don't make the laws we want, our recourse is to vote them out at the next election.
So, if enough people do something illegally, we should automatically make it legal, or at least encourage even more people to do it illegally? I think you'd be hard pressed to find any legitimate justification for that.
90% profit for iTunes? Try 10% profit at most. The royalties to record labels are 65%, and an additional 25% goes to such costs as bandwidth and credit card processing. The remaining 10% is unlikely to be pure profit, once you have to start paying people to manage the store. Also, with regards to it being cheaper to buy the CD, sometimes I just want one or two specific songs from an album, or want to create a mix CD with songs from an artist's many albums. That way, it becomes cheaper to buy songs on iTunes instead of multiple CDs or a whole CD for one song.
A free market doesn't guarantee you unlimited means of purchase and distribution. You have the option of purchasing things through multiple means in the market, but you can't engage in illegal means of procurement solely because you don't like the existing options.
There was no such claim being made. A service can quite well fulfill the demands of the public, and be perfectly legal. However, if the demands of the public happen to be for product they should reasonably suspect is illegal, I feel little sympathy for them when they find out that, surprise of surprises, it might actually be illegal.
And they have recently decided that what is happening in sudan is not genocide [cnn.com].
The problem with the term "genocide," until international law, is that it has an extremely strict definition under the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (a treaty from 1951). While the UN committee found that they couldn't strictly, under the treaty, call it genocide under international law, they did point out that serious crimes against humanity were being perpetrated in Darfur. Crimes against humanity are just as prosecutable, and in many cases easier to prove in international courts and tribunals than genocide, with quite similar punishments. The problem is in assuming that the term "genocide" has the same meaning in both international politics and law. It doesn't. International law often makes much more strict determinations of terms, because of how treaties and customary law works. It's not like Sudan is getting off easy in this matter. The Security Council is soon likely to pass (based on the report) a resolution most likely creating a tribunal to prosecute these serious crimes occurring in Darfur. You'll also note that the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda was established less than a year after the crimes there started taking place, and has since delivered convictions in cases.
With the tsunami aid effort, they were mostly concerned with holding meetings in 5 star hotels while other people did the real work.
Generally, I prefer to get my information from better sources than a blog that repeatedly uses such stellar examples of journalistic writing as the use of the terms "UNocrat," "lefties," "deranged pimply-faced trolls" (a term applied to people who disagree with them!) and "The Queen of the High Priest Vulture Elite" (referencing the UNICEF director). See for yourself! Their only source for their accusation that the UN is not providing sufficient support is an ill-defined "fact sheet" that they don't even corroborate with additional sources, nor tell where this "fact sheet" even came from. I would hope people would do much more research than just assuming that such a vitriolic blog posting is true.
The 1996 order is obsolete. Under pressure from various fronts, including Congressmen, the Clinton Administration later pushed through, in 2000, an extremely permissive encryption policy that essentially made any consumer-oriented encryption software freely available to anyone who doesn't live in a country that the US has sanctions against. The amount of regulations regarding encryption products was also substantially decreased, which has made possible freely-available strong encryption, where before even browsers had US and international versions with weaker encryption for the latter.
(Less than perfect) source: http://www.cdt.org/crypto/admin/
(Also read Steven Levy's book, "Crypto", for a good overview of the history of these regulations and Clinton's relaxing of the rules)
There's a difference between idealism and realism, and even Stallman recognizes this. Just because he wishes HURD could be used widely, he also needs to get his work done, and Linux is the closest free software alternative to what HURD is going for.
I fail to see how this directly relates to the topic in question. I would also argue that correlation does not equal causation, but I simply don't have the time right now to dissect the argument.
The plugin wasn't for Ogg on the iPod. Instead, it was a Quicktime plugin that allowed iTunes to play Ogg-encoded files, albeit with less than perfect tag editing and a noticeable delay in beginning to play the file. I have it on my computer for the few Ogg files I have remaining, but I don't think I've actually added any Ogg songs in a year or so. Simply put, I don't see any point in doing so in my case, when AAC and MP3 work just fine for what I do.
Regardless of whether you define the issue as one of "freedom of speech," it doesn't matter in the end. Freedom of speech when abridged by the government is against the Constitution, but there's nothing against companies limiting speech. Indeed, by signing an NDA, you voluntarily gave up your option to freely speak about whatever the contract covers. In return, you get yourself a job. If you speak about something covered under the NDA, you lose your job and get sued in civil court. There's not a thing I can find illegal about that.
Actually, an even more plausible reason I've seen bandied about is that, with the altitude and speed of commercial aircraft, cell phones in flight would be within range of so many cell towers, and switching between them so rapidly, that it could easily overload the system.
Well, true, form has a big effect on consumer spending, but the iPod definitely has the substance that the average consumer wants. It plays MP3s and the iTMS's AAC files, which are really all that the average consumer needs. It integrates with iTunes and downloads everything as soon as it's plugged in, which is a plus when many people would have no idea how to load music files by click-and-drag or a proprietary program used only to load music. So, in short, Apple provides an easy-to-use product with all of the features the average consumer wants, and makes it look good to them at the same time.
Frankly, I find the Zen Micro to be completely ugly. You're presented with the same problem when you're competing against Apple, who goes to great lengths and costs trying to find out exactly what people want to see. They capitalized on the customization feature of different iPod Mini colors, along with the sleek metallic design and click wheel. People are willing to pay more for the "wow" factor, not necessarily so with an FM tuner that few people would be likely to use.
Except they're not suing their own fans. They're suing someone who is likely from inside the company for leaking information. After all, how could any Average Joe find out such detailed information? It's obvious that the person who leaked the device was someone inside Apple, and anyone with that kind of access would have signed an NDA. It's simple breach of contract. They're merely serving subpoenas to rumor sites in order to get information on who the person might be. They're not suing any sites, just compelling them to release information about who the person might be. An employee becomes a real liability to the company when they start leaking pre-released device specifications to Internet sites, and who knows that he/she won't do it again with a bigger product?
I made a slight mistake in my previous message. Typing simply "quicktime" will send you to apple.com/quicktime/download/, whereas Quicktime.com goes to simply apple.com/quicktime/ (no "download" subdirectory). I thought the same thing as you at first, but it still works differently. I just tried "litigious bastards" in the address bar, and it did in fact forward me to sco.com (I'm using Firefox 1.0 final). HTTP.com brings me to an ad site, not Microsoft like "http://" does.
Not really weird. It appears that Firefox, when it doesn't recognize what you typed in the address bar as an actual address, tries to use Google's "I'm Feeling Lucky" system to get to the actual page. For instance, type "quicktime" in the address bar, and you'll get sent to apple.com/quicktime, since that's the first result on a Google search for "quicktime". The problem therefore lies in Firefox not recognizing the extra "http://" as extraneous, and instead acting like it's a search term. It just so happens that the first result for a search on "http://" with Google is Microsoft's home page.
Maybe Global Crossing doesn't want to get involved in petty Internet politics, and is more concerned about people wasting their bandwidth on the latest cause of the day, and an ethically dubious one at that? I understand that it's much easier to come up with a conspiracy theory whereby Global Crossing is protecting those evil spammers (100% of who are obviously guilty; reference the thread higher up about an art site that was added as a false positive and is losing legitimate business as a result).
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According to IMDB, it'll be coming out in Australia on May 26th. Here in Denmark, it doesn't come out until June 3rd, and the Czechs don't get it until August 18th...
Apple's support techs recently seem to be somewhat lax on checking for warranty information. Sometimes if you call up with a minor question, they'll take it without asking for your AppleCare information. I've done that one or two times (though I have an AppleCare contract, so it's not that big of a deal).
As for some techs sounding like they're reading off a sheet, that can be true now. However, I've had excellent experience with just moving up the chain of command. Apple techs generally seem more willing to bring someone else into the conversation, like a supervisor, than many other companies. This particularly held true for me during the snafu over the shipment of the delayed GeForce 6800 cards. Oftentimes just by asking once, I'd get someone higher up the chain who could answer my question.
You can also see it as partially financing the iTunes Music Store. After all, they take a slim margin, if not a downright loss, in order to sell iPods and the like.
Yeah, I agree. What Mom and Pop computer stores need is more people calling up asking why little Jimmy's Christmas gift of a new computer won't run any of the games they bought for him at Wal-Mart. They definitely have the time to tell Jimmy's parents about the great wonders of Linux on the desktop and how it's much better than that Windows that most everyone else runs.
But all new consumer Macs come pre-loaded with Quicken already on them...even my iBook from two years ago has it on there.
Note, however, that the US (since Slashdot is US-centric, I'll assume that you're American for the moment) is not in fact a democracy, but a democratic republic. If we were, in fact, a complete democracy, the public could decide the laws. However, in a democratic republic, the democracy extends only to the point where we elect our representatives. These representatives then make the laws, not the general public. If these representatives don't make the laws we want, our recourse is to vote them out at the next election.
So, if enough people do something illegally, we should automatically make it legal, or at least encourage even more people to do it illegally? I think you'd be hard pressed to find any legitimate justification for that.
90% profit for iTunes? Try 10% profit at most. The royalties to record labels are 65%, and an additional 25% goes to such costs as bandwidth and credit card processing. The remaining 10% is unlikely to be pure profit, once you have to start paying people to manage the store. Also, with regards to it being cheaper to buy the CD, sometimes I just want one or two specific songs from an album, or want to create a mix CD with songs from an artist's many albums. That way, it becomes cheaper to buy songs on iTunes instead of multiple CDs or a whole CD for one song.
0 4/1204webs.html
Source for percentages: http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/WEBONLY/resource/dec
A free market doesn't guarantee you unlimited means of purchase and distribution. You have the option of purchasing things through multiple means in the market, but you can't engage in illegal means of procurement solely because you don't like the existing options.
There was no such claim being made. A service can quite well fulfill the demands of the public, and be perfectly legal. However, if the demands of the public happen to be for product they should reasonably suspect is illegal, I feel little sympathy for them when they find out that, surprise of surprises, it might actually be illegal.
And they have recently decided that what is happening in sudan is not genocide [cnn.com].
The problem with the term "genocide," until international law, is that it has an extremely strict definition under the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (a treaty from 1951). While the UN committee found that they couldn't strictly, under the treaty, call it genocide under international law, they did point out that serious crimes against humanity were being perpetrated in Darfur. Crimes against humanity are just as prosecutable, and in many cases easier to prove in international courts and tribunals than genocide, with quite similar punishments. The problem is in assuming that the term "genocide" has the same meaning in both international politics and law. It doesn't. International law often makes much more strict determinations of terms, because of how treaties and customary law works. It's not like Sudan is getting off easy in this matter. The Security Council is soon likely to pass (based on the report) a resolution most likely creating a tribunal to prosecute these serious crimes occurring in Darfur. You'll also note that the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda was established less than a year after the crimes there started taking place, and has since delivered convictions in cases.
With the tsunami aid effort, they were mostly concerned with holding meetings in 5 star hotels while other people did the real work.
Generally, I prefer to get my information from better sources than a blog that repeatedly uses such stellar examples of journalistic writing as the use of the terms "UNocrat," "lefties," "deranged pimply-faced trolls" (a term applied to people who disagree with them!) and "The Queen of the High Priest Vulture Elite" (referencing the UNICEF director). See for yourself! Their only source for their accusation that the UN is not providing sufficient support is an ill-defined "fact sheet" that they don't even corroborate with additional sources, nor tell where this "fact sheet" even came from. I would hope people would do much more research than just assuming that such a vitriolic blog posting is true.
The 1996 order is obsolete. Under pressure from various fronts, including Congressmen, the Clinton Administration later pushed through, in 2000, an extremely permissive encryption policy that essentially made any consumer-oriented encryption software freely available to anyone who doesn't live in a country that the US has sanctions against. The amount of regulations regarding encryption products was also substantially decreased, which has made possible freely-available strong encryption, where before even browsers had US and international versions with weaker encryption for the latter.
(Less than perfect) source: http://www.cdt.org/crypto/admin/ (Also read Steven Levy's book, "Crypto", for a good overview of the history of these regulations and Clinton's relaxing of the rules)
I bet that if they redirected the DNS to your server's IP, you wouldn't be referring to it as a "null address."
There's a difference between idealism and realism, and even Stallman recognizes this. Just because he wishes HURD could be used widely, he also needs to get his work done, and Linux is the closest free software alternative to what HURD is going for.
I fail to see how this directly relates to the topic in question. I would also argue that correlation does not equal causation, but I simply don't have the time right now to dissect the argument.
The plugin wasn't for Ogg on the iPod. Instead, it was a Quicktime plugin that allowed iTunes to play Ogg-encoded files, albeit with less than perfect tag editing and a noticeable delay in beginning to play the file. I have it on my computer for the few Ogg files I have remaining, but I don't think I've actually added any Ogg songs in a year or so. Simply put, I don't see any point in doing so in my case, when AAC and MP3 work just fine for what I do.
Regardless of whether you define the issue as one of "freedom of speech," it doesn't matter in the end. Freedom of speech when abridged by the government is against the Constitution, but there's nothing against companies limiting speech. Indeed, by signing an NDA, you voluntarily gave up your option to freely speak about whatever the contract covers. In return, you get yourself a job. If you speak about something covered under the NDA, you lose your job and get sued in civil court. There's not a thing I can find illegal about that.
Actually, an even more plausible reason I've seen bandied about is that, with the altitude and speed of commercial aircraft, cell phones in flight would be within range of so many cell towers, and switching between them so rapidly, that it could easily overload the system.
Well, true, form has a big effect on consumer spending, but the iPod definitely has the substance that the average consumer wants. It plays MP3s and the iTMS's AAC files, which are really all that the average consumer needs. It integrates with iTunes and downloads everything as soon as it's plugged in, which is a plus when many people would have no idea how to load music files by click-and-drag or a proprietary program used only to load music. So, in short, Apple provides an easy-to-use product with all of the features the average consumer wants, and makes it look good to them at the same time.
Frankly, I find the Zen Micro to be completely ugly. You're presented with the same problem when you're competing against Apple, who goes to great lengths and costs trying to find out exactly what people want to see. They capitalized on the customization feature of different iPod Mini colors, along with the sleek metallic design and click wheel. People are willing to pay more for the "wow" factor, not necessarily so with an FM tuner that few people would be likely to use.
Except they're not suing their own fans. They're suing someone who is likely from inside the company for leaking information. After all, how could any Average Joe find out such detailed information? It's obvious that the person who leaked the device was someone inside Apple, and anyone with that kind of access would have signed an NDA. It's simple breach of contract. They're merely serving subpoenas to rumor sites in order to get information on who the person might be. They're not suing any sites, just compelling them to release information about who the person might be. An employee becomes a real liability to the company when they start leaking pre-released device specifications to Internet sites, and who knows that he/she won't do it again with a bigger product?
I'm a Mac user, and I even know better than that.
I made a slight mistake in my previous message. Typing simply "quicktime" will send you to apple.com/quicktime/download/, whereas Quicktime.com goes to simply apple.com/quicktime/ (no "download" subdirectory). I thought the same thing as you at first, but it still works differently. I just tried "litigious bastards" in the address bar, and it did in fact forward me to sco.com (I'm using Firefox 1.0 final). HTTP.com brings me to an ad site, not Microsoft like "http://" does.
Not really weird. It appears that Firefox, when it doesn't recognize what you typed in the address bar as an actual address, tries to use Google's "I'm Feeling Lucky" system to get to the actual page. For instance, type "quicktime" in the address bar, and you'll get sent to apple.com/quicktime, since that's the first result on a Google search for "quicktime". The problem therefore lies in Firefox not recognizing the extra "http://" as extraneous, and instead acting like it's a search term. It just so happens that the first result for a search on "http://" with Google is Microsoft's home page.
Maybe Global Crossing doesn't want to get involved in petty Internet politics, and is more concerned about people wasting their bandwidth on the latest cause of the day, and an ethically dubious one at that? I understand that it's much easier to come up with a conspiracy theory whereby Global Crossing is protecting those evil spammers (100% of who are obviously guilty; reference the thread higher up about an art site that was added as a false positive and is losing legitimate business as a result).