True, but there's a vast gulf between the OP's attitude of "So now I sit here today monitoring my IP blockers, obfuscation algorithms, tor relay and each packet that goes in or out of every device that I operate. I even wear a hat always when I go outdoors, never carry a cell phone, and never look up (well, not all of that is true)." and your hypothetical situation of "The first picture to come up when someone Googles my name is that time I ended up handcuffed to the goat with my testicles painted orange". Preventing things from being directly and publicly linked to your name is quite different to preventing the monitoring from happening in the first place.
There's also the fact that, as another poster pointed out, your boss should really be able to cope with the fact that you're not on duty 24/7, nobody meets some absurd standard of 'morality' that they seem to set, and there's nothing wrong with a good party once in a while; I do realise, however, that in the real world the luxury of a decent, reasonable boss is something that many people don't have.
The corollary to that would perhaps be "you don't need to hide it if it's not worth anyone's while to find it"; admittedly with crowdsourcing, and the decreasing cost of automated data processing, it's pretty easy to pull individual data from the huge conglomeration that's produced every day, but the limiting requirement is still that somebody needs to take the time to act on that data.
I completely understand the principle of the original question, but I do think they need a little perspective on the practical side: the chance of anyone caring what you, as an individual, are doing is near-zero. Unless you've pissed off people in your monkeysphere enough that they'll go digging for your name, there's probably not much chance of any of the information about you surfacing beyond its minuscule impact on aggregate marketing data. Those improbable edge-cases are maybe still worth taking some precaution against, but in general it's not worth too much worry. The real question, of course, is whether you truly care about the principle above and beyond any practical danger it poses to you?
I was just about to post a link to that - it's as good a take on the privacy argument as I've seen anywhere, well worth reading even if you end up disagreeing. I really don't think we're going to get very far trying to rein in government (and large company) surveillance of us, so it seems to me that rather than spending time and effort trying that tack, we might actually be better off just pushing for more reciprocal surveillance instead. All of their arguments (especially the classic "if you've done nothing wrong, you won't mind us watching") work just as well in reverse, and it might actually be better for society if we do realise that we're basically all as bad as each other.
I think you're conflating two separate issues; the 11Mbps that Sky tells you about is the best your particular phone line can manage, whereas 20Mbps is the most you'll get from them even on a line made from Monster cables braided with coathangers hooked and directly into the exchange next door. It's a technical issue of bandwidth drop-off with distance, and they're somewhat up-front about it now that they've been forced to be, but it's quite separate from speed decreases due to excessive overselling, traffic management, or anything else; on a relatively 'slow' 11Mbps line you probably won't see those issues, but Virgin's 100Mbps service is much more sensitive to them, and doesn't really suffer from distance-related speed decreases, meaning that they can't shift the blame to the line quality like the DSL providers (legitimately) can.
You mean the 4.6mm (3/16") difference and the whopping 79 grams (2.8 ounces) loss? [zdnet.com] Who cares? No one thinks "Gee, I would buy this laptop/computer/screen/etc, but it weighs 2.8 ounces too much". This isn't a cellphone or something where an ounce or 1/4" can make a big difference, it's a tablet.
Your original post was specifically comparing the iPad (either model) to a $250 netbook, not the original iPad to the iPad 2. I was making the same comparison as you.
To stay competitive with Apple your product has to be free! How can anyone compete with that?
You're paying for the phone as part of the monthly contract. It's hardly the case that Motorola's not being paid for the things, is it?
Because the iPad is significantly thinner and somewhat lighter. Maybe those things don't matter to you, and if that's the case then you'd be wasting your money, but they do make the engineering more complex and thus more expensive, and they do matter to some people. Build quality is also an issue when you're really racing to the bottom on price. I don't quite know what you mean by 'a lot more parts' - if they achieve roughly the same goal then it really doesn't matter how many parts they use; if anything, small, consolidated system-on-chip tech is likely to be more expensive.
None of this is to say that the iPad is necessarily well priced, and there are already some cheaper tablets out there, but I think it goes some way to showing why there isn't this flood of ultra-cheap clones you predict.
Their deliberately narrow range probably helps with the economy of scale - Apple makes one tablet, pumps out a few million of that precise model (give or take a few extra flash chips), designs another, and repeats. Samsung are perhaps spread too thin, pushing up both the relative development and manufacturing costs of each individual product. Apple also have app store purchases as a secondary source of income should they feel the need to cut margins, although that doesn't sound like their kind of tactic - being too cheap risks destroying the 'quality' cachet that they work so hard to market.
The final thing, which often gets lost as partisan debates rage between the pro- and anti-Apple camps, is the fact that, love them or loath them, they have a lot of money and a lot of talented people working for them. That means that sometimes they're going to come out with something that's just flat out better than the competition, at a decent price (and sometimes they'll come out with a mediocre device and stick a huge mark up on it - the difference is that anybody can manage the latter, only a few companies manage the former).
The terms of service for those plans don't seem to make sense from a technical perspective:
Beyond Talk Plans: $25.00 per month for unlimited domestic text messages, picture messages, instant messages ("IM") and email messages, unlimited video, unlimited access to Downloads (VirginXL) and the mobile Internet (but not unlimited downloaded content), and 300 anytime minutes.
I know it's legalese, but I've always been told that the point of such arcane terminology is to accurately and unambiguously cover all eventualities (usually in the context of none of those eventualities being the company's fault, but I digress). How can one reconcile " unlimited access to... the mobile Internet" with "but not unlimited downloaded content" - is the mobile internet somehow defined differently to the regular internet? Obviously if something ends up getting from a server to your phone it's been downloaded, but under their odd definition does something count if it's only stored in RAM? What if it's cached on the persistent memory but automatically deleted? What if it's not automatically deleted?
Thinking further, a few more relevant points come to mind: by your own argument, people can replicate the same content on other servers - why won't the infringing content come back just as easily as the rest? It wasn't even Blogger hosting the files, they were just linked to, so making those few links available again is not exactly difficult - certainly much easier than making hundreds of thousands of blogs (and all the associated community and commenting) available elsewhere.
Even taking as fact the obviously spurious argument that blocking Blogger would be 100% effective in preventing this copyright infringement from occurring, you've just weighed the value of a certain amount of potential profit lost by a large media company against the rights of hundreds of thousands of people to have years worth of their writing remain public. Even in this hypothetical, 'best case' argument for your side, I wouldn't hesitate to put the speech of the majority ahead of the profit of the minority.
Do you have any idea how hard is to block part of a web site from a distributed server? Should they check the whole data which people downloading and filter only the certain 'html' code? Isn't it more harmful for free speech? I don't want anyone to monitor data I'm downloading from any server.
I really don't think they should be blocking any content at all, and any method they do try to use is almost guaranteed to be breakable - the only real question is how hard it is to break. That said, I'm sure blocking the URL of the relevant blog or blogs at the DNS level would be about the same difficulty, and effectiveness, as blocking the whole of Blogger.
It's duty of Google to block those content, but they didn't according to the owner of complaint, since they tried to convince Google first to remove that content.
No, it isn't. If companies start yanking content based on the laws of countries other than those where their servers are located, whose laws should they draw the line at? Sweden? Turkey? Saudi Arabia?
People can use more legitimate servers (read: other blog sites) to share their ideas. Google Blogger product is not the only place to write blogs.
A fair point, but where does that leave Turks who want to access information that only exists on Blogger? What about the following that users had built up? How are they to tell their readers where to find the new blog? Most importantly, how are they to be sure that the same won't keep happening, now the precedent is set?
You seem to have missed the point - they didn't just block the alleged infringing content, the blocked the entire Google Blogger service; that's 600,000 people's speech blocked from view by the government because a few broke the law. I'd say that's very much a free speech issue, and your post is an excellent example of how their attempts to imply it's a simple copyright case are working.
I don't know about their IP laws, but Turkey does have a somewhat strained relationship with political speech - it's theoretically well protected, and broadly speaking, dissenting opinions are published more or less freely, but it's not especially unusual for those espousing the opinions to end up in court over it.
It's actually a very good 'slippery slope' example for those of us in the west to point out - under the veil of copyright protection, speech is severely curtailed, and this in a country which can only just get away with it. This isn't something people can write off as "It won't happen here" like the gross abuses in Saudi Arabia or China, this is a very real threat to free speech even in countries where it's more strongly protected.
And having at least a dozen other students posting comments shows the posts in question were far from a "private communication" (who knows how many other students viewed the posts w/o commenting).
A comment restricted to a certain group can be just as 'private' as something restricted to a certain individual. Would a payroll spreadsheet on a company's server, restricted to only certain levels of management, also be considered public to you? If so, what's the difference between that and a Facebook post?
I know not to expect privacy on Facebook because I've seen too many stories like this, but that's a quite separate issue to whether a reasonable person should have some expectation of privacy for their posts. It's also quite different if there's a subpoena involved, which there clearly wasn't in this case.
Just to be entirely clear: I think the kid calling the teacher a paedophile (assuming the accusation was indeed unfounded, as it seems to be) was, at best, dangerously flippant or, at worst, a malicious little shit. Thing is, there are two issues at hand here: the child's wrongdoing in saying things that could quite easily ruin someone's life, and the teacher's wrongdoing in invading the child's privacy.
I don't think they'd be stupid enough to keep trying to sue - the major labels would be more than happy to have a guaranteed monthly income stream from essentially everybody in the country. I also don't doubt that labels would also graciously offer to take the job of passing the money on to the artists who deserved it, less a reasonable fee for all their valuable services, of course... Oh, and good luck getting any payment if you aren't signed to one of those companies doing the distribution.
Fair point. For what it's worth, I use OSX on my primary machine and it's been who knows how long since I last came across a website that required ActiveX; the odd time that it has happened it's been easy enough to react with a simple "Oh, well, I'm not doing business with those idiots then". That said, you're absolutely right that OS specific extensions are dangerous, especially in the hands of the market leader - it's still technically a matter of standards rather than of platform-specificity, but you'd be quite right to accuse me of nitpicking were I to push that point any further!
Cross platform doesn't matter as long as the different pieces of platform-specific software all obey the same standard. It doesn't matter whether your TCP/IP stack was coded in malbolge by Russian monks and only runs on RISC OS, if it supports the standard it won't cause any problems for anybody.
The problem, of course, is that HTML & CSS are very complicated and, some might say, poorly-defined standards whereas TCP/IP, ASCII, and so forth are straightforward and well known. Really, though, your theory that one needs a cross-platform browser to ensure correct rendering implies that none of them are implementing the standards properly, and that's something I disagree with - there may be minor quirks, but on the whole you can expect a well coded site to display more or less accurately, although not pixel-perfect, in all modern browsers. IE6, however, made a complete hash of valid markup ten years ago, and does so to an even greater extent now.
To be fair, it only takes one of us to make an executable to do the job with a couple of clicks and a "What's your FB username/password?" prompt. Not that I'm going to do so, though; these YouTube clips of cats in amusing situations aren't going to watch themselves, after all...
I didn't mean it as any kind of judgement. I was simply working on the basis that the incentive for copyright infringement tends to be much higher in countries with a somewhat lower GDP/capita (but one which is high enough that a decent number of people can still afford computers), and such countries also tend to have a smaller IP export industry, meaning that the governments tend to have more pressing issues driving genuine economic development than chasing after people who may or may not have deprived a foreign company of a few dollars.
None of these apply to Canada, and it is culturally similar to the states (i.e. similar respect or lack thereof for creative work), which is why it struck me as the odd one out. No assumptions of guilt or innocence on anyone's part, just a simple "one of these things is not like the others".
As a Canadian, do you have any idea why Canadia ended up on the list? The rest I can understand, with the possible exception of Spain, but Canada? Really?
Faxes also have legal statuses that email doesn't, in some jurisdictions, so faxing is still a staple in government departments, the legal profession, and in B2B transactions.
While true, this is still stupid. Not a major problem in the scheme of things, I know, but when the very conversation we're having is about the fact that a modem can send a stream of bits to a fax machine as easily as to an email account, it's pretty clear that one should have no more bearing than the other.
I know the legal system shouldn't be jumping on the bandwagon every time new tech comes along, but it's 2011, there's plenty of precedent involving email. Either accept both or deny both, but don't make some arbitrary distinction between the two.
Or perhaps, y'know, just extend the same protections to the 'credit' you're accessing in the time before you pay your phone bill as you get with credit cards. Very limited liability for unauthorised use & a call to confirm if your usage strays far outside your normal pattern should be plenty.
We've seen with roaming data charges, that they're happy to let you run up a bill in the thousands, cut it by 70% when you complain, and act like they've done you a favour, but I don't know that they'll manage to keep up the same attitude when it's that bit harder to blame on the user.
I thought the same - doesn't McAfee's software suck? I mean, I can see how they're profitable despite said suckage, but Intel are a chip company, not an investment bank, so presumably they want something more than to just let the guys chug along making them cash.
That comment was in relation to them silencing the author of the book, not the button guy. My point was that they are genuinely silencing creative work, and the story about the buttons is just an amusingly absurd example of the pattern of behaviour.
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True, but there's a vast gulf between the OP's attitude of "So now I sit here today monitoring my IP blockers, obfuscation algorithms, tor relay and each packet that goes in or out of every device that I operate. I even wear a hat always when I go outdoors, never carry a cell phone, and never look up (well, not all of that is true)." and your hypothetical situation of "The first picture to come up when someone Googles my name is that time I ended up handcuffed to the goat with my testicles painted orange". Preventing things from being directly and publicly linked to your name is quite different to preventing the monitoring from happening in the first place.
There's also the fact that, as another poster pointed out, your boss should really be able to cope with the fact that you're not on duty 24/7, nobody meets some absurd standard of 'morality' that they seem to set, and there's nothing wrong with a good party once in a while; I do realise, however, that in the real world the luxury of a decent, reasonable boss is something that many people don't have.
The corollary to that would perhaps be "you don't need to hide it if it's not worth anyone's while to find it"; admittedly with crowdsourcing, and the decreasing cost of automated data processing, it's pretty easy to pull individual data from the huge conglomeration that's produced every day, but the limiting requirement is still that somebody needs to take the time to act on that data.
I completely understand the principle of the original question, but I do think they need a little perspective on the practical side: the chance of anyone caring what you, as an individual, are doing is near-zero. Unless you've pissed off people in your monkeysphere enough that they'll go digging for your name, there's probably not much chance of any of the information about you surfacing beyond its minuscule impact on aggregate marketing data. Those improbable edge-cases are maybe still worth taking some precaution against, but in general it's not worth too much worry. The real question, of course, is whether you truly care about the principle above and beyond any practical danger it poses to you?
I was just about to post a link to that - it's as good a take on the privacy argument as I've seen anywhere, well worth reading even if you end up disagreeing. I really don't think we're going to get very far trying to rein in government (and large company) surveillance of us, so it seems to me that rather than spending time and effort trying that tack, we might actually be better off just pushing for more reciprocal surveillance instead. All of their arguments (especially the classic "if you've done nothing wrong, you won't mind us watching") work just as well in reverse, and it might actually be better for society if we do realise that we're basically all as bad as each other.
I think you're conflating two separate issues; the 11Mbps that Sky tells you about is the best your particular phone line can manage, whereas 20Mbps is the most you'll get from them even on a line made from Monster cables braided with coathangers hooked and directly into the exchange next door. It's a technical issue of bandwidth drop-off with distance, and they're somewhat up-front about it now that they've been forced to be, but it's quite separate from speed decreases due to excessive overselling, traffic management, or anything else; on a relatively 'slow' 11Mbps line you probably won't see those issues, but Virgin's 100Mbps service is much more sensitive to them, and doesn't really suffer from distance-related speed decreases, meaning that they can't shift the blame to the line quality like the DSL providers (legitimately) can.
You mean the 4.6mm (3/16") difference and the whopping 79 grams (2.8 ounces) loss? [zdnet.com] Who cares? No one thinks "Gee, I would buy this laptop/computer/screen/etc, but it weighs 2.8 ounces too much". This isn't a cellphone or something where an ounce or 1/4" can make a big difference, it's a tablet.
Your original post was specifically comparing the iPad (either model) to a $250 netbook, not the original iPad to the iPad 2. I was making the same comparison as you.
To stay competitive with Apple your product has to be free! How can anyone compete with that?
You're paying for the phone as part of the monthly contract. It's hardly the case that Motorola's not being paid for the things, is it?
Because the iPad is significantly thinner and somewhat lighter. Maybe those things don't matter to you, and if that's the case then you'd be wasting your money, but they do make the engineering more complex and thus more expensive, and they do matter to some people. Build quality is also an issue when you're really racing to the bottom on price. I don't quite know what you mean by 'a lot more parts' - if they achieve roughly the same goal then it really doesn't matter how many parts they use; if anything, small, consolidated system-on-chip tech is likely to be more expensive.
None of this is to say that the iPad is necessarily well priced, and there are already some cheaper tablets out there, but I think it goes some way to showing why there isn't this flood of ultra-cheap clones you predict.
Their deliberately narrow range probably helps with the economy of scale - Apple makes one tablet, pumps out a few million of that precise model (give or take a few extra flash chips), designs another, and repeats. Samsung are perhaps spread too thin, pushing up both the relative development and manufacturing costs of each individual product. Apple also have app store purchases as a secondary source of income should they feel the need to cut margins, although that doesn't sound like their kind of tactic - being too cheap risks destroying the 'quality' cachet that they work so hard to market.
The final thing, which often gets lost as partisan debates rage between the pro- and anti-Apple camps, is the fact that, love them or loath them, they have a lot of money and a lot of talented people working for them. That means that sometimes they're going to come out with something that's just flat out better than the competition, at a decent price (and sometimes they'll come out with a mediocre device and stick a huge mark up on it - the difference is that anybody can manage the latter, only a few companies manage the former).
Maybe so, maybe not, but in either case they don't have the right to sell it as 'unlimited' if there is, in fact, a limit.
The terms of service for those plans don't seem to make sense from a technical perspective:
Beyond Talk Plans: $25.00 per month for unlimited domestic text messages, picture messages, instant messages ("IM") and email messages, unlimited video, unlimited access to Downloads (VirginXL) and the mobile Internet (but not unlimited downloaded content), and 300 anytime minutes.
I know it's legalese, but I've always been told that the point of such arcane terminology is to accurately and unambiguously cover all eventualities (usually in the context of none of those eventualities being the company's fault, but I digress). How can one reconcile " unlimited access to ... the mobile Internet" with "but not unlimited downloaded content" - is the mobile internet somehow defined differently to the regular internet? Obviously if something ends up getting from a server to your phone it's been downloaded, but under their odd definition does something count if it's only stored in RAM? What if it's cached on the persistent memory but automatically deleted? What if it's not automatically deleted?
Thinking further, a few more relevant points come to mind: by your own argument, people can replicate the same content on other servers - why won't the infringing content come back just as easily as the rest? It wasn't even Blogger hosting the files, they were just linked to, so making those few links available again is not exactly difficult - certainly much easier than making hundreds of thousands of blogs (and all the associated community and commenting) available elsewhere.
Even taking as fact the obviously spurious argument that blocking Blogger would be 100% effective in preventing this copyright infringement from occurring, you've just weighed the value of a certain amount of potential profit lost by a large media company against the rights of hundreds of thousands of people to have years worth of their writing remain public. Even in this hypothetical, 'best case' argument for your side, I wouldn't hesitate to put the speech of the majority ahead of the profit of the minority.
Do you have any idea how hard is to block part of a web site from a distributed server? Should they check the whole data which people downloading and filter only the certain 'html' code? Isn't it more harmful for free speech? I don't want anyone to monitor data I'm downloading from any server.
I really don't think they should be blocking any content at all, and any method they do try to use is almost guaranteed to be breakable - the only real question is how hard it is to break. That said, I'm sure blocking the URL of the relevant blog or blogs at the DNS level would be about the same difficulty, and effectiveness, as blocking the whole of Blogger.
It's duty of Google to block those content, but they didn't according to the owner of complaint, since they tried to convince Google first to remove that content.
No, it isn't. If companies start yanking content based on the laws of countries other than those where their servers are located, whose laws should they draw the line at? Sweden? Turkey? Saudi Arabia?
People can use more legitimate servers (read: other blog sites) to share their ideas. Google Blogger product is not the only place to write blogs.
A fair point, but where does that leave Turks who want to access information that only exists on Blogger? What about the following that users had built up? How are they to tell their readers where to find the new blog? Most importantly, how are they to be sure that the same won't keep happening, now the precedent is set?
You seem to have missed the point - they didn't just block the alleged infringing content, the blocked the entire Google Blogger service; that's 600,000 people's speech blocked from view by the government because a few broke the law. I'd say that's very much a free speech issue, and your post is an excellent example of how their attempts to imply it's a simple copyright case are working.
I don't know about their IP laws, but Turkey does have a somewhat strained relationship with political speech - it's theoretically well protected, and broadly speaking, dissenting opinions are published more or less freely, but it's not especially unusual for those espousing the opinions to end up in court over it.
It's actually a very good 'slippery slope' example for those of us in the west to point out - under the veil of copyright protection, speech is severely curtailed, and this in a country which can only just get away with it. This isn't something people can write off as "It won't happen here" like the gross abuses in Saudi Arabia or China, this is a very real threat to free speech even in countries where it's more strongly protected.
And having at least a dozen other students posting comments shows the posts in question were far from a "private communication" (who knows how many other students viewed the posts w/o commenting).
A comment restricted to a certain group can be just as 'private' as something restricted to a certain individual. Would a payroll spreadsheet on a company's server, restricted to only certain levels of management, also be considered public to you? If so, what's the difference between that and a Facebook post?
I know not to expect privacy on Facebook because I've seen too many stories like this, but that's a quite separate issue to whether a reasonable person should have some expectation of privacy for their posts. It's also quite different if there's a subpoena involved, which there clearly wasn't in this case.
Just to be entirely clear: I think the kid calling the teacher a paedophile (assuming the accusation was indeed unfounded, as it seems to be) was, at best, dangerously flippant or, at worst, a malicious little shit. Thing is, there are two issues at hand here: the child's wrongdoing in saying things that could quite easily ruin someone's life, and the teacher's wrongdoing in invading the child's privacy.
I don't think they'd be stupid enough to keep trying to sue - the major labels would be more than happy to have a guaranteed monthly income stream from essentially everybody in the country. I also don't doubt that labels would also graciously offer to take the job of passing the money on to the artists who deserved it, less a reasonable fee for all their valuable services, of course... Oh, and good luck getting any payment if you aren't signed to one of those companies doing the distribution.
Fair point. For what it's worth, I use OSX on my primary machine and it's been who knows how long since I last came across a website that required ActiveX; the odd time that it has happened it's been easy enough to react with a simple "Oh, well, I'm not doing business with those idiots then". That said, you're absolutely right that OS specific extensions are dangerous, especially in the hands of the market leader - it's still technically a matter of standards rather than of platform-specificity, but you'd be quite right to accuse me of nitpicking were I to push that point any further!
Cross platform doesn't matter as long as the different pieces of platform-specific software all obey the same standard. It doesn't matter whether your TCP/IP stack was coded in malbolge by Russian monks and only runs on RISC OS, if it supports the standard it won't cause any problems for anybody.
The problem, of course, is that HTML & CSS are very complicated and, some might say, poorly-defined standards whereas TCP/IP, ASCII, and so forth are straightforward and well known. Really, though, your theory that one needs a cross-platform browser to ensure correct rendering implies that none of them are implementing the standards properly, and that's something I disagree with - there may be minor quirks, but on the whole you can expect a well coded site to display more or less accurately, although not pixel-perfect, in all modern browsers. IE6, however, made a complete hash of valid markup ten years ago, and does so to an even greater extent now.
To be fair, it only takes one of us to make an executable to do the job with a couple of clicks and a "What's your FB username/password?" prompt. Not that I'm going to do so, though; these YouTube clips of cats in amusing situations aren't going to watch themselves, after all...
I didn't mean it as any kind of judgement. I was simply working on the basis that the incentive for copyright infringement tends to be much higher in countries with a somewhat lower GDP/capita (but one which is high enough that a decent number of people can still afford computers), and such countries also tend to have a smaller IP export industry, meaning that the governments tend to have more pressing issues driving genuine economic development than chasing after people who may or may not have deprived a foreign company of a few dollars.
None of these apply to Canada, and it is culturally similar to the states (i.e. similar respect or lack thereof for creative work), which is why it struck me as the odd one out. No assumptions of guilt or innocence on anyone's part, just a simple "one of these things is not like the others".
As a Canadian, do you have any idea why Canadia ended up on the list? The rest I can understand, with the possible exception of Spain, but Canada? Really?
Faxes also have legal statuses that email doesn't, in some jurisdictions, so faxing is still a staple in government departments, the legal profession, and in B2B transactions.
While true, this is still stupid. Not a major problem in the scheme of things, I know, but when the very conversation we're having is about the fact that a modem can send a stream of bits to a fax machine as easily as to an email account, it's pretty clear that one should have no more bearing than the other.
I know the legal system shouldn't be jumping on the bandwagon every time new tech comes along, but it's 2011, there's plenty of precedent involving email. Either accept both or deny both, but don't make some arbitrary distinction between the two.
Just because you don't need a feature doesn't mean that's always the solution.
Or perhaps, y'know, just extend the same protections to the 'credit' you're accessing in the time before you pay your phone bill as you get with credit cards. Very limited liability for unauthorised use & a call to confirm if your usage strays far outside your normal pattern should be plenty.
We've seen with roaming data charges, that they're happy to let you run up a bill in the thousands, cut it by 70% when you complain, and act like they've done you a favour, but I don't know that they'll manage to keep up the same attitude when it's that bit harder to blame on the user.
I thought the same - doesn't McAfee's software suck? I mean, I can see how they're profitable despite said suckage, but Intel are a chip company, not an investment bank, so presumably they want something more than to just let the guys chug along making them cash.
That comment was in relation to them silencing the author of the book, not the button guy. My point was that they are genuinely silencing creative work, and the story about the buttons is just an amusingly absurd example of the pattern of behaviour.