In terms of practical historical precedent, not so much. This sort of thing tends to end badly.
While I don't disagree, it's interesting to look at the example of Britain in World War Two. In effect, the major parties all banded together to form a single wartime government, thereby suspending true democracy for the greater good. However, in 1945 Labour immediately left the coalition and contested the general election in opposition to the government.
I think the point this guy is trying to make is that in the face of a sufficiently serious threat, partisan differences become an impediment to effective action. He might have done better to suggest that political parties need to overcome their differences and regard climate change and the need for a response to it as a settled, undeniable fact rather than a field for political dispute and point-scoring. But that would have got him fewer headlines.
Legally required car insurance is insurance for other people/property you injure/damage.
Well, think of health insurance as insuring other people against either having to bear your medical bills via taxes, or insuring them against the guilt of living in a society where selfish, short-sighted bastards are left to die in the streets.
It is indeed a glorious day for the Socialist Republic of America.
How is that unfettered capitalism thing going for you guys lately? We heard you were having some problems, and that a system built around pure unadulterated greed was maybe turning out to be slightly less efficient than you had thought?
Exactly. I live in Australia. These are my choices here:
1. Do not take out health insurance. Pay about 1% more tax as a penalty. Get free healthcare when I get sick of a standard ranging from ok to excellent. If I am in hospital for an extended period of time, share a room with a number of other patients and put up with less than 'premium' services.
2. Take out health insurance (for around A$70-100/month, i.e. about US$60-90 on current exchange rates). Get premium healthcare when I get sick, including (usually) my choice of doctor and hospital. Get a private room and premium services if I have to stay in hospital for an extended period of time.
Either way the government subsidises many useful medications and I can see a GP within a few hours during business hours, or go to a hospital and wait a few hours at casualty after hours. Regardless of my insurance status, a visit to a doctor costs between around $20 and $50, with the difference being borne by the state.
Amazingly, despite this horrifying crypto-communist arrangement Australia has not gone bankrupt, nor have my rights and freedoms been taken from me.
Uh, that may be true, but it would also require that the overprocessed, overmodulated, autotuned, beatbox crap they're calling "music" these days be worth a shit to press onto vinyl. In most cases, vinyl is nothing more than turd polish.
You certainly are lucky to have had the golden age of modern music coincide with the years of your life when you were aged 15 through to 35. How I pity today's youngsters for missing that magical window of time.
Apple's control issues can be a pain, but they've simply never done anything like that. The fact that music players and associated file formats are frequently cited as one of the most high profile issues shows how weak the comparison is: even at their absolute worst in terms of lock-down, iTMS and the iPod have been quite usable with non-Apple products and systems, and most of the time, Apple's competed on their product merits and marketing skills rather than market pressure.
It's funny, you know. I can't remember one single occasion where Microsoft actually used its control of Windows to specifically prevent a competitor's product from functioning on a PC. Yes, they pushed their own stuff. But I could always install Opera or Mozilla or Lotus or whatever I wanted, and nothing built into the OS could or would prevent that. Likewise MS never attempted to 'protect' me from 'objectionable' material or otherwise impose its value judgments on me.
My memory loss must be pretty bad, because I also can't remember this fabled golden age when ipods and itunes were "quite usable with non-Apple products". What I can remember, though, is Apple changing the way files are written to an ipod over and over again to deliberately break compatibility with non-Apple software. I can remember my frustration that my ipod wouldn't let me simply drag music files on and off in via a file browser. I can remember Apple selling DRMed music through itunes which wouldn't work with my Creative Zen MP3 player. Funnily enough, I also remember Apple forcing me to install the bloated monstrosity that is quicktime on my system, and both itunes and quicktime then breaking my perfectly functional GUI standards almost as though they never existed.
As for your underlying thesis, it is immensely naive. "ipod" and "mp3 player" are more or less synonymous for most non-tech people I know. Apple is moving aggressively into video and text. And to me, control over our society's collective cultural record is far more significant than which web browser I use when I install a pre-2000 version of Windows.
Limiting salt levels in foods, rather than an outright ban, might make sense
Instead of having the info available to diners who are concerned about their salt intake and letting them make their own decisions?
Sounds like a plan, so long as none of the taxes of people who choose to limit their salt intake go towards the eventual health costs of those who choose to eat huge amounts of it.
Pink Floyd have also been very vocal, and very difficult about file sharing -- so forgive me if I do NOT believe ONE SINGLE WORD of their "artistic integrity" bullshit rhetoric. This is about the money.
So your argument is, in summary, that we cannot rely on statements of the artists on the subject of what their intention is and was when trying to ascertain their intention? And that, in fact, your random speculation as to ulterior motives is more likely to be correct that direct statements straight from the people in question?
If it was "about the money" they would make more by splitting up the tracks for individual sale. So that doesn't make sense either.
It just struck me that the main bone BoingBoing had to pick with MagicJack's EULA is that its users' calls are monitored, and are played targeted ads (obtained from said monitoring). How is this really much different from Google's adsense inside of gmail, where ads containing keywords found in your email's body are displayed next to your emails?
Not that I am supporting MagicJack or Google in anyway, but what really was the difference? Did it boil down to Google's better wording or selling of its adsense, or are we just more sensitive when it is done to audio/ voice as opposed to when it is done in text/ email?
The difference is that, as with Apple, people are wilfully blind to the serious privacy problems with using Google products. Arguably Gmail is worse because Google actually trawls and stores the content of your emails, not just the address of the recipient and sender. I had a look at the EULA a while ago - it's pretty bad.
DO NOT EVER TAKE RESPONSIBILITY AWAY FROM THE MOVANT and PUT IT ON THEIR LAWYERS.
If you hire dicks to sue people, it means you hired dicks to sue people.
It makes me angry because I've been on the receiving end of such dickishness.
Thank you!
IAAL and I can tell you that no sane lawyer would assure their client that they will definitely win anything. There are always risks, and if you fail to appraise your client of those risks then once they lose they will turn their attention to suing you.
Plus, as I often find myself explaining to people, if people could just grow up and work out their problems amicably then lawyers would be out of a job tomorrow.
I agree, although I plan to keep an open mind about the hexes.
What I would like to know is how keyboard control is going to work though - I use it exclusively to move units, but my keyboard doesn't have an intuitive six-directional keypad on it.
On the list of things that eat hours and hours of my life without me realising it, Civilization and Settlers of Catan are high up the list... and now Sid shows me these screenshots, where Civ suddenly has ominously hexagonal tiles...
...and, as a consequence, you don't get access to any software produced by any legitimate software developer for the iphone.
Boohoo. You play by the rules of the providers of the service or they cut you off.
This reasoning would make sense, except that apart from setting themselves up as the artificial gatekeepers, Apple isn't the provider of the services in question - the app developers are.
But enjoy your monopoly controlled, anti-competitive future in which physical objects you own can be rendered useless by the cancellation of "services" at the whim of a self-interested corporation with whom you have no actual need for an ongoing relationship...
They aren't turning off the device, they are removing your access to the iTunes store. Which is a service.
Which is a service, which controls access to all legitimate software for the device, which is one of its primary functions.
You can't diminish the significance of banning people from using a "service" when that service happens to be the only way to use a significant portion of the device's functionality. If Apple hadn't intentionally established a monopoly over legitimate iphone software then your argument would have some merit.
And you can still use your iPhone. You just don't get access to iTunes.
...and, as a consequence, you don't get access to any software produced by any legitimate software developer for the iphone.
It would be sort of ok (well, still debateable) if this only affected Apple's own software. What you fail to acknowledge is that Apple has established a system which allows them to prevent iphone users from using software from anyone, or at least anyone who wishes for their software to reach a mainstream audience of iphone users.
I trust MS is using Flickr photos strictly according to their licensing settings and not just wholesale pillaging other people's copyright for their own commercial gain...
Which is all well and good if you have the money or influence to get a good lawyer on your case for you. Some of these bloggers may actually have the influence, if not the money. But how many of them don't? And how many other wrongful DMCA notices and take-downs occur each year that go unpunished?
So you want to win this fight against huge megacorporations who are both wealthy and exert significant influence over the government by expending... zero effort?
In a perfect world, yes, the little guy could easily and affordable enforce his rights. You may have noticed this isn't a perfect world. This blogger should take this on, but that might involve finding a lawyer and possibly even paying some money.
Oh, and IAAL, you don't "influence" to get a good lawyer on your side, you need a half reasonable case and the air of someone who might actually pay for the reasonably difficult to perform professional services you receive.
Walk around in trashed faux 1920s underwater cavern... kill zombie... find key... kill zombie... listen to over the top voice acting... kill zombie... kill zombie... kill zombie... kill big daddy... kill zombie... find key... kill zombie...
I thought the first game was nice to look at, had an interesting background plot compared to most games, but was pretty damn average to play. The fps combat was decidedly mediocre, and it felt like there were two or three types of enemies in the whole game. The fact that half the plot was coveyed via audio diaries and the like rather than, say, actual events and characters also detracted from it.
Bioshock 1 was where I knew that the video games reviewing industry really was rotten to the core. Fourth best PC game of all time my arse.
7 is still a giant kludge. It's like Microsoft wants people to switch. Seems to be working.. Lots more Macs in my neighborhood.
Actually, 7 works really well and is without much doubt the best OS Microsoft has so far released. And I am someone who went through the pain of manually downgrading a new laptop from Vista to XP, so great was my hatred for Vista and love for XP. I mostly use my PC for gaming and I won't be going back to XP.
There are maaaaaaaaaany ways in which 7 beats XP. For example:
- actually recognises hardware made in the last 10 years out of the box
- driver-related crashes, if any, typically drop you back to the desktop with no further damage
- actually quite good at finding the right drivers on-line
- significantly better HDD performance in my case, which I attribute to the OS actually expecting and knowing how to use modern SATA drives
- and of course a UI that looks half decent and is much more intuitive and flexible
I think the complaint misses the point of the device. It's not supposed to be a full-blown personal computer.
I think you are missing the point that it COULD do almost anything a personal computer can do, but has been intentionally crippled. It's not like a DVD player or whatever, built with only one function... it actually IS a computer, but Apple have gone out of their way to lock it down to perform highly limited, and coincidentally profitable for Apple, functions.
If users like the idea of being locked into the store, fine. RMS, the EFF, Slashdot, "whine" by showing people the bars they are getting into. I must say that I never heard Apple bragging that they locked in users or that it was hard to get the kind of apps you like for their devices. For that I thank those "whiners".
Exactly - all this "choice" crap means nothing when 99% of people are not even aware of what they are "choosing", let alone taking the time to actually think about its short, medium and long term implications for them and for consumers as a whole in that and other markets.
I mean, people will still buy fuel from companies that sponsor wars in Africa, mostly because they don't know about it. People will buy cheese from companies that distribute unsuitable baby milk powder to the third world. People will buy hamburgers from companies that promote the deforestation of the Amazon. Etc etc etc.
Consumer choice only means a damn when people know what they are choosing. The idea that raising awareness of that is in any way improper is ridiculous.
Slashdot Mirror
In terms of practical historical precedent, not so much. This sort of thing tends to end badly.
While I don't disagree, it's interesting to look at the example of Britain in World War Two. In effect, the major parties all banded together to form a single wartime government, thereby suspending true democracy for the greater good. However, in 1945 Labour immediately left the coalition and contested the general election in opposition to the government.
I think the point this guy is trying to make is that in the face of a sufficiently serious threat, partisan differences become an impediment to effective action. He might have done better to suggest that political parties need to overcome their differences and regard climate change and the need for a response to it as a settled, undeniable fact rather than a field for political dispute and point-scoring. But that would have got him fewer headlines.
Legally required car insurance is insurance for other people/property you injure/damage.
Well, think of health insurance as insuring other people against either having to bear your medical bills via taxes, or insuring them against the guilt of living in a society where selfish, short-sighted bastards are left to die in the streets.
It is indeed a glorious day for the Socialist Republic of America.
How is that unfettered capitalism thing going for you guys lately? We heard you were having some problems, and that a system built around pure unadulterated greed was maybe turning out to be slightly less efficient than you had thought?
Exactly. I live in Australia. These are my choices here:
1. Do not take out health insurance. Pay about 1% more tax as a penalty. Get free healthcare when I get sick of a standard ranging from ok to excellent. If I am in hospital for an extended period of time, share a room with a number of other patients and put up with less than 'premium' services.
2. Take out health insurance (for around A$70-100/month, i.e. about US$60-90 on current exchange rates). Get premium healthcare when I get sick, including (usually) my choice of doctor and hospital. Get a private room and premium services if I have to stay in hospital for an extended period of time.
Either way the government subsidises many useful medications and I can see a GP within a few hours during business hours, or go to a hospital and wait a few hours at casualty after hours. Regardless of my insurance status, a visit to a doctor costs between around $20 and $50, with the difference being borne by the state.
Amazingly, despite this horrifying crypto-communist arrangement Australia has not gone bankrupt, nor have my rights and freedoms been taken from me.
Uh, that may be true, but it would also require that the overprocessed, overmodulated, autotuned, beatbox crap they're calling "music" these days be worth a shit to press onto vinyl. In most cases, vinyl is nothing more than turd polish.
You certainly are lucky to have had the golden age of modern music coincide with the years of your life when you were aged 15 through to 35. How I pity today's youngsters for missing that magical window of time.
It's funny, you know. I can't remember one single occasion where Microsoft actually used its control of Windows to specifically prevent a competitor's product from functioning on a PC. Yes, they pushed their own stuff. But I could always install Opera or Mozilla or Lotus or whatever I wanted, and nothing built into the OS could or would prevent that. Likewise MS never attempted to 'protect' me from 'objectionable' material or otherwise impose its value judgments on me.
My memory loss must be pretty bad, because I also can't remember this fabled golden age when ipods and itunes were "quite usable with non-Apple products". What I can remember, though, is Apple changing the way files are written to an ipod over and over again to deliberately break compatibility with non-Apple software. I can remember my frustration that my ipod wouldn't let me simply drag music files on and off in via a file browser. I can remember Apple selling DRMed music through itunes which wouldn't work with my Creative Zen MP3 player. Funnily enough, I also remember Apple forcing me to install the bloated monstrosity that is quicktime on my system, and both itunes and quicktime then breaking my perfectly functional GUI standards almost as though they never existed.
As for your underlying thesis, it is immensely naive. "ipod" and "mp3 player" are more or less synonymous for most non-tech people I know. Apple is moving aggressively into video and text. And to me, control over our society's collective cultural record is far more significant than which web browser I use when I install a pre-2000 version of Windows.
Limiting salt levels in foods, rather than an outright ban, might make sense
Instead of having the info available to diners who are concerned about their salt intake and letting them make their own decisions?
Sounds like a plan, so long as none of the taxes of people who choose to limit their salt intake go towards the eventual health costs of those who choose to eat huge amounts of it.
It just struck me that the main bone BoingBoing had to pick with MagicJack's EULA is that its users' calls are monitored, and are played targeted ads (obtained from said monitoring). How is this really much different from Google's adsense inside of gmail, where ads containing keywords found in your email's body are displayed next to your emails?
Not that I am supporting MagicJack or Google in anyway, but what really was the difference? Did it boil down to Google's better wording or selling of its adsense, or are we just more sensitive when it is done to audio/ voice as opposed to when it is done in text/ email?
The difference is that, as with Apple, people are wilfully blind to the serious privacy problems with using Google products. Arguably Gmail is worse because Google actually trawls and stores the content of your emails, not just the address of the recipient and sender. I had a look at the EULA a while ago - it's pretty bad.
Disclaimer - it may have changed since then.
DO NOT EVER TAKE RESPONSIBILITY AWAY FROM THE MOVANT and PUT IT ON THEIR LAWYERS.
If you hire dicks to sue people, it means you hired dicks to sue people.
It makes me angry because I've been on the receiving end of such dickishness.
Thank you!
IAAL and I can tell you that no sane lawyer would assure their client that they will definitely win anything. There are always risks, and if you fail to appraise your client of those risks then once they lose they will turn their attention to suing you.
Plus, as I often find myself explaining to people, if people could just grow up and work out their problems amicably then lawyers would be out of a job tomorrow.
I agree, although I plan to keep an open mind about the hexes.
What I would like to know is how keyboard control is going to work though - I use it exclusively to move units, but my keyboard doesn't have an intuitive six-directional keypad on it.
Truly we are doomed.
On the list of things that eat hours and hours of my life without me realising it, Civilization and Settlers of Catan are high up the list... and now Sid shows me these screenshots, where Civ suddenly has ominously hexagonal tiles...
...and, as a consequence, you don't get access to any software produced by any legitimate software developer for the iphone.
Boohoo. You play by the rules of the providers of the service or they cut you off.
This reasoning would make sense, except that apart from setting themselves up as the artificial gatekeepers, Apple isn't the provider of the services in question - the app developers are.
But enjoy your monopoly controlled, anti-competitive future in which physical objects you own can be rendered useless by the cancellation of "services" at the whim of a self-interested corporation with whom you have no actual need for an ongoing relationship...
They aren't turning off the device, they are removing your access to the iTunes store. Which is a service.
Which is a service, which controls access to all legitimate software for the device, which is one of its primary functions.
You can't diminish the significance of banning people from using a "service" when that service happens to be the only way to use a significant portion of the device's functionality. If Apple hadn't intentionally established a monopoly over legitimate iphone software then your argument would have some merit.
And you can still use your iPhone. You just don't get access to iTunes.
...and, as a consequence, you don't get access to any software produced by any legitimate software developer for the iphone.
It would be sort of ok (well, still debateable) if this only affected Apple's own software. What you fail to acknowledge is that Apple has established a system which allows them to prevent iphone users from using software from anyone, or at least anyone who wishes for their software to reach a mainstream audience of iphone users.
But apparently a random Federal Court decision is newsworthy despite the fact that the High Court dealt with this issue in the IceTV case last year.
I trust MS is using Flickr photos strictly according to their licensing settings and not just wholesale pillaging other people's copyright for their own commercial gain...
Which is all well and good if you have the money or influence to get a good lawyer on your case for you. Some of these bloggers may actually have the influence, if not the money. But how many of them don't? And how many other wrongful DMCA notices and take-downs occur each year that go unpunished?
So you want to win this fight against huge megacorporations who are both wealthy and exert significant influence over the government by expending... zero effort?
In a perfect world, yes, the little guy could easily and affordable enforce his rights. You may have noticed this isn't a perfect world. This blogger should take this on, but that might involve finding a lawyer and possibly even paying some money.
Oh, and IAAL, you don't "influence" to get a good lawyer on your side, you need a half reasonable case and the air of someone who might actually pay for the reasonably difficult to perform professional services you receive.
Nope. I'm with you.
Walk around in trashed faux 1920s underwater cavern... kill zombie... find key... kill zombie... listen to over the top voice acting... kill zombie... kill zombie... kill zombie... kill big daddy... kill zombie... find key... kill zombie...
I thought the first game was nice to look at, had an interesting background plot compared to most games, but was pretty damn average to play. The fps combat was decidedly mediocre, and it felt like there were two or three types of enemies in the whole game. The fact that half the plot was coveyed via audio diaries and the like rather than, say, actual events and characters also detracted from it.
Bioshock 1 was where I knew that the video games reviewing industry really was rotten to the core. Fourth best PC game of all time my arse.
Pissing off 4chan is probably the worst thing you can do on the Internet.
I disagree: http://xkcd.com/591/
You're right, continuing to read and reference xkcd long after it became stale and lame is definitely worse.
7 is still a giant kludge. It's like Microsoft wants people to switch. Seems to be working.. Lots more Macs in my neighborhood.
Actually, 7 works really well and is without much doubt the best OS Microsoft has so far released. And I am someone who went through the pain of manually downgrading a new laptop from Vista to XP, so great was my hatred for Vista and love for XP. I mostly use my PC for gaming and I won't be going back to XP.
There are maaaaaaaaaany ways in which 7 beats XP. For example:
- actually recognises hardware made in the last 10 years out of the box
- driver-related crashes, if any, typically drop you back to the desktop with no further damage
- actually quite good at finding the right drivers on-line
- significantly better HDD performance in my case, which I attribute to the OS actually expecting and knowing how to use modern SATA drives
- and of course a UI that looks half decent and is much more intuitive and flexible
I think the complaint misses the point of the device. It's not supposed to be a full-blown personal computer.
I think you are missing the point that it COULD do almost anything a personal computer can do, but has been intentionally crippled. It's not like a DVD player or whatever, built with only one function... it actually IS a computer, but Apple have gone out of their way to lock it down to perform highly limited, and coincidentally profitable for Apple, functions.
If users like the idea of being locked into the store, fine. RMS, the EFF, Slashdot, "whine" by showing people the bars they are getting into. I must say that I never heard Apple bragging that they locked in users or that it was hard to get the kind of apps you like for their devices. For that I thank those "whiners".
Exactly - all this "choice" crap means nothing when 99% of people are not even aware of what they are "choosing", let alone taking the time to actually think about its short, medium and long term implications for them and for consumers as a whole in that and other markets.
I mean, people will still buy fuel from companies that sponsor wars in Africa, mostly because they don't know about it. People will buy cheese from companies that distribute unsuitable baby milk powder to the third world. People will buy hamburgers from companies that promote the deforestation of the Amazon. Etc etc etc.
Consumer choice only means a damn when people know what they are choosing. The idea that raising awareness of that is in any way improper is ridiculous.
So why have the restriction at all if all it adds is inconvenience to customers?
How is having _one_ store that has _all_ available applications an inconvenience to the customer?
Yes, _all_ applications*...
* Except those which do things Apple don't want you to do
So to summarise your post:
1. The consumer choices of the majority of people is a good determinant of whether a legal and technological IP system is a good and fair one.
2. It is ok if 10% of people are oppressed by the ignorance of 90% of people.