User error that was enabled by terrible design decisions by Apple. When Windows had stupid default settings that made it easy to get infected by just visiting a web page or viewing an email, Microsoft appropriately got blamed even though users theoretically could have become network security experts and disabled the dangerous features. Same thing here.
US manufacturing output is at a record high (PDF). It's true that fewer Americans are employed in the manufacturing sector, because efficiency has increased so much. This is good, for the same reasons that free software is good.
Sure, but that only says that Congress *can* establish copyrights, not that they *must*. Congress can also declare war, but it's not our god-given duty to invade Paraguay. We could abolish all copyright tomorrow and it would be perfectly constitutional. (Although there might be 5th Amendment takings issues which would require compensating holders of existing copyrights).
Thanks to this incident, it is highly improbable that Apple will ever be able to come out with something innovative and new that is a success ever again... because if they try to, a lot of people will hesitate to buy it right away, thinking that perhaps Apple might lower their price in the not-too-distant future.
Yes, that certainly explains the failure of every single other technology product.
Actually, Ashcroft was a right-wing asshole, with nothing better to do then go after sick people smoking weed (*gasp*, the horror!) but even he had misgivings about the direction this administration is taking civil rights and law enforcement.
Ashcroft is an interesting case. Here he is 10 years ago opposing the Clinton administration's encryption restrictions:
The protections of the Fourth Amendment are clear. The right to protection from unlawful searches is an indivisible American value. Two hundred years of court decisions have stood in defense of this fundamental right. The state's interest in effective crime-fighting should never vitiate the citizens' Bill of Rights.
It's quite possible that he resigned because under Bush he ended up having to defend a lot of policies that he didn't want to.
Think of it this way, today the popular shows are subsidizing the niche (good) shows, with ala carte the niche shows will have to survive with just their own audiences.
But survival at a higher price can be better than death. Firefly might still be around if fans could have voted with their wallets.
and its entirely because of people like him that we have DRM
Piracy is just the excuse for attempting to eradicate fair use and first sale rights. Exhibit A: region coding. By definition all it can do is *increase* piracy by making legitimate copies unavailable.
For example do you consider it a drain that you have to pay for clothes, food, cars, houses, etc? No because you factor it in.
And if food and cars were free, we would be better off, because we could use the resources we spend on them for other things instead. This is true even taking into account the temporary losses that farmers and automakers would suffer. Paying money for stuff isn't the engine of economic growth; having stuff available is. See the broken window fallacy.
That's lying with numbers. Note that what the Wikipedia article states is household income. Median income per adult is a paltry $23,500.
Source? Comparison to other countries?
And this is before paying for what other countries have already paid for, like healthcare and schooling.
Most Americans don't pay directly for healthcare either. (It's provided through employers which is truly idiotic, but that's a separate rant). Are the higher taxes for the "free" services accounted for?
There's little left for paying for things like advanced technology for most Americans.
That's just silly. iPods, broadband, and Xboxes are not remotely confined to upper classes.
Here in the US, 40% of the population gets distributed less than 1% of the wealth (while the top 1% controls 38% of all wealth).
Irrelevant; if the rich get richer, that doesn't change the median.
Lobbying congress to stop them imposing stricter fuel restrictions has meant that many US made cars are illegal everywhere else in the world. Anybody who doesn't like it can damn well buy something else... so they do. In huge numbers.
Erm, so your theory is that masses of buyers want fuel-efficient cars but Detroit petulantly refuses to build them? The percentage of SUVs I'm looking at out my window right now casts some doubt on that. If we really cared about fuel efficiency, there would be no need for a federal mandate. But by and large, we don't.
also the capitalist system's propensity for ending up with very few and very large companies with near-monopolies or oligopolies in their areas
That may be a necessary condition for poor options, but it's not sufficient. Intel and AMD are essentially a duopoly, but they compete fiercely and we benefit from better products and lower prices as a result. For some reason that doesn't happen with telecoms.
I'm not suggesting that the article is right about everything, or even that it meets genuine scientific standards, but it seems some people are almost ready to go back to creationism rather than realistically face questions about human nature.
Liberals: believe in evolution but not biology Conservatives: believe in biology but not evolution
Don't remember where I came across that, but it's often accurate.
My hope is that the iPhone would bring into the limelight how restrictive all mobile phone service providers are. They do nothing but restrict progress and rip off the consumer.
Exactly right, I was hoping Apple would challenge the system. The iPhone has the potential to be a fantastic mobile computer, but Apple is apparently willing to let AT&T call the shots and just split the profits.
No. Just different restrictions and different currency. The GPL's currency is limiting one's behavior on the one hand, and expecting certain behaviors (such as returning modifications) on the other. Either you pay in these currencies, or you can't use the product.
That's just wrong. You don't have to do anything to use GPLed software. You do have to abide by its conditions if you want to modify or redistribute it, but you typically can't do that at all with proprietary software, even after you've paid for the ability to use it. Your rights under the GPL are a strict superset of your rights under normal copyright, and your rights under proprietary licenses are almost always a strict subset.
You may ask, what about your right to hack your Tivo? I'd respond, what about their right to attempt to prevent their product from being hacked? They are equivalent freedoms.
Before the DMCA, I'd have agreed. Ideally Tivo could cripple their product however they wanted, and I could buy it (at which point it becomes *my* product) and uncripple it. But thanks to the DMCA that makes me a criminal, so the freedoms are not equivalent and the only way to restore balance is to prevent Tivo from using free software to enforce control of my hardware.
Likewise, watermarked mp3s enable the tracking of data
How? Keep them on computers that you control, and nothing is tracked. (Other than that you bought the songs in the first place, and that happens regardless of watermarking).
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User error that was enabled by terrible design decisions by Apple. When Windows had stupid default settings that made it easy to get infected by just visiting a web page or viewing an email, Microsoft appropriately got blamed even though users theoretically could have become network security experts and disabled the dangerous features. Same thing here.
US manufacturing output is at a record high (PDF). It's true that fewer Americans are employed in the manufacturing sector, because efficiency has increased so much. This is good, for the same reasons that free software is good.
Sure, but that only says that Congress *can* establish copyrights, not that they *must*. Congress can also declare war, but it's not our god-given duty to invade Paraguay. We could abolish all copyright tomorrow and it would be perfectly constitutional. (Although there might be 5th Amendment takings issues which would require compensating holders of existing copyrights).
The difference would be that Google was rendering their customers' purchases completely useless, while an iPhone from June works perfectly well today.
Thanks to this incident, it is highly improbable that Apple will ever be able to come out with something innovative and new that is a success ever again... because if they try to, a lot of people will hesitate to buy it right away, thinking that perhaps Apple might lower their price in the not-too-distant future.
Yes, that certainly explains the failure of every single other technology product.
I'm with you. Let's all mail Steve and see if we can get a $50 credit to compensate for the $100 savings that he stole from us.
I had to click on the main view to remove focus from the text fields, then Command-option-A worked.
She'll take whatever issue is popular at any given moment and run with it.
Yeah, but that's the problem. Catching terrorists is popular; civil liberties, not so much.
Ashcroft is an interesting case. Here he is 10 years ago opposing the Clinton administration's encryption restrictions:
It's quite possible that he resigned because under Bush he ended up having to defend a lot of policies that he didn't want to.
Think of it this way, today the popular shows are subsidizing the niche (good) shows, with ala carte the niche shows will have to survive with just their own audiences.
But survival at a higher price can be better than death. Firefly might still be around if fans could have voted with their wallets.
and its entirely because of people like him that we have DRM
Piracy is just the excuse for attempting to eradicate fair use and first sale rights. Exhibit A: region coding. By definition all it can do is *increase* piracy by making legitimate copies unavailable.
For example do you consider it a drain that you have to pay for clothes, food, cars, houses, etc? No because you factor it in.
And if food and cars were free, we would be better off, because we could use the resources we spend on them for other things instead. This is true even taking into account the temporary losses that farmers and automakers would suffer. Paying money for stuff isn't the engine of economic growth; having stuff available is. See the broken window fallacy.
That's lying with numbers. Note that what the Wikipedia article states is household income. Median income per adult is a paltry $23,500.
Source? Comparison to other countries?
And this is before paying for what other countries have already paid for, like healthcare and schooling.
Most Americans don't pay directly for healthcare either. (It's provided through employers which is truly idiotic, but that's a separate rant). Are the higher taxes for the "free" services accounted for?
There's little left for paying for things like advanced technology for most Americans.
That's just silly. iPods, broadband, and Xboxes are not remotely confined to upper classes.
Here in the US, 40% of the population gets distributed less than 1% of the wealth (while the top 1% controls 38% of all wealth).
Irrelevant; if the rich get richer, that doesn't change the median.
Lobbying congress to stop them imposing stricter fuel restrictions has meant that many US made cars are illegal everywhere else in the world. Anybody who doesn't like it can damn well buy something else... so they do. In huge numbers.
Erm, so your theory is that masses of buyers want fuel-efficient cars but Detroit petulantly refuses to build them? The percentage of SUVs I'm looking at out my window right now casts some doubt on that. If we really cared about fuel efficiency, there would be no need for a federal mandate. But by and large, we don't.
The median income in the US is way lower than other Western countries.
No.
also the capitalist system's propensity for ending up with very few and very large companies with near-monopolies or oligopolies in their areas
That may be a necessary condition for poor options, but it's not sufficient. Intel and AMD are essentially a duopoly, but they compete fiercely and we benefit from better products and lower prices as a result. For some reason that doesn't happen with telecoms.
I'm not suggesting that the article is right about everything, or even that it meets genuine scientific standards, but it seems some people are almost ready to go back to creationism rather than realistically face questions about human nature.
Liberals: believe in evolution but not biology
Conservatives: believe in biology but not evolution
Don't remember where I came across that, but it's often accurate.
My hope is that the iPhone would bring into the limelight how restrictive all mobile phone service providers are. They do nothing but restrict progress and rip off the consumer.
Exactly right, I was hoping Apple would challenge the system. The iPhone has the potential to be a fantastic mobile computer, but Apple is apparently willing to let AT&T call the shots and just split the profits.
Looking Apple's recent market share and stock price, I'll go with a "no" on that.
No native apps means you don't have to be scared to death of running a new app on your phone.
If somebody stole my car, I wouldn't have to worry about getting into an accident, but I wouldn't be thanking him.
Besides, after Wickard v. Filburn , all commerce is interstate commerce.
And after Raich, all non-commerce is interstate commerce.
what significant advantage do people imagine a "more native" dev kit would have?
Offline usage, local storage, and unrestricted networking for starters.
No. Just different restrictions and different currency. The GPL's currency is limiting one's behavior on the one hand, and expecting certain behaviors (such as returning modifications) on the other. Either you pay in these currencies, or you can't use the product.
That's just wrong. You don't have to do anything to use GPLed software. You do have to abide by its conditions if you want to modify or redistribute it, but you typically can't do that at all with proprietary software, even after you've paid for the ability to use it. Your rights under the GPL are a strict superset of your rights under normal copyright, and your rights under proprietary licenses are almost always a strict subset.
You may ask, what about your right to hack your Tivo? I'd respond, what about their right to attempt to prevent their product from being hacked? They are equivalent freedoms.
Before the DMCA, I'd have agreed. Ideally Tivo could cripple their product however they wanted, and I could buy it (at which point it becomes *my* product) and uncripple it. But thanks to the DMCA that makes me a criminal, so the freedoms are not equivalent and the only way to restore balance is to prevent Tivo from using free software to enforce control of my hardware.
Today is the first day of the death of DRM. Be happy. Applaud those involved.
Well said. This is a huge win, and it would be nice if we didn't screw it up.
Likewise, watermarked mp3s enable the tracking of data
How? Keep them on computers that you control, and nothing is tracked. (Other than that you bought the songs in the first place, and that happens regardless of watermarking).