I just bought a track... It took my credit info that was stored (my fault, I suppose) and charged it without asking even once. (I have never turned on that 1-click crap.) I (wrongly) assumed it'd go in my cart and then I could purchase it. Luckily, I intended to follow through the whole process.
I noticed that too...after the first purchase of that session, the next few went as if one-click was turned on.
During the first purchase of that logged-in session, note the checkbox in the first confirmation dialog; you can check it to confirm each purchase.
The music industry is willing to allow an all-you-can-eat subscription model for (based on memory) anywhere from $8-$15 a month. If you use portable devices that work with their DRM, you can essentially have all-you-can-eat music, all the time, even without an internet connection, for very little money.
This is why I'm saying $8-$9 is too much for a single album; when the industry is willing to do all-you-can-eat for slightly more per month. I'd be willing to pay $1-$2 to download an older album, and a few dollars more for a newer album. If the industry can make money on volume in all-you-can-eat, why can't they make money on volume for downloads a-la-carte?
I think it's because you can pay the $9 once and have the album forever. If I only buy a few albums per year, a monthly subscription is pointless and a waste of money.
As one who has never used a subscription service (I'm one of the low-volume types) I ask this: if your subscription ceases, do you still have access to the music you already downloaded?
A full album for $0.89...I was so intrigued I downloaded it just to give it a whirl... one less trip to the soda machine this month for me:)
When I downloaded that one, "Stargazer's Journey" popped up...I sampled it, and it sounds like it would be a nice soundtrack for stargazing (hence the title) so I bought that one too (not going to use the downloader though...so I did it the "hard" way).
Out of curiousity, I checked the album at iTMS...$9.99 for the same album I bought at Amazon for $5.96. $9.99 for a DRM-encumbered album, for $5.96 for a DRM-free album? Decisions, decisions!
I think I'll be checking this out more in the future.
It does present a quandry of sorts...does this balance out the Bezos' Silly Patent Machine?
Why is it that when a company like Microsoft or Oracle does some sort of lock-in or stunt like this, they're "so evil" and it's just such a demonstration of how evil they are, but when Apple does it they're just "doing what a business has to do"?
If MS or Oracle did the same, I'd hold the same opinion. If the warranty states that the manufacturer doesn't support unauthorized hacks and will void the warranty, then you do your mods at your own risk.
I try to be even-handed, even though it doesn't always turn out that way.
Regarding the whole legality of locking and unlocking...it's been said that unlocking is legal under the DMCA, which is likely why we haven't heard any lawsuits being slung about at the unlockers. However, just because it is legal doesn't obligate Apple (or any manufacturer for that matter) to support a device that has been modified outside the design parameters.
Poor Apple - people are buying things from them and then using them in ways that Apple hadn't intended! That's so totally unfair to Apple I can't believe it!
Sarcasm aside, that is exactly the same reason why unlockers shouldn't bitch if their iPhones become iBricks. They are using them in a way the manufacturer hadn't intended them to be used.
This warranty does not apply: (a) to damage caused by use with non-Apple products; (b) to damage caused by accident, abuse, misuse, flood, fire, earthquake or other external causes; (c) to damage caused by operating the product outside the permitted or intended uses described by Apple; (d) to damage caused by service (including upgrades and expansions) performed by anyone who is not a representative of Apple or an Apple Authorized Service Provider ("AASP"); (e) to a product or part that has been modified to alter functionality or capability without the written permission of Apple; (f) to consumable parts, such as batteries, unless damage has occurred due to a defect in materials or workmanship; (g) to cosmetic damage, including but not limited to scratches, dents and broken plastic on ports; or (h) if any Apple serial number has been removed or defaced.
In other words, swim at your own risk, but don't bitch to us if you get eaten by an alligator; you were told to stay out of the water.
The other option is to simply forgo the update, or re-lock it.
At present, UMG, the world's largest record company, gets 0.70 euro ($0.99) out of the 0.99 euro retail price charged by iTunes, Vivendi said.
My math puts that at 71% for UMG, 29% Apple.
I'm split on this one:
(1) If you think of it in terms of traditional retail, Apple is applying a 41% (.29 retail/.70 wholesale) markup. That sounds like a hefty markup at first, until you figure in Apple's cost of storage and delivery. While there is no "storage" and "delivery" in the traditional brick and mortar store sense, there is still server storage and bandwidth costs. I wonder what Apple's true costs (costs to music producers and IT costs to run iTMS) are on a per-track basis. Know that, and you can get a better grasp on the actual profit margin.
(2) If the deal is so bad for the producers, why did they go in on the deal in the first place?
The second point is more rhetorical, but the first one I think bears further study before deciding if the markup is excessive. Of course, getting Apple's per-track expenses will be damn near impossible so we'll have to settle for speculation and conjecture.:)
It's as speculative as some data I took recently...the data show that time travel is possible and we're about to be visited by our future selves! It's true! I only have two points but I was able to extrapolate the results.
(In other words...there's about as much solid footing for this story as there is for my time-travel theory.)
If you pull out an ID, poll workers will tell you to put it away, refusing to look at it.
That's something I have a hard time understanding. What's the harm in requiring ID to vote? What's the point in registering to vote if ID isn't checked at the polling place? Of course, your identity doesn't get tied to your vote, it just gets you in the door; check your ID, put a check mark next to your name in the voter registration list, and you are in the door, ready to vote.
It is not hard to make a voter-verifiable paper-trail voting system. Publish a database of election results that includes a unique ID generated by the voting machine for each vote. Also print that ID on a paper receipt that the voter can take home after voting. Then the voter can verify via the internet if the vote was tallied with the right party/candidate. And it will also be possible to verify the totals by downloading the full database and doing the sums yourself.
On the same paper receipt, the candidate/party that was voted on can be printed. But it is better to hash that information together with the unique ID and encrypt it using a private election key and then print the result on the receipt (e.g. as a hex string). This generates a voting receipt that, when decoded with the public key, is verifyably a receipt of a vote that should have been counted for that election.
No, no, NO!
WHY do people keep bringing up this corruption-laden idea of a take-home receipt with your vote printed on it, or some other way of verifying your vote outside the polling place?
As has been stated repeatedly here and elsewhere, taking home a receipt opens the floodgates for corruption. "Bring me a vote for Candidate XXX, and I'll pay you $10!" "Bring me a vote for Candidate XXX, or you might suffer an 'accident' in the near future."
You verify the paper ballot in the privacy of the voting booth; once verified, the ballot drops into a secure ballot box and serves as the permanent record of your vote. No name, no identifying information is on the ballot, and NO RECEIPT.
Has anyone noticed that the quality of the programming & content on television seems to be inversely proportional to the quality of the actual signal ?
Of course...as the signal quality gets better, the piss-poor programming has less to hide behind.:)
Interfaces: Verdict: OpenOffice.org, not because it is well-designed, but because Microsoft Word's changes seem pointless and upset users for no good reason.
Sounds like a lot of the UI changes in Vista, doesn't it?
Re:Good binoculars, star charts, and a red flashli
on
Entry-Level Astronomy?
·
· Score: 2, Informative
That's all very good advice.
I've take to using my binoculars more than my telescope. While I don't get the aperture with the binoculars, I do get the ease of instant set-up time and a wide field of view so I can see not only the various objects in the sky, but also the star field around them.
The wide field of view helps you learn the sky too. You get the big picture when learning what is what up in the sky, which makes finding things easier down the road with a telescope.
Another little tidbit--don't be so quick to use the "Go To" function all the time. Star-hopping from point to point will help you learn the sky's landmarks, how to use and control your telescope, and you might come across something that you have never seen before (think driving across country and discovering sights that you would miss in an airplane).
Someone please correct / enlighten me, but how can the phone *ever* truely be OFF when it requires interaction on its touchsceen to turn it on again?
When the iPhone is off, you don't interact with the touch screen to turn it on. You have to press the sleep/wake button for several seconds (not just a quick tap and release) to turn it on again.
I guess that makes a lot of cellphones defective by design. My Blackberry looked "off" when not in use, my RAZR looked "off" when not in use...in fact, nearly every cellphone I've ever owned looked "off" when not in use.
It's a simple matter of knowing how to operate the equipment.
In much of North America, the moisture in the sky causes a white high altitude fog as soon as the sun goes down, so light or no light, you can't see much of anything anyway, even when you are in the middle of nowhere, of which there actually is quite a lot of around here - it's a big place. So don't blame the white night sky on all the street lights - take a drive out of the city and look up, chances are that you'll still see nothing.
When you go out into the countryside, you have to wait for your eyes to adjust before you will see the stars. It takes 15-30 minutes for night vision to really set in, and when it does, you will see a remarkably starry sky, provided it is not cloudy. I'll assume that you didn't mean "clouds" by saying "white high altitude fog," since to say "you can't see the stars if it is cloudy" is as impressive as saying "you will get wet if you stand in the rain." If you mean something else, I'd be interested in the source of your information.
WTF are you talking to for 1200 minutes, that's 20 hours a month on the phone??!?
I used to think that as well, until recently when I started burning over 1000 minutes per month, and don't consider myself a phone junkie. 1200 minutes per month is about 40 minutes per day; if your cellphone is your only line, your usage will add up fast, esp. if your family and friends don't use instant messaging.
Much like a nickel here and a dime there adds up to real money over time, cell phone use does the same thing.
It's not just a phone, so it's hard to evaluate the price. Early customers thought they could trust Apple about the fact that the iPhone was worth $600. Now they lost their trust in Apple, and Steve Jobs is trying to buy it back.
There's nothing here to trust--the iPhone was, in fact, worth $600 on June 29, as evidenced by the throngs who paid $600 after waiting in line for hours. If it wasn't worth $600, people wouldn't have bought it, or would have quickly realized it wasn't worth the price and returned it.
An item will sell for exactly what both parties (seller and buyer) believe is a fair price at the time of sale. Those that claimed that they got ripped off are just complaining that they fell for the "early adopter" technolust that comes with the launch of a new gadget. Instead, we should be cheering on those who couldn't afford one before but can do so now; "Hey, good for you! You're getting a deal!" instead of "Oh screw Apple, they let me buy something on my own free will at a higher price! Maybe I can join up with those non-user-replaceable-battery whiners and bitch about my lack of self-control and impulse buying."
And for the record, I paid $600 in early July, and feel that it was worth the price I paid. Mind you, if somebody wants to give me some form of credit after the fact, I won't turn it down, but I won't bitch about being allowed to spend my money on my own free will, either.
I don't think he was continuing his streak of being a dick, he started it when he refused to show ID to the officer.
He was the one who called the police for assistance in dealing with the manager. In that respect, he should have been more willing to show his ID when asked; after all, the cop was there to help him. This wasn't a random "You, citizen walking down the street, show me your papers!" I bet the cop has to file a report on the incident at the end of his shift, and to do that he needs to know the true identity of the involved parties. How does the cop not know he's lying, to tie somebody else's name into the incident and not his own?
There are going to be cops that will habitually abuse their position and those are the ones we should stand up against; the ones that are genuinely trying to help us out deserve our cooperation. "I want you to help me out, but I'm not going to help you do that" won't get you very far.
There's an argument for standing up for one's rights, and an argument for helping out the people that are there to help you. You can do both without sacrificing either.
Ahh...I should have done about 30 seconds of looking before making a comment.
It seems a bit involved; since the files are on the iPod, they must have come from somewhere; I would think simple file copying using USB or other portable drives would be easier instead of taking them off an iPod.
FTA (thanks BugMeNot for saving the login requirement):
From Napster to the iPod, the music business has been wrong about how much it can dictate to its audience. "Steve Jobs understood Napster better than the record business did," David Geffen told me. "IPods made it easy for people to share music, and Apple took a big percentage of the business that once belonged to the record companies. The subscription model is the only way to save the music business. If music is easily available at a price of five or six dollars a month, then nobody will steal it."
I'm not sure how the iPod makes it easy to share music, since you can't move music from one computer to another with an iPod. The only way I can see an iPod sharing music is with a Y-adapter on the headphone jack.
Furthermore, what business did Apple take from "the business"? Apple doesn't record music, it is a distributer.
I get the feeling that there is a bit of "blame Apple's success for our failure" theatrics going on here.
Slashdot Mirror
During the first purchase of that logged-in session, note the checkbox in the first confirmation dialog; you can check it to confirm each purchase.
Well then, you do the old-fashioned "comparison shopping" and decide which is more value for the money. Is DRM-free worth the $4 extra?
Maybe it's a result of the variable pricing...I just downloaded immersion: Two for 89 cents as well...73 minutes!
In in both cases, iTMS has them for $9.99 each.
I almost feel guilty...but only almost.
As one who has never used a subscription service (I'm one of the low-volume types) I ask this: if your subscription ceases, do you still have access to the music you already downloaded?
A full album for $0.89...I was so intrigued I downloaded it just to give it a whirl... one less trip to the soda machine this month for me :)
When I downloaded that one, "Stargazer's Journey" popped up...I sampled it, and it sounds like it would be a nice soundtrack for stargazing (hence the title) so I bought that one too (not going to use the downloader though...so I did it the "hard" way).
Out of curiousity, I checked the album at iTMS...$9.99 for the same album I bought at Amazon for $5.96. $9.99 for a DRM-encumbered album, for $5.96 for a DRM-free album? Decisions, decisions!
I think I'll be checking this out more in the future.
It does present a quandry of sorts...does this balance out the Bezos' Silly Patent Machine?
I try to be even-handed, even though it doesn't always turn out that way.
In bad form, I'll reply to myself...
Regarding the whole legality of locking and unlocking...it's been said that unlocking is legal under the DMCA, which is likely why we haven't heard any lawsuits being slung about at the unlockers. However, just because it is legal doesn't obligate Apple (or any manufacturer for that matter) to support a device that has been modified outside the design parameters.
From the iPhone warranty: In other words, swim at your own risk, but don't bitch to us if you get eaten by an alligator; you were told to stay out of the water.
The other option is to simply forgo the update, or re-lock it.
I'm split on this one:
(1) If you think of it in terms of traditional retail, Apple is applying a 41% (.29 retail/.70 wholesale) markup. That sounds like a hefty markup at first, until you figure in Apple's cost of storage and delivery. While there is no "storage" and "delivery" in the traditional brick and mortar store sense, there is still server storage and bandwidth costs. I wonder what Apple's true costs (costs to music producers and IT costs to run iTMS) are on a per-track basis. Know that, and you can get a better grasp on the actual profit margin.
(2) If the deal is so bad for the producers, why did they go in on the deal in the first place?
The second point is more rhetorical, but the first one I think bears further study before deciding if the markup is excessive. Of course, getting Apple's per-track expenses will be damn near impossible so we'll have to settle for speculation and conjecture.
It's as speculative as some data I took recently...the data show that time travel is possible and we're about to be visited by our future selves! It's true! I only have two points but I was able to extrapolate the results.
(In other words...there's about as much solid footing for this story as there is for my time-travel theory.)
WHY do people keep bringing up this corruption-laden idea of a take-home receipt with your vote printed on it, or some other way of verifying your vote outside the polling place?
As has been stated repeatedly here and elsewhere, taking home a receipt opens the floodgates for corruption. "Bring me a vote for Candidate XXX, and I'll pay you $10!" "Bring me a vote for Candidate XXX, or you might suffer an 'accident' in the near future."
You verify the paper ballot in the privacy of the voting booth; once verified, the ballot drops into a secure ballot box and serves as the permanent record of your vote. No name, no identifying information is on the ballot, and NO RECEIPT.
That's all very good advice.
I've take to using my binoculars more than my telescope. While I don't get the aperture with the binoculars, I do get the ease of instant set-up time and a wide field of view so I can see not only the various objects in the sky, but also the star field around them.
The wide field of view helps you learn the sky too. You get the big picture when learning what is what up in the sky, which makes finding things easier down the road with a telescope.
Another little tidbit--don't be so quick to use the "Go To" function all the time. Star-hopping from point to point will help you learn the sky's landmarks, how to use and control your telescope, and you might come across something that you have never seen before (think driving across country and discovering sights that you would miss in an airplane).
I guess that makes a lot of cellphones defective by design. My Blackberry looked "off" when not in use, my RAZR looked "off" when not in use...in fact, nearly every cellphone I've ever owned looked "off" when not in use.
It's a simple matter of knowing how to operate the equipment.
Much like a nickel here and a dime there adds up to real money over time, cell phone use does the same thing.
An item will sell for exactly what both parties (seller and buyer) believe is a fair price at the time of sale. Those that claimed that they got ripped off are just complaining that they fell for the "early adopter" technolust that comes with the launch of a new gadget. Instead, we should be cheering on those who couldn't afford one before but can do so now; "Hey, good for you! You're getting a deal!" instead of "Oh screw Apple, they let me buy something on my own free will at a higher price! Maybe I can join up with those non-user-replaceable-battery whiners and bitch about my lack of self-control and impulse buying."
And for the record, I paid $600 in early July, and feel that it was worth the price I paid. Mind you, if somebody wants to give me some form of credit after the fact, I won't turn it down, but I won't bitch about being allowed to spend my money on my own free will, either.
Tell you what judge...if you believe this is necessary, how about having you and your family be the first to submit their DNA to the database?
I don't think he was continuing his streak of being a dick, he started it when he refused to show ID to the officer.
He was the one who called the police for assistance in dealing with the manager. In that respect, he should have been more willing to show his ID when asked; after all, the cop was there to help him. This wasn't a random "You, citizen walking down the street, show me your papers!" I bet the cop has to file a report on the incident at the end of his shift, and to do that he needs to know the true identity of the involved parties. How does the cop not know he's lying, to tie somebody else's name into the incident and not his own?
There are going to be cops that will habitually abuse their position and those are the ones we should stand up against; the ones that are genuinely trying to help us out deserve our cooperation. "I want you to help me out, but I'm not going to help you do that" won't get you very far.
There's an argument for standing up for one's rights, and an argument for helping out the people that are there to help you. You can do both without sacrificing either.
Ahh...I should have done about 30 seconds of looking before making a comment.
It seems a bit involved; since the files are on the iPod, they must have come from somewhere; I would think simple file copying using USB or other portable drives would be easier instead of taking them off an iPod.
More options is still better.
I'm not sure how the iPod makes it easy to share music, since you can't move music from one computer to another with an iPod. The only way I can see an iPod sharing music is with a Y-adapter on the headphone jack.
Furthermore, what business did Apple take from "the business"? Apple doesn't record music, it is a distributer.
I get the feeling that there is a bit of "blame Apple's success for our failure" theatrics going on here.
"And I want a solid gold toilet but it just isn't in the cards, now is it?"