If you find a wallet on the street and keep the money, it's theft. If you take something that has some value and that does not belong to you, it's theft. I am not sure I understand your chair example -- if the chair is in the way, you can just move it from the spot and park there without committing theft.
In this case, I don't understand what the controversy is about. Computer crime laws are very clear-cut. You can hack your own computer. You can tell the company about the vulnerability. You cannot hack someone else's computer. Nobody here would think that it's OK to walk into someone else's poorly-secured house, sleep on their couch, and vandalize their property. Why is the same thing OK on the Internet? If anything, the guy deserves a much more severe punishment.
"Effective supply chain management" is a bullshit buzzword used by consulting companies. If your logistics costs dominate your expenses, it makes sense to minimize them, but there is only so much you can gain. Anyone can have a good supply chain. Far from anyone can obtain Dell's volumes.
Without the volume, you have zero leverage on your supplier. Think about it. If Supplier A sells 70% of their product to Dell, Dell will have 100% of the leverage and the others will have nothing. No company would ever say no to a customer responsible for 70% of their income. Dell can basically dictate prices and schedules. The same model is used by Wal-mart. Focusing on supply chain issues is myopic at best.
Even if it's powdered, the lead is still INSIDE the glass. It's not going to be poisoning your drinking water. And there are milligrams of it in there anyway.
I really don't think Chipworks would risk a multibillion dollar DMCA lawsuit, so it is highly unlikely that they would have been able to help Huang, even if he did manage to raise a few million bucks. In addition, I don't think they would have the capability to extract the key from a well-protected circuit. The main deterrent is that it would have cost a few million bucks and that it is completely illegal.
Information is value, if you can't see the point in cracking pay-TV and with-holding the information then I'm not going to explain it to you
The only purpose for cracking a pay-TV system is to steal service. If the information is not widely available, then the integrity of the system has not really been breached.
As for the two attacks you linked to: they are highly theoretical, apply largely to smartcards, and are trivial to guard against. For example, the processor could be reset or even destroyed by a supervisor circuit if the supply voltages or clocks are out of specification. Tilt bits and hardware checksums could be used to guard against data corruption due to external influences. Design measures could be used to effectively guard against microprobing or surface attacks.
There is no compelling reason that a "tamper-proof" chip cannot be broken. The only limit is how much it costs.
Cannot be broken by anyone? Maybe not. Cannot be broken without spending a few million bucks? Sure. Really, the chip is pretty much unbreakable if it costs more to break it than it does to just steal the keys directly from the manufacturer. Industrial espionage is often a much more practical solution.
The bus-snooping paper about the xbox mentions that taking the key directly was one considered approach that they didn't go with due to cost.
I am sure they considered the approach, but just saying it was due to "cost" doesn't even begin to describe it. Really, I don't think it would even be possible. Even a high resolution 10-foot wide plot of a digital chip looks like a jumbled mess. Those things are automatically synthesized and routed. I've seen them and it's not pretty -- even the designer probably couldn't find the key by looking at the layout. If you think you'll see anything useful with an electron microscope, you are deluding yourself.
As for whether or not keys have been compromised in the wild - I would assume that they have been, and I would assume that the information has not been released publically.
I fail to see the basis for your assumptions. There is no reason for anyone to crack satellite or cable receivers and not tell anyone about it.
The only reason those players use FPGAs and CPLDs is because they were basically rushed to market and cost was not a consideration. The 2-3 years it takes for the players to reach the $100-$150 level is basically the time it takes to replace all the standard chips with specialized ones. Of course, these days, it is much easier to transition an FPGA design to an ASIC -- you can recompile it with ASIC tools, add boundary scan capabilities, redo the verification steps, and send it off to a fab.
DVD players are now so cheap here that you can't give them away (about £30 last time I looked).
DVD players are that cheap BECAUSE they use ASICs and ASSPs. A DVD player typically consists of one or two application-specific VLSI chips, each of which costs 1-3 dollars to produce. If you tried to implement this using off-the-shelf DSPs and general-purpose chips, a DVD player would cost thousands of dollars.
But we're not talking about a common ASIC for each player - you've twisted the GPs point. We're talking about a unique ASIC for each player, and making runs of 1 ASIC would be unimaginably expensive.
Who in their right mind would do that? You can easily make a chip with OTP fuses or a secure EEPROM area if you want to give each one a unique key. But even if all of them have the same key, it would be pretty much impossible to extract.
Reading keys off with a microscope has been done. That is how the 2048bit Xbox private key was compromised.
Uh, no. The Xbox was cracked by snooping on unencrypted bus traffic on the LDT bus. The guy did try to decap the chip, but could not see anything other than the top metallization layer (which was mostly power distribution lines).
Nobody has ever made a tamper-proof device.
How many cable boxes, smartcards, or satellite TV/radio systems have been seriously compromised? I am not counting the primitive card-cloning/emulation schemes, but rather obtaining the actual encryption keys.
DRM cannot work unless the the secret keys are available in plaintext.
Embedded within a chip is not exactly plaintext. I don't think a single hardware encryption chip has ever been compromised. They have been bypassed, and software players have been cracked, but I don't ever remember someone extracting keys from hardware.
The SAT is more about being fast than being right. You have about 45 seconds per problem. If you use a calculator for the easy shit, you just won't have enough time for the harder problems.
First, ASICs are not expensive. They are in fact extremely cheap to produce, and the development costs are not that high and are easily justified in a mass-market application. Nobody in their right mind would use an FPGA in a consumer application -- they are far too expensive.
Second, I don't think you will be able to read off keys with any kind of microscope. I don't think you'd be able to find out the key even if you had a complete wall-poster-size plot of the chip. I don't think you quite appreciate the complexity of a chip. Even low-end ASICs push millions of transistors these days. About the only method that can be used to steal keys is wafer probing, and that's pretty hard to do with modern chip densities.
Reading data from a flash EEPROM is even harder. Engineers who design chips are generally much smarter than people who try to break them, and there are plenty of tamperproof chips available. Most tamper-resistant chips now incorporate self-destruct features that erase the data when you try to probe the chip or screw around with its supply voltages or clocks. The industry has come a long way since the 16C84, which wasn't even intended to be tamperproof.
I am also not sure what your point is with regard to keys. Any secure system ultimately depends on the security of its keys.
They don't allow anything which could let someone easily steal test questions. I suppose the idea is that it's possible to touch-type all the questions into a TI-92 much faster than into a standard calculator. Anything with a QWERTY keyboard layout is not allowed. In fact, they have a list of the specific models of graphing calculators that are allowed on the test.
For the SAT, a calculator does not help much. A standard 4-function calculator is as useful as a fancy TI-89. Most of the problems involve logic reasoning, not brute force computational or algebraic skills. It's stuff like 101!/99! -- if you type that into a calculator, you are a moron. In fact, I think most of the problems can be done more quickly without using a calculator. The AP Calculus tests, on the other hand, benefit heavily from a TI-89 due to its algebraic capabilities. In fact, I think a TI-89 can do pretty much everything on that test.
Uh, we aren't talking about off-the-shelf hardware here I would assume. And it's not like realtime hardware MPEG2 or MPEG4 encoders don't exist or can't handle HDTV resolutions. Any TV studio probably has boxes that can handle that, and it only takes one person to pirate a movie before everyone has it. So yeah, HDCP serves a useful purpose.
I agree, that book does not really work well on its own. However, it's much better than trying to learn electronics from a circuit theory textbook or a semiconductor physics textbook. Unfortunately, I don't know of an intro book that is written at a suitable level (i.e. not for hobbyists) and is a better starting point. I certainly think it should be supplemented -- read Horowitz and Hill until you are sort of confused, then pick up a theory book to fill in the gaps. Horowitz and Hill suffer heavily from their avoidance of math and formal methods, which really hurts understanding. However, it's a decent starting point as far as identifying what exactly you need to learn.
A good way to buy good college textbooks for next to nothing is to buy older editions at half.com. Used textbooks depreciate very quickly when new editions come out.
OK, sure, it's a neat device that reaches out to people who are not good with electronics. I have nothing against it as a product, it's just more like a Lego Mindstorms kit than a microcontroller; it is rather limited in what it can do, given that it's a bytecode interpreter running on a rather underpowered microcontroller. I think your friend would be much better-off partnering with a knowledgeable engineering student, but a Stamp is fine for experimenting if you don't mind its limitations. If you don't want to learn how to program microcontrollers but want to do something with them, a Stamp kit is great. It's just that if you want to learn, you need a real microcontroller.
Never have I been asked about my GPA, ever, getting a good GPA is a waste of your time in college unless you plan on doing some grad work.
Recent college grads should list it on the resume. If you don't list it, you are essentially saying that it's less than 2.5. Have you ever been to a resume writing workshop?
I would say that GPA in school is a good indication of how successful you will be in a job. A high GPA indicates the ability to put up with bullshit you do not necessarily like in order to achieve a goal. A low GPA screams "I am a slacker". In most colleges, grade inflation is so rampant that a student with an above-average IQ can get a B average just by showing up to class and doing little or no work.
A better investment of your time is going out with the MBA friends and having a few beers.
Social skills are great, and always help, though very few CS majors actually have them. If you just want your friends to find you a job out of pity, that's all you need. If you are actually good, they might offer you an upper-level position. Being a slacker never pays off.
I am not saying that a high GPA is all you need. There are many stupid people with high GPAs. However, very few people with low GPAs are smart. Putting yourself in the second group really hurts your chances at getting a job offer from people who don't know you.
Uh, yeah. Microcontrollers != electronics. Not even close. Yeah, you can be another guy making magic 8-balls with stamps (they can't really do much more than that). Electronics is much more than that, and it honestly sounds like you don't have much of a clue. There is a lot of fun you can have with analog electronics, FPGAs, real microprocessors, and various application-specific chips. Building a simple op-amp headphone amp and understanding how it works and how to improve it is a much better learning experience.
I would start with "The Art of Electronics" by Horowitz and Hill. Jim Williams' book is pretty good reading, too (Art of analog design or something like that). If you like audio amplifiers, Douglas Self's books are absolutely awesome. In my opinion, digital design is a skill while high performance analog is an art (much more interesting and far more difficult). Of course, any engineer or serious hobbyist should be able to do both well.
If you like microcontrollers, get a digital logic textbook and learn what is inside first. Anyone who writes stuff for microcontrollers should have no trouble drawing a detailed block diagram of one. You should be able to learn to program any given 8-bit chip in a couple of days, whether it's a PIC, 8051, AVR, Z80, 68HC11, or your own design. I am pretty sure most basic stamp developers don't even know what a finite state machine is. Hence, their mortal fear of assembly or machine code. Learning electronics with basic stamps is like learning to swim in a bathtub. Not to mention, the whole point of an 8-bit microcontroller is that it's extremely cheap. Even a moderately complicated robot might have dozens of them. Paying $50 a pop defeats the point.
Uh, dude, that is why there are things in college called internships and co-op programs. Bitch about Asia all you want, but reality is that 80% people out of college have no usable skills. Lack of technical skills combined with a lack of work experience (even at a McDonalds) will guarantee that no company will give you a job. The ways to look good to an employer? Have a >3.5 GPA. Work tech support for the IT department at your university. Join a few student organizations. Find an internship or co-op. Work on free software in your spare time. Do research with a professor or two. Don't just show up to class and get Bs. That will fuck you out of a job faster than anything else.
The little caps near the expansion slots are for power decoupling. There are usually lots of them and the loss of one will not affect anything as long as it does not short out. The bigger switching converter caps near the CPU are a critical component of the switching power supply, and losing one would definitely kill the mobo and possibly the CPU. They are also the ones most likely to explode or leak, since they do a lot more work and are exposed to much higher temperatures.
That's what design patents are for, and Apple certainly has a design patent on the Shuffle (and all of their other products). Hence, Luxpro would not be allowed to sell the product in any country that recognizes US design patents. I have no idea whether or not Taiwan is one of these countries.
Actually, their stuff usually makes more sense in the long run. I can buy a cheap toaster from Wal-mart for $4, which may last two years. Or, I could buy a more expensive $40 model from Sears, which certainly won't last 20 years. What makes more sense in the long run?
Uh, more like if you steal billions of dollars, murder a few people here and there, evade taxes for several years, and piss off the president you might go to jail. It's a bit lenient, no?
So, you are saying that as a lawyer you are more useful to society than, say, a manufacturing worker or a plumber or even a janitor? Give me a break. Salary != productivity. The exceptionally high salaries paid to doctors and lawyers are mainly a result of their professional lobbies being competent at artificially restricting the supply of new entrants, rather than exceptional abilities required to do the job.
Uh, an interface that doesn't suck? I think it's been covered before, but the ipod's click wheel interface is by far the most intuitive and efficient interface. The zune's buttons feel clunky and unreliable in comparison. It's not something you notice in the store, but it definitely makes a big difference when you are actually using it.
Not to mention, I think iTunes/gtkpod sure beats the crap out of Windows media player or the hacked version of it used for Zune. Oh, and I actually feel comfortable buying from Apple, they don't have the same propensity for screwing over their customers. If you bought music from Microsoft before, you are fucked if you want to transfer it to a Zune. Sure doesn't inspire confidence, does it?
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Well, you could get a Virgin Mobile phone for $10 with no contracts or monthly fees...
If you find a wallet on the street and keep the money, it's theft. If you take something that has some value and that does not belong to you, it's theft. I am not sure I understand your chair example -- if the chair is in the way, you can just move it from the spot and park there without committing theft.
In this case, I don't understand what the controversy is about. Computer crime laws are very clear-cut. You can hack your own computer. You can tell the company about the vulnerability. You cannot hack someone else's computer. Nobody here would think that it's OK to walk into someone else's poorly-secured house, sleep on their couch, and vandalize their property. Why is the same thing OK on the Internet? If anything, the guy deserves a much more severe punishment.
"Effective supply chain management" is a bullshit buzzword used by consulting companies. If your logistics costs dominate your expenses, it makes sense to minimize them, but there is only so much you can gain. Anyone can have a good supply chain. Far from anyone can obtain Dell's volumes.
Without the volume, you have zero leverage on your supplier. Think about it. If Supplier A sells 70% of their product to Dell, Dell will have 100% of the leverage and the others will have nothing. No company would ever say no to a customer responsible for 70% of their income. Dell can basically dictate prices and schedules. The same model is used by Wal-mart. Focusing on supply chain issues is myopic at best.
Even if it's powdered, the lead is still INSIDE the glass. It's not going to be poisoning your drinking water. And there are milligrams of it in there anyway.
I really don't think Chipworks would risk a multibillion dollar DMCA lawsuit, so it is highly unlikely that they would have been able to help Huang, even if he did manage to raise a few million bucks. In addition, I don't think they would have the capability to extract the key from a well-protected circuit. The main deterrent is that it would have cost a few million bucks and that it is completely illegal.
Information is value, if you can't see the point in cracking pay-TV and with-holding the information then I'm not going to explain it to you
The only purpose for cracking a pay-TV system is to steal service. If the information is not widely available, then the integrity of the system has not really been breached.
As for the two attacks you linked to: they are highly theoretical, apply largely to smartcards, and are trivial to guard against. For example, the processor could be reset or even destroyed by a supervisor circuit if the supply voltages or clocks are out of specification. Tilt bits and hardware checksums could be used to guard against data corruption due to external influences. Design measures could be used to effectively guard against microprobing or surface attacks.
There is no compelling reason that a "tamper-proof" chip cannot be broken. The only limit is how much it costs.
Cannot be broken by anyone? Maybe not. Cannot be broken without spending a few million bucks? Sure. Really, the chip is pretty much unbreakable if it costs more to break it than it does to just steal the keys directly from the manufacturer. Industrial espionage is often a much more practical solution.
The bus-snooping paper about the xbox mentions that taking the key directly was one considered approach that they didn't go with due to cost.
I am sure they considered the approach, but just saying it was due to "cost" doesn't even begin to describe it. Really, I don't think it would even be possible. Even a high resolution 10-foot wide plot of a digital chip looks like a jumbled mess. Those things are automatically synthesized and routed. I've seen them and it's not pretty -- even the designer probably couldn't find the key by looking at the layout. If you think you'll see anything useful with an electron microscope, you are deluding yourself.
As for whether or not keys have been compromised in the wild - I would assume that they have been, and I would assume that the information has not been released publically.
I fail to see the basis for your assumptions. There is no reason for anyone to crack satellite or cable receivers and not tell anyone about it.
The only reason those players use FPGAs and CPLDs is because they were basically rushed to market and cost was not a consideration. The 2-3 years it takes for the players to reach the $100-$150 level is basically the time it takes to replace all the standard chips with specialized ones. Of course, these days, it is much easier to transition an FPGA design to an ASIC -- you can recompile it with ASIC tools, add boundary scan capabilities, redo the verification steps, and send it off to a fab.
DVD players are now so cheap here that you can't give them away (about £30 last time I looked).
DVD players are that cheap BECAUSE they use ASICs and ASSPs. A DVD player typically consists of one or two application-specific VLSI chips, each of which costs 1-3 dollars to produce. If you tried to implement this using off-the-shelf DSPs and general-purpose chips, a DVD player would cost thousands of dollars.
But we're not talking about a common ASIC for each player - you've twisted the GPs point. We're talking about a unique ASIC for each player, and making runs of 1 ASIC would be unimaginably expensive.
Who in their right mind would do that? You can easily make a chip with OTP fuses or a secure EEPROM area if you want to give each one a unique key. But even if all of them have the same key, it would be pretty much impossible to extract.
Reading keys off with a microscope has been done. That is how the 2048bit Xbox private key was compromised.
Uh, no. The Xbox was cracked by snooping on unencrypted bus traffic on the LDT bus. The guy did try to decap the chip, but could not see anything other than the top metallization layer (which was mostly power distribution lines).
Nobody has ever made a tamper-proof device.
How many cable boxes, smartcards, or satellite TV/radio systems have been seriously compromised? I am not counting the primitive card-cloning/emulation schemes, but rather obtaining the actual encryption keys.
DRM cannot work unless the the secret keys are available in plaintext.
Embedded within a chip is not exactly plaintext. I don't think a single hardware encryption chip has ever been compromised. They have been bypassed, and software players have been cracked, but I don't ever remember someone extracting keys from hardware.
The SAT is more about being fast than being right. You have about 45 seconds per problem. If you use a calculator for the easy shit, you just won't have enough time for the harder problems.
First, ASICs are not expensive. They are in fact extremely cheap to produce, and the development costs are not that high and are easily justified in a mass-market application. Nobody in their right mind would use an FPGA in a consumer application -- they are far too expensive.
Second, I don't think you will be able to read off keys with any kind of microscope. I don't think you'd be able to find out the key even if you had a complete wall-poster-size plot of the chip. I don't think you quite appreciate the complexity of a chip. Even low-end ASICs push millions of transistors these days. About the only method that can be used to steal keys is wafer probing, and that's pretty hard to do with modern chip densities.
Reading data from a flash EEPROM is even harder. Engineers who design chips are generally much smarter than people who try to break them, and there are plenty of tamperproof chips available. Most tamper-resistant chips now incorporate self-destruct features that erase the data when you try to probe the chip or screw around with its supply voltages or clocks. The industry has come a long way since the 16C84, which wasn't even intended to be tamperproof.
I am also not sure what your point is with regard to keys. Any secure system ultimately depends on the security of its keys.
They don't allow anything which could let someone easily steal test questions. I suppose the idea is that it's possible to touch-type all the questions into a TI-92 much faster than into a standard calculator. Anything with a QWERTY keyboard layout is not allowed. In fact, they have a list of the specific models of graphing calculators that are allowed on the test.
For the SAT, a calculator does not help much. A standard 4-function calculator is as useful as a fancy TI-89. Most of the problems involve logic reasoning, not brute force computational or algebraic skills. It's stuff like 101!/99! -- if you type that into a calculator, you are a moron. In fact, I think most of the problems can be done more quickly without using a calculator. The AP Calculus tests, on the other hand, benefit heavily from a TI-89 due to its algebraic capabilities. In fact, I think a TI-89 can do pretty much everything on that test.
It looks _marginally_ better? What kind of TV do you have? If you can't tell HD content from 480p, you've gotten ripped off big-time.
Uh, we aren't talking about off-the-shelf hardware here I would assume. And it's not like realtime hardware MPEG2 or MPEG4 encoders don't exist or can't handle HDTV resolutions. Any TV studio probably has boxes that can handle that, and it only takes one person to pirate a movie before everyone has it. So yeah, HDCP serves a useful purpose.
I agree, that book does not really work well on its own. However, it's much better than trying to learn electronics from a circuit theory textbook or a semiconductor physics textbook. Unfortunately, I don't know of an intro book that is written at a suitable level (i.e. not for hobbyists) and is a better starting point. I certainly think it should be supplemented -- read Horowitz and Hill until you are sort of confused, then pick up a theory book to fill in the gaps. Horowitz and Hill suffer heavily from their avoidance of math and formal methods, which really hurts understanding. However, it's a decent starting point as far as identifying what exactly you need to learn.
A good way to buy good college textbooks for next to nothing is to buy older editions at half.com. Used textbooks depreciate very quickly when new editions come out.
OK, sure, it's a neat device that reaches out to people who are not good with electronics. I have nothing against it as a product, it's just more like a Lego Mindstorms kit than a microcontroller; it is rather limited in what it can do, given that it's a bytecode interpreter running on a rather underpowered microcontroller. I think your friend would be much better-off partnering with a knowledgeable engineering student, but a Stamp is fine for experimenting if you don't mind its limitations. If you don't want to learn how to program microcontrollers but want to do something with them, a Stamp kit is great. It's just that if you want to learn, you need a real microcontroller.
Never have I been asked about my GPA, ever, getting a good GPA is a waste of your time in college unless you plan on doing some grad work.
Recent college grads should list it on the resume. If you don't list it, you are essentially saying that it's less than 2.5. Have you ever been to a resume writing workshop?
I would say that GPA in school is a good indication of how successful you will be in a job. A high GPA indicates the ability to put up with bullshit you do not necessarily like in order to achieve a goal. A low GPA screams "I am a slacker". In most colleges, grade inflation is so rampant that a student with an above-average IQ can get a B average just by showing up to class and doing little or no work.
A better investment of your time is going out with the MBA friends and having a few beers.
Social skills are great, and always help, though very few CS majors actually have them. If you just want your friends to find you a job out of pity, that's all you need. If you are actually good, they might offer you an upper-level position. Being a slacker never pays off.
I am not saying that a high GPA is all you need. There are many stupid people with high GPAs. However, very few people with low GPAs are smart. Putting yourself in the second group really hurts your chances at getting a job offer from people who don't know you.
Uh, yeah. Microcontrollers != electronics. Not even close. Yeah, you can be another guy making magic 8-balls with stamps (they can't really do much more than that). Electronics is much more than that, and it honestly sounds like you don't have much of a clue. There is a lot of fun you can have with analog electronics, FPGAs, real microprocessors, and various application-specific chips. Building a simple op-amp headphone amp and understanding how it works and how to improve it is a much better learning experience.
I would start with "The Art of Electronics" by Horowitz and Hill. Jim Williams' book is pretty good reading, too (Art of analog design or something like that). If you like audio amplifiers, Douglas Self's books are absolutely awesome. In my opinion, digital design is a skill while high performance analog is an art (much more interesting and far more difficult). Of course, any engineer or serious hobbyist should be able to do both well.
If you like microcontrollers, get a digital logic textbook and learn what is inside first. Anyone who writes stuff for microcontrollers should have no trouble drawing a detailed block diagram of one. You should be able to learn to program any given 8-bit chip in a couple of days, whether it's a PIC, 8051, AVR, Z80, 68HC11, or your own design. I am pretty sure most basic stamp developers don't even know what a finite state machine is. Hence, their mortal fear of assembly or machine code. Learning electronics with basic stamps is like learning to swim in a bathtub. Not to mention, the whole point of an 8-bit microcontroller is that it's extremely cheap. Even a moderately complicated robot might have dozens of them. Paying $50 a pop defeats the point.
Uh, dude, that is why there are things in college called internships and co-op programs. Bitch about Asia all you want, but reality is that 80% people out of college have no usable skills. Lack of technical skills combined with a lack of work experience (even at a McDonalds) will guarantee that no company will give you a job. The ways to look good to an employer? Have a >3.5 GPA. Work tech support for the IT department at your university. Join a few student organizations. Find an internship or co-op. Work on free software in your spare time. Do research with a professor or two. Don't just show up to class and get Bs. That will fuck you out of a job faster than anything else.
The little caps near the expansion slots are for power decoupling. There are usually lots of them and the loss of one will not affect anything as long as it does not short out. The bigger switching converter caps near the CPU are a critical component of the switching power supply, and losing one would definitely kill the mobo and possibly the CPU. They are also the ones most likely to explode or leak, since they do a lot more work and are exposed to much higher temperatures.
That's what design patents are for, and Apple certainly has a design patent on the Shuffle (and all of their other products). Hence, Luxpro would not be allowed to sell the product in any country that recognizes US design patents. I have no idea whether or not Taiwan is one of these countries.
Actually, their stuff usually makes more sense in the long run. I can buy a cheap toaster from Wal-mart for $4, which may last two years. Or, I could buy a more expensive $40 model from Sears, which certainly won't last 20 years. What makes more sense in the long run?
Uh, more like if you steal billions of dollars, murder a few people here and there, evade taxes for several years, and piss off the president you might go to jail. It's a bit lenient, no?
So, you are saying that as a lawyer you are more useful to society than, say, a manufacturing worker or a plumber or even a janitor? Give me a break. Salary != productivity. The exceptionally high salaries paid to doctors and lawyers are mainly a result of their professional lobbies being competent at artificially restricting the supply of new entrants, rather than exceptional abilities required to do the job.
Let me guess. You don't get out much. And you've never worked in retail.
Uh, an interface that doesn't suck? I think it's been covered before, but the ipod's click wheel interface is by far the most intuitive and efficient interface. The zune's buttons feel clunky and unreliable in comparison. It's not something you notice in the store, but it definitely makes a big difference when you are actually using it.
Not to mention, I think iTunes/gtkpod sure beats the crap out of Windows media player or the hacked version of it used for Zune. Oh, and I actually feel comfortable buying from Apple, they don't have the same propensity for screwing over their customers. If you bought music from Microsoft before, you are fucked if you want to transfer it to a Zune. Sure doesn't inspire confidence, does it?