That's a bald-faced lie. Glenn Lurie, Cingular's president of national distribution, is the one who said that.
From PC Magazine
But in the end, Apple bent to Cingular with a multi-year, exclusive US contract for an entire line of different iPhone models, Glenn Lurie, Cingular's president of national distribution told journalists at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES 2007) today. ...
While "there are bad guys out there that unlock phones," Lurie said, Apple and Cingular are taking unspecified steps to make the phone more difficult to unlock and use on other GSM carriers in the US.
...if Apple meant it, the phones would be 100% unbranded and unlocked, they'd take any GSM provider's card, and APPLE would provide simple, regional, downloadable settings (for carrier-based web proxies, etc.)
Yeah, that'd sure win them an agreement with the cell carriers in the US. I'm sure Cingular would love to sell an unlocked phone in their stores, just as I'm sure they'd never intentionally screw with their network so said unlocked phone couldn't connect. Over 2 years of development, untold millions of man-hours, who knows how many millions of dollars, 200+ new patents... That's a lot to put on the line just to appease the sensibilities of a few dozen Linux nerds.
Just how naïve are you? This is the business world, not some paradise where He With The Most Principles wins. Apple has to deal with these people to get a cell phone to market, and they have certain deal-breakers. That's just life. You don't like it? Then I suggest you start a class-action lawsuit against the mobile phone cartel for their lock-in practices so that vendors like Apple can supply open phones without risking the wrath of the mobile networks and billions of dollars in research and development.
Apple doesn't have to sell them through Cingular (AT&T) or anyone else.
No, they would just have to sell them themselves and risk all the networks cutting their phone out of the service. Gee, an iPhone that doesn't work with any networks. Bet that'd sell a ton.
At the command line, Apple simply uses sudo. At the GUI layer, the security architecture is more complex than sudo. It borrows some concepts, but only in a very limited sense. When you authenticate, you don't necessarily become root. Sometimes, you are just given permission to make modificaitons within a program, where root privileges aren't strictly required for anything, but the app's author wanted to restrict certain capabilities to admin users on the machine. Apple's security model is designed around requesting rights (like "com.apple.installer.installSoftware") from the security server, and those rights have certain properties that you can set, like a timeout, whether root privileges are actually required for this right, etc... In many cases, you're authenticating for permission to run a SetUID command-line tool that's been factored out of the GUI app you're working in. For example, when you authenticate in Installer.app, Installer.app does not elevate to being run with root privileges. It launches a SetUID binary called "runner", which runs with as root.
Apple copied sudo's idea of "least required privileges" as the basis of its GUI security model, but I don't know if sudo was the first example of LRP. Maybe it was. But the GUI security model is definitely more complex than sudo, and apparently, it's a hell of a lot better than what Microsoft came up with for Vista. Using heuristics to identify which executables should get admin rights just seems like a horrendously stupid idea. Microsoft should've put its foot down on this one and forced developers of installer applications to properly request credentials. But they chose backwards-compatibility, as always, and now they're basically guessing who needs admin rights and who doesn't.
Almost as long as GDI from freaking windows which is the base vector graphics API. Go look it up, please.
Just because I was talking about GDI+, because it has the anti-aliasing and translucency features added in OSX, does not mean Windows didn't have a freaking vector language prior to that. In fact there is stuff from the original GDI of Windows in the 80s that is STILL not in OSX.
Mac OS 9 had vector drawing capabilities in the form of QuickDraw. For Christ's sake, I don't understand why you're making such a huge deal out of this. GUI operating systems generally have vector graphics APIs. And OS X doesn't even make use of vectors to draw the UI. Neither does Vista, as far as I know.
There is a difference between using 3D textures for window composition and actually using functions of the 3D library for accelerating the drawing inside an application and the desktop.
I realize that, but you're not listening. Quartz Extreme is more than just using 2-D textured polygons for windows. It also enables you to use OpenGL shaders to apply effects to different parts of the UI in an application. QuartzGL (originally Quartz 2D Extreme) puts the entire drawing path on the GPU. And its benefits are free for any application that uses Quartz for drawing, similar to how Vista's acceleration will be free to applications using WPF. But Vista doesn't have the half-way layer that OS X does. In OS X, people with non-DirectX 9-compliant cards still get some degree of 3-D acceleration, as long as their graphics cards support non-power-of-2 textures and basic shaders, that is, basically every GPU that's been shipped in the past 4 years. With Vista, you either support Aero Glass or you don't. That's not to say that Microsoft did something wrong. Their approach was just revolutionary because of Vista's development time, whereas Mac OS X's was evolutionary.
Vista also has a Vector composer to further speed up Vista and WPF applications, this is why you can remote desktop 4000 miles away to a Vista machine and STILL have 3D accelerated drawing on the remote screen. A Mac doesn't even have 3D accelerated drawing on screen in front of you if you are sitting at the freaking computer itself unless it is an OpenGL application.
Of course it does. The screen is composited on the GPU. That's 3-D acceleration. Not to the extent that the whole rendering pipeline is 3-D accelerated, but parts of it are. Claiming that Quartz isn't 3-D accelerated is just flat-out wrong.
Understand the difference?
About as well as I understand that you're a condescending prick who obviously has some deep-seated hatred for OS X's rendering pipeline.
OSX only has a bitmap composer that does nothing more than use the GPU textures for double buffering, it is NOT 3D accelerated, nor even 3D rendered. (Vista is BOTH.)
The compositor uses the GPU, which is 3-D acceleration. And QuartzGL, the fully 3-D rendering pipeline, was in Tiger in development form.
OSX's vector based graphics API is EQUIVALENT to GDI+ that has been available in Windows since 2001. Go look this up, please. Additionally, the Vectoring API of OSX is NOT EVEN close to the WPF vectoring concepts in Vista, from animation constructs to true 3D rendering and hit checking and is TRULY 3D accelerated.
OS X's vector graphics API? You mean NSBezierPath? That's been around since NeXTStep, which far predates Windows XP.
The iPhone is not a smart phone. It sits somewhere between dumb phones and smart phones. It's a phone for people who are willing to spend extra cash to get something nice. It's certainly not a replacement for anything running Windows CE. How could it be? Remember how Microsoft owns the business sector because of Outlook and its proprietary e-mail and calendar protocols? Why would Apple even bother?
Apple wants to do with the iPhone what it did with the iPod: bring some actual innovation to a stagnant market with shitty products.
And enough of the geek snobbery, please. Not everyone interested in the iPhone is a cum-guzzling whore like Paris Hilton or a clueless PHB. There are actual people (who can walk and chew gum at the same time and even perform basic arithmetic!) who are interested in the iPhone. You like stereotypes and snobbery? How's this one? People who get hard-ons for Linux don't know where they're actually supposed to put their penises.
He's not against DRM. Mac OS X is protected with it (the Intel version has certain binaries such as Dock.app "protected" in this way using encryption and the TPM chip.) He's also spoken approvingly of DRM on Bluray.
This is a myth. The Intel version of OS X never used the TPM chip, and no Macs shipping since October of last year include it. Certain binaries on OS X are encrypted, however.
He just appears to dislike it when it comes to music. And, to be honest, with Apple's absolutely hysterical comments in the past concerning, for example, France's attempts to outlaw DRM, I honestly think this is a new position, based upon forthcoming events, not because of pressure from Europe meaning Jobs feels like he can say what he always wanted to say really.
What a lawyer says when talking to the press gets overridden when the CEO posts a 2,000-word essay to the contrary on the front page. We can't know what was in Steve's head when he was negotiating the distribution contracts, but he's not stupid. All the arguments he made in that essay make sense in 2003 as well. Jobs has often drawn a distinction between music and video, saying that you listen to your favorite songs hundreds or thousands of times, but you might only watch your favorite movie a dozen or so times. He probably sees music as "wanting to be more free" than video or operating systems. And that's not an unreasonable view. Not everything digital must be completely open and free.
Quite honestly, the notion Steve Jobs has always been against DRM makes no sense whatsoever. There's no evidence for it, and there's plenty of evidence against it.
You're drawing a false dilemma. Steve Jobs does not have to be anti-DRM for everything in order to be anti-DRM for music. Obviously, he thinks that DRM and/or copy protection is appropriate for certain bytes while not appropriate for others. This is not unreasonable.
Do you have a reference as to how exactly this has changed? And can TCPFlow get through the secure session which iTunes establishes with the store? Shouldn't it only pick up encrypted packets?
In March of 2005, it was revealed through a front end of the iTunes Music Store called PyMusique that the FairPlay DRM was added only as a song was being purchased from the store by the client software itself.
Has this changed? Besides, even if the store sends out an unprotected AAC, there are plenty of methods to hide that AAC in memory and make it next to impossible for anything but iTunes to reconstruct. You could randomly store different parts of the song in different parts of memory, so one part could be stored in a local variable, another in a global variable, still another in static storage in a calling routine, etc...
I was thinking about this last night, and it seems to me that tying the iTunes Music Store to the iPod isn't really so much a way to lock consumers in as it is a bludgeon to use in negotiations with the RIAA. Jobs says that this lock-in doesn't benefit the consumer, and they don't derive enough profit from the "lock in" sales to make it worthwhile. But when he can walk into a room with all the big labels and say, "iPods are freakin' popular, and I've got the only way of putting legally-downloaded music on them", he has instant leverage. That's probably why he was able to keep the song price at $0.99. The labels can't go to another download service if they want to put DRM'ed music on iPods. They have to go to Apple, and they have to actually negotiate, rather than just steamrolling over the opposition until they get their way. So it's a lock-in, but it's primary purpose is not to force customers to keep buying iPods; it's to force the record labels to keep coming back to Apple.
iTunes DRM is applied by the client, which means that the client would have to pull down a "DRM/no-DRM" flag from the server in order to determine how it should procede. Of course DVD John would love this, since he has a business dedicated to cracking iTunes and other DRM. This way he could just intercept the flag and switch it to "no DRM" all the time. And then guess what? Apple has to find a way to fix it within a few weeks, or the labels pull their catalogues.
I can't believe people have the audacity to accuse Steve Jobs of being self-serving when DVD John is talking about how great it'd be if Apple adopted this system whereby he could prevent DRM from even being applied to store purchases just by flipping a bit. This would be great for DVD John, since he'd have a consistent vector of attack. The flag would always have to be transmitted. Apple might "fix" his hack by hiding it somewhere, but then it's just a matter of finding out where it's hidden, not a matter of coming up with a completely new method of attack.
How about DVD John puts his money where his mouth is and publicly states that he will not try to crack a DRM/no-DRM flag system if Apple implements it?
They don't sell podcasts (they're all free, I think) or license them from anyone. They just provide a directory in which people can list their podcasts. What a band chooses to put in their podcast is entirely within their discretion. If the band wishes to give their music away, they're free to do that, provided their label doesn't mind.
You have your principles and stick to your guns for a good cause. That's admirable. Stick it out further, and you might just get an iTunes Store with DRM-free music. (No, this isn't sarcasm.)
Oh right. I naïvely expected you to actually use context to get true meaning. Sorry I didn't spell everything out for your dumb ass.
Who knows. Why would Jobs forcibly have iTunes DRM tunes that don't require it?
Maybe because if he starts giving one music label different contracts, every other music label will start demanding different contracts with songs for different prices? This is business, not some geek fantasy world where everything revolves around mere technical practicality. Jobs busted his ass to keep a consistent contract across labels. If he shows willingness to bend on the terms, guess who'll take advantage?
Except that the metric by which Apple would judge the success of the Grand Lock-in Conspiracy(TM) is average number of DRM'ed songs per iPod, because that's the most conservative estimate. How is Apple supposed to know whether an iTunes customer has an iPod or which iPods are no longer in use? It gives a ball-park estimate. So let's say we've got 45 million iPods still in use, half of the ones that have been sold. That's 44 songs per iPod in use. Still, not incredibly locked in. The person could still burn to a CD and re-rip. Okay, so let's say half of all iPod owners don't actually buy songs from the iTunes Music Store. Okay, average of 88. Still below a hundred. This also means that Apple has to spend money and risk getting the music catalogue pulled to keep half their user-base potentially locked in. Now, for simplicity, let's say that half of all people feel "locked in" after 88 songs. So Apple's spending all this time and effort to lock in a quarter of all iPod buyers.
This is a simplistic analysis. But this should show that it's not as simple as DVD John makes it out to be and certainly not as simple as how Steve Jobs made it out. But really, the true answer is probably in the same order of magnitude. You also have to take into account how big a factor "iTunes lock-in" is in future purchasing decisions. Most people just don't even know that iTunes DRM is there. They just buy new iPods because... OH MY GOD THEY LIKE iPODS. Apple spends a whole lot of money on marketing. Why do that if the Grand Lock-in Conspiracy(TM) works so well? For a lot of people, the "lock in" factor doesn't even register. They just like their iPods, so they keep buying them.
So yeah, it's complicated. And it's not easy to figure out. What does Jobs' analysis tell us? It's a conservative estimate of how well this supposed lock-in works. And that estimate is not kind. Generally, in business, if a conservative estimate makes something not worthwhile, then don't do it. Just assume that the worst-case scenario is how it actually is and go by that.
As to his comments about TV shows and movies, once you've watched a TV show on your iPod once, you're not nearly as likely to watch it again. Same with movies. Songs are really all that matters here. The most likely videos you'll end up replaying are ones you've made yourself with something like iMovie, which doesn't generate DRM-encrypted movies. If Apple really wanted to lock people in, they could do a far better job for far less money. Or they could make iTunes rip to DRM'ed AAC's. Guess what? That would mean lock-in for free. No having to put up with music companies' threats of pulling their catalogues or anything.
DVD John may be a smart guy, but this theory that "Steve Jobs is using bogus statistics on purpose to back an argument he doesn't really believe in (which is bound to piss off the people who license him his content, and those people just happen to be a cartel) just to make himself look better to the geek crowd that hates DRM and maybe appeal to governments that have already made it clear they don't like what he's doing" is just ridiculous. Please.
In the spirit of this new, open Internet, would you mind giving me your name, home address and employment history? You know, just so I know where to send my future replies.
It's amazing to me that a sex offender has to run around and tell everyone in his neighborhood that he's a sex offender, but a drunk driver who kills someone behind the wheel gets to go home after he's served his sentence, no questions asked. But of course, the real purpose of Megan's Law isn't to actually protect anyone; it's to encourage vigilantism. If we ring a big enough bell, we can rely on the public to drive the sex offender out of town (or just kill him outright; sex offenders released from prison shouldn't expect to have the same freedoms or protections as normal people, after all) while simultaneously freeing up a spot in the prison system so we can lock up some kid who got busted with an ounce of marijuana. Everyone wins!
Indeed. If the person is a legitimate sex offender (not some 18 year-old high schooler who got busted having sex with his 17 year-old girlfriend), then just leave him in jail. Seriously, if you're going to put all these massive, Draconian restrictions on sex offenders when they're released, why bother releasing them at all? They only live some pathetic mockery of a normal life, have virtually no chance of ever landing a respectable job (thanks to idiotic labels that lump child molesters in with guys who urinated in public), and they're more difficult for the police to track. Depriving a person of his freedoms and confining him to a fixed space is the point of jail, not being released from jail.
If Jobs wanted a consistent, all-or-nothing experience, he would make iTunes encrypt all music -- ripped CDs, MP3s from the intarweb, etc.
I said a consistent experience with the store, you blitering idiot. Why the hell would Jobs forcibly have iTunes DRM legitimately-ripped CDs? Hell, this is an argument in favor of Jobs' comments today, not against them. iTunes doesn't even offer the user the option of DRM'ing their rips, unlike Windows Media Player.
The current situation is inconsistent. If a user wants to make a MP3-CD for their car player, some of their songs can be copied (MP3s ripped from original CDs) and some can't (iTunes Store purchases).
Wrong. iTunes will simply convert the protected AACs to MP3's to create the MP3 CD.
How the fuck is that consistent? The average user doesn't understand why there's a difference. They don't know that iTunes Store tracks are encrypted, and they certainly don't know how to tell which is which. They just have a bunch of music and want everything to work the same way.
Bullshit, you retard. There's a "Purchased" category in iTunes that shows you exactly what you've bought from the store, and all music bought from the store has the ".m4p" extension. Have you ever used iTunes?
The "benefit" is to the tune of $22 per iPod, notwithstanding the constant cat-and-mouse game with people trying to break FairPlay and the programmer-hours that costs. Frankly, I wouldn't be surprised if the overhead of maintaining FairPlay for each song was more than Apple's profit for each song. And you saw the numbers. The average iPod owner's music collection consists of 3% of protected-AAC files. If someone is really dissatisfied with the iPod and wants to switch, or if he's found something he likes better, he's not going to be swayed by 30 songs out of his collection of 1000, especially when he has the option of burning those songs and re-ripping them. The average consumer won't notice the quality drop. The benefit from this lock-in has been severely exaggerated.
It's obviously an all-or-nothing deal. He wants a consistent user experience so that the customer knows what he's getting every time. Microsoft caught shit for pimping the Zune's squirting and then turning around and selling tracks that certain artists didn't want to be squirted. That kind of inconsistency adds complexity. The iTunes store is supposed to be simple. There's no conspiracy here. On average, barely 3% of the music on an iPod is from the iTunes store, so if a customer really wants to move to another player, he's not going to feel "locked in" by 3% of his music collection. If you'd read the damn essay, you'd know that.
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Just how naïve are you? This is the business world, not some paradise where He With The Most Principles wins. Apple has to deal with these people to get a cell phone to market, and they have certain deal-breakers. That's just life. You don't like it? Then I suggest you start a class-action lawsuit against the mobile phone cartel for their lock-in practices so that vendors like Apple can supply open phones without risking the wrath of the mobile networks and billions of dollars in research and development. No, they would just have to sell them themselves and risk all the networks cutting their phone out of the service. Gee, an iPhone that doesn't work with any networks. Bet that'd sell a ton.
At the command line, Apple simply uses sudo. At the GUI layer, the security architecture is more complex than sudo. It borrows some concepts, but only in a very limited sense. When you authenticate, you don't necessarily become root. Sometimes, you are just given permission to make modificaitons within a program, where root privileges aren't strictly required for anything, but the app's author wanted to restrict certain capabilities to admin users on the machine. Apple's security model is designed around requesting rights (like "com.apple.installer.installSoftware") from the security server, and those rights have certain properties that you can set, like a timeout, whether root privileges are actually required for this right, etc ... In many cases, you're authenticating for permission to run a SetUID command-line tool that's been factored out of the GUI app you're working in. For example, when you authenticate in Installer.app, Installer.app does not elevate to being run with root privileges. It launches a SetUID binary called "runner", which runs with as root.
Apple copied sudo's idea of "least required privileges" as the basis of its GUI security model, but I don't know if sudo was the first example of LRP. Maybe it was. But the GUI security model is definitely more complex than sudo, and apparently, it's a hell of a lot better than what Microsoft came up with for Vista. Using heuristics to identify which executables should get admin rights just seems like a horrendously stupid idea. Microsoft should've put its foot down on this one and forced developers of installer applications to properly request credentials. But they chose backwards-compatibility, as always, and now they're basically guessing who needs admin rights and who doesn't.
Yes, and we've had this thing called "improvement" since then.
I'd imagine Steve supports copy protection on Adobe Photoshop. Software and music are two completely different things.
The iPhone is not a smart phone. It sits somewhere between dumb phones and smart phones. It's a phone for people who are willing to spend extra cash to get something nice. It's certainly not a replacement for anything running Windows CE. How could it be? Remember how Microsoft owns the business sector because of Outlook and its proprietary e-mail and calendar protocols? Why would Apple even bother?
Apple wants to do with the iPhone what it did with the iPod: bring some actual innovation to a stagnant market with shitty products.
And enough of the geek snobbery, please. Not everyone interested in the iPhone is a cum-guzzling whore like Paris Hilton or a clueless PHB. There are actual people (who can walk and chew gum at the same time and even perform basic arithmetic!) who are interested in the iPhone. You like stereotypes and snobbery? How's this one? People who get hard-ons for Linux don't know where they're actually supposed to put their penises.
Compile that and run it.
Do you have a reference as to how exactly this has changed? And can TCPFlow get through the secure session which iTunes establishes with the store? Shouldn't it only pick up encrypted packets?
The license actually forbids you from installing Vista on two partitions of a hard drive on the same computer? That's just fucking retarded.
I was thinking about this last night, and it seems to me that tying the iTunes Music Store to the iPod isn't really so much a way to lock consumers in as it is a bludgeon to use in negotiations with the RIAA. Jobs says that this lock-in doesn't benefit the consumer, and they don't derive enough profit from the "lock in" sales to make it worthwhile. But when he can walk into a room with all the big labels and say, "iPods are freakin' popular, and I've got the only way of putting legally-downloaded music on them", he has instant leverage. That's probably why he was able to keep the song price at $0.99. The labels can't go to another download service if they want to put DRM'ed music on iPods. They have to go to Apple, and they have to actually negotiate, rather than just steamrolling over the opposition until they get their way. So it's a lock-in, but it's primary purpose is not to force customers to keep buying iPods; it's to force the record labels to keep coming back to Apple.
iTunes DRM is applied by the client, which means that the client would have to pull down a "DRM/no-DRM" flag from the server in order to determine how it should procede. Of course DVD John would love this, since he has a business dedicated to cracking iTunes and other DRM. This way he could just intercept the flag and switch it to "no DRM" all the time. And then guess what? Apple has to find a way to fix it within a few weeks, or the labels pull their catalogues.
I can't believe people have the audacity to accuse Steve Jobs of being self-serving when DVD John is talking about how great it'd be if Apple adopted this system whereby he could prevent DRM from even being applied to store purchases just by flipping a bit. This would be great for DVD John, since he'd have a consistent vector of attack. The flag would always have to be transmitted. Apple might "fix" his hack by hiding it somewhere, but then it's just a matter of finding out where it's hidden, not a matter of coming up with a completely new method of attack.
How about DVD John puts his money where his mouth is and publicly states that he will not try to crack a DRM/no-DRM flag system if Apple implements it?
They don't sell podcasts (they're all free, I think) or license them from anyone. They just provide a directory in which people can list their podcasts. What a band chooses to put in their podcast is entirely within their discretion. If the band wishes to give their music away, they're free to do that, provided their label doesn't mind.
You have your principles and stick to your guns for a good cause. That's admirable. Stick it out further, and you might just get an iTunes Store with DRM-free music. (No, this isn't sarcasm.)
Except that the metric by which Apple would judge the success of the Grand Lock-in Conspiracy(TM) is average number of DRM'ed songs per iPod, because that's the most conservative estimate. How is Apple supposed to know whether an iTunes customer has an iPod or which iPods are no longer in use? It gives a ball-park estimate. So let's say we've got 45 million iPods still in use, half of the ones that have been sold. That's 44 songs per iPod in use. Still, not incredibly locked in. The person could still burn to a CD and re-rip. Okay, so let's say half of all iPod owners don't actually buy songs from the iTunes Music Store. Okay, average of 88. Still below a hundred. This also means that Apple has to spend money and risk getting the music catalogue pulled to keep half their user-base potentially locked in. Now, for simplicity, let's say that half of all people feel "locked in" after 88 songs. So Apple's spending all this time and effort to lock in a quarter of all iPod buyers.
... OH MY GOD THEY LIKE iPODS. Apple spends a whole lot of money on marketing. Why do that if the Grand Lock-in Conspiracy(TM) works so well? For a lot of people, the "lock in" factor doesn't even register. They just like their iPods, so they keep buying them.
This is a simplistic analysis. But this should show that it's not as simple as DVD John makes it out to be and certainly not as simple as how Steve Jobs made it out. But really, the true answer is probably in the same order of magnitude. You also have to take into account how big a factor "iTunes lock-in" is in future purchasing decisions. Most people just don't even know that iTunes DRM is there. They just buy new iPods because
So yeah, it's complicated. And it's not easy to figure out. What does Jobs' analysis tell us? It's a conservative estimate of how well this supposed lock-in works. And that estimate is not kind. Generally, in business, if a conservative estimate makes something not worthwhile, then don't do it. Just assume that the worst-case scenario is how it actually is and go by that.
As to his comments about TV shows and movies, once you've watched a TV show on your iPod once, you're not nearly as likely to watch it again. Same with movies. Songs are really all that matters here. The most likely videos you'll end up replaying are ones you've made yourself with something like iMovie, which doesn't generate DRM-encrypted movies. If Apple really wanted to lock people in, they could do a far better job for far less money. Or they could make iTunes rip to DRM'ed AAC's. Guess what? That would mean lock-in for free. No having to put up with music companies' threats of pulling their catalogues or anything.
DVD John may be a smart guy, but this theory that "Steve Jobs is using bogus statistics on purpose to back an argument he doesn't really believe in (which is bound to piss off the people who license him his content, and those people just happen to be a cartel) just to make himself look better to the geek crowd that hates DRM and maybe appeal to governments that have already made it clear they don't like what he's doing" is just ridiculous. Please.
In the spirit of this new, open Internet, would you mind giving me your name, home address and employment history? You know, just so I know where to send my future replies.
It's amazing to me that a sex offender has to run around and tell everyone in his neighborhood that he's a sex offender, but a drunk driver who kills someone behind the wheel gets to go home after he's served his sentence, no questions asked. But of course, the real purpose of Megan's Law isn't to actually protect anyone; it's to encourage vigilantism. If we ring a big enough bell, we can rely on the public to drive the sex offender out of town (or just kill him outright; sex offenders released from prison shouldn't expect to have the same freedoms or protections as normal people, after all) while simultaneously freeing up a spot in the prison system so we can lock up some kid who got busted with an ounce of marijuana. Everyone wins!
Indeed. If the person is a legitimate sex offender (not some 18 year-old high schooler who got busted having sex with his 17 year-old girlfriend), then just leave him in jail. Seriously, if you're going to put all these massive, Draconian restrictions on sex offenders when they're released, why bother releasing them at all? They only live some pathetic mockery of a normal life, have virtually no chance of ever landing a respectable job (thanks to idiotic labels that lump child molesters in with guys who urinated in public), and they're more difficult for the police to track. Depriving a person of his freedoms and confining him to a fixed space is the point of jail, not being released from jail.
The "benefit" is to the tune of $22 per iPod, notwithstanding the constant cat-and-mouse game with people trying to break FairPlay and the programmer-hours that costs. Frankly, I wouldn't be surprised if the overhead of maintaining FairPlay for each song was more than Apple's profit for each song. And you saw the numbers. The average iPod owner's music collection consists of 3% of protected-AAC files. If someone is really dissatisfied with the iPod and wants to switch, or if he's found something he likes better, he's not going to be swayed by 30 songs out of his collection of 1000, especially when he has the option of burning those songs and re-ripping them. The average consumer won't notice the quality drop. The benefit from this lock-in has been severely exaggerated.
It's obviously an all-or-nothing deal. He wants a consistent user experience so that the customer knows what he's getting every time. Microsoft caught shit for pimping the Zune's squirting and then turning around and selling tracks that certain artists didn't want to be squirted. That kind of inconsistency adds complexity. The iTunes store is supposed to be simple. There's no conspiracy here. On average, barely 3% of the music on an iPod is from the iTunes store, so if a customer really wants to move to another player, he's not going to feel "locked in" by 3% of his music collection. If you'd read the damn essay, you'd know that.