2. Atheism without religion is meaningless. Every child is born an atheist, but there's a massive difference between the atheism of a newborn, and the atheism of, say, Richard Dawkins. Atheism based on ignorance is no better than religion.
That doesn't seem to coincide with the underpinnings of atheism: the refusal to believe in something without evidence.
A child ignorant of the existence of religion is an atheist for precisely the right reason: because he (or she) has seen no evidence that any being called or described as "God" exists.
Atheism does not gain its meaning from the existence of religion. All religion creates is a need to give atheism a name.
The trouble with that is simple: Time marches on, and specialized devices eventually cease being useful. I've had two DVD players that once played everything which have been supplanted by the shift to h.264 and AAC, for instance.
Formats get old. Does-everything black boxes turn into do-nothing black boxes at the same rate.
Whatever specialized box you have will eventually cease to be useful without software maintenance. And while software maintenance is a pain, chasing formats around is even more painful.
This is no less true of general purpose devices. Formats change and hardware requirements change as well.
I'd be willing to bet on the useful lifetime of a Boxee Box purchased this coming November as being as long as or longer than an atom-powered Acer Aspire, and the Aspire, the Windows operating system on it, and the hand-assembled collection of software on it mentioned in the post above-- some flavor XBMC, plus CoreAVC) would most certainly require more care and feeding than the more specialized device.
Industry trends wax and wane, to and from general purpose and single purpose, with lots of items along the spectrum in between. Cost is a big factor. When components are expensive, a device must be multifunction, and perhaps even user serviceable, to justify its price. When components become cheaper, more specialized devices are acceptable, if they do the things they do very well and require minimal maintenance.
A netbook is the worst of both worlds in this scenario. It wasn't made for the purpose it is being used for, can't effectively be used for many of the purposes it was intended for (general computing) and requires more user maintenance than a comparable specialized device for a similar price (Boxee Box) or half the price (Apple TV).
Besides, I do enjoy tinkering with things, even though I have also wife+house+job+kids. It's not the most glorious hobby in the world, but it's mine. I'd so much rather tinker*, than work to pay someone else to tinker on my behalf and deliver the fruits of their efforts in the form of a does-everything (for today!) black box.
This is why it won't pay either for the device industry, or for the content industry, to cater to your usage patterns, because you'd prefer not to involve either of them. You're essentially not a customer for anyone except for the maker of the general purpose operating systems you do your tinkering on.
(*Yes, I generally get to choose how much I work in a week, or in a day. It makes it easy to justify spending time on personal stuff, and not just with computers. Things like: Gosh, I could pay a carpenter $900 to do that job, or I could take a few days off of work and do it myself. Or: I could pay $1,600 for a new clutch to be installed, or... etc. YMMV, but if you're really just a suburbanite consumer, you're doing it by choice.)
I suppose that just depends on whether or not you can make $900 in "a few days" or not. Not everyone is a jack of all trades. Some pay for such services because they are unable, or can't be bothered. Some do it yourselfers do so because it's cheaper, others because they just prefer it, irrespective of cost.
The problem is that in many cases, the do-it-yourselfers are not an addressable market, and so products that hit the marketplace do not cater to their usage patterns. This explains a high percentage of the complaints on Slashdot regarding the Apple/iTunes ecosystem.
Seriously, give credit where it's due. The Apple one watches you as much as (or more than?) the Google one.
Perhaps, but for most people, Apple has less data to correlate.
Both run an email service, but I'm willing to wager that Google's is more ubiquitous.
Google runs a search engine; Apple doesn't. Google uses information in your mailbox to figure out what ads to show you on any device where you use a Google account. There's no iAd program I'm aware of outside the handheld sphere. So while Apple is watching you while you're on an iOS device, Google is watching you everywhere.
Google's business model gives them a lot more interest in leveraging information they have about you in some other sphere, and hence more incentive to abuse, than Apple currently does, because most of Apple's ecosystems exist to add value to their primary products, which are consumer electronics devices, not content.
Google has no such business. It's in advertising. Google's information about you is their business. The free services they offer are just ways to get you to give them that information. Every new potential use of that information is a new potential revenue stream for Google, whereas if new information about you doesn't lead directly to you having a better feeling about your Apple device, or make you more likely to buy more Apple devices in the future, it has relatively little value to Apple-- at least, at the current time.
With the growth of iAds being what it is, this may not be the case for much longer.
>>>I assumed we were talking about "broadband" in the networking sense, not in the RF sense.
Then you are using the word incorrectly. The word "broadband" can only ever be used when talking about Frequencies, not bits. The latter is the DATARATE.:-) You could have a channel that is very broad in frequency, but still very slow in datarate. Like TV closed captioning. Or ELF radio..
>>>The relevant meaning of "broadband" is something more like "at least 1MBps and reasonable latency for both download and upload"
Citation please. Last I checked anything greater than Dialup (56k) or ISDN (128k) speed is considered a high speed network. Even my 750k line is considered high speed per FCC regs..
>>> a standard which satellite didn't meet, last time I checked (have they moved beyond dialup upload by now?)
Satellite provides 1.5 Mbit/s (Wild Blue company). Or more.
While the note about frequencies vs data rate is technically correct (the best kind of correct) in the context of this discussion, it is a bit pedantic. The term "broadband" is being used as generally understood-- as high data rate, relatively low latency Internet access.
Even if we extended the definition, as many people do, beyond the FCC's 4Mbps to commonly available services down to 1Mbps, any satellite system with telco return (56K dialup or perhaps ISDN) would not qualify.
Most people in the US have, at best, a choice between two such providers, where they have any. Many have only one choice.
A DOLLAR for a TV show? that's what Apple wants! If you ask me (and you won't) that's just stupid.
That is what Apple is proposing to charge. I do not suppose this is necessarily what Apple wants. I'd be surprised if Apple weren't happy with whatever their normal percentage is of whatever the content providers are willing to sell content for.
Historically, content providers have wanted higher pricing than Apple wanted, something they disguised behind a request for more flexible pricing.
What I do find curious about all of this is the bifurcation between the radio/music ecosystem on one hand, and the television/video ecosystem on the other.
Obviously enough people feel that $0.99 for a track of music (say around three minutes of stereo audio) is a reasonable proposition.
However, $1.99 for twenty-two minutes of video is too expensive, and $0.99 for rental of that same program is also unacceptable.
I'm not saying I disagree, I'm just saying that objectively, that would seem to be in line. Both represent transitions from advertising-supported distribution networks that are free to the end user, to an a la carte model where you pay for only what you want. Yet somehow, the much smaller music file is worth far more money per bit than the television program. Or perhaps it's just the DRM and other restrictions that make music a worthwhile purchase, and iTunes video not so much.
So you're saying that bad behavior by a corporation is OK, as long as they're not #1.
I'll have to think about that a while.
He's not saying that.
He's saying behavior crosses the line from being bad to being actionable when there is not enough competition in a market to allow for real choice, as in cases of a company that abuses a monopoly position.
I do expect Apple will have to consider banning jailbroken phones from GameCenter. I don't see how that is not analogous to MS banning modified consoles from XBL. Neither party needs to brick the device or disable it in any other way-- just disable the ability to potentially use those modifications on a service where such modifications might grant them an unfair advantage, and ruin the service for others.
> What does Plex get you that using the file browser and double clicking does not?
Metadata. Being able to filter and sort by year, by genre, by actor, by director, or by whether you've watched them before or not.
Posters and frame previews. Plot summaries for both movies and television episodes.
Attractive graphical representations of file contents-- resolution, video codec, audio format.
Ratings for content, and the ability to submit ratings.
XBMC and all its forks (like Plex and Boxee) are specifically designed to give you a fundamentally different kind of experience than just looking at a list of files and then double-clicking to open.
If none of those things are interesting (or if you're willing to go to the trouble to install your own jukebox and configure it) you're better off going with an NMT-based device like a PopcornHour or something similar. They're much less expensive, and many have options for local storage if you don't want to run a server, and can access NAS devices directly if you have any.
If you want the metadata, but only need it on a single machine, or have a NAS and don't want to run a server, look at XBMC.
If you want the metadata, need to access it from several different places and devices (iOS devices, Mac Mini as an HTPC) and are willing to run a server, look at Plex9.
Another alternative is coming later this year: the Boxee box. A fork of XBMC running on a linux-based machine rather like many of the NMT devices, but $100 more than an AppleTV.
An AppleTV is really only useful if you either already have all your content in iTunes and are prepared to keep a computer running to serve it from, or if you're happy with Apple's content rental offerings.
Both XBMC and Plex have supported hardware acceleration on the 2010 mini for a few months now. XBMC "dharma" supports it, Plex9 supports it, and there's a standalone binary of Plex 0.85 that supports it.
If you haven't already I suggest enabling the "true fullscreen" option in Plex. (Go to windowed mode, and in the Plex menu, open "advanced settings" and enable "True fullscreen".
If you're seeing dropped frames or stuttering that makes you think Plex9 can't do 1080p full screen, try this option. I've actually had no problem doing this on older machines than a 2010 mini, and using less capable video hardware, like the 9400M instead of the mini's GF 320M.
If the OP or many of the posters had bothered to read TFA they would understand why not.
Righthaven's client in this case is the Review-Journal of Las Vegas. Like many media outlets, its core business is creating content, and while it has an interest in having its intellectual property rights protected, it lacks the internal resources for doing so.
They engage Righthaven to search the Internet for infringing material. When they find it, they purchase the rights from the content producer for the express purpose of suing the infringer for damages.
There are several ideas here: one, that monitoring the Internet for this kind of content is a full-time job, and would be a big distraction if every content producer had to do it full-time.
Two, that issuing takedown notices is ultimately ineffective, since it is possible for considerable time to elapse between when infringing material is made available and when a takedown notice ultimately results in a takedown. If the infringer were a news site or an aggregator, reproducing content in full without permission, link, or attribution, all the while collecting advertising revenue and other benefits from the infringing content, a takedown notice may not provide enough deterrent against future infringement. Such an infringer would likely receive a small number of complaints compared to the amount of content they infringe upon. It is easier just to take the risk, knowing that no one will notice the content immediately, and afterwards it can be taken down-- by which time it has already served its purpose.
The approach used by Righthaven and its clients is to put some teeth into the deterrent by suing for damages. This is what makes it necessary for them to buy the rights from the content producer in order to sue for damages. I don't know what financial arrangements are made; possibly they pay Righthaven a monthly fee for monitoring, plus the sale of the rights on each piece of infringing content, plus damages, if any-- or perhaps damages are shared. I can only guess.
The point, however, is that this outfit is not out there just looking for random infringing content and then profiteering by suing for infringement. They are performing a service, outsourced to them by content producers, for policing the Internet for infringing content, for which any damages paid may (or may not) constitute part of their compensation for doing the monitoring and the litigation.
Intellectual property rights are like other rights-- rights over property. Like real property, it can be bought and sold. In this case, Righthaven buys it in order to make it part of a service they provide to the paper, which is to try and ensure that others are not reproducing content without permission.
The term "copyright troll" invokes an unfair comparison to the term "patent troll" in which a company buys patents or companies that hold patents that have never been, nor were ever likely to be, commercialized, in the hopes of building revenue from court enforced settlements alone. There is an important distinction here: while Righthaven itself does not produce content, it has a content producer as its client, and the content in question is part of that client's real, commercial activity: the newspaper.
In a patent troll situation, the link between the patent and the activities of the companies being sued can be entirely arbitrary. They need not have been aware of nor at any time in contact with the company that holds the patent. It need not be proved that the companies being sued had any special knowledge, conducted any industrial espionage, or undertook any reverse engineering. All they need to have done was to have reproduced some method for achieving a goal that is sufficiently similar to one previously registered by the patent office.
The link between the infringing content in this case and the commercial product of Righthaven's client is not coincidental or arbitrary: they are one and the same.
They find that on average, the advertised speeds were 'up to 6.7 Mbps' while the real median was 3 Mbps and the mean was 4 Mbps. This implies that ISPs were falsely advertising by at least 50%."
This implies that the author of the post does not understand the distinction between "peak" (meaning by "up to") and average or median.
C'mon, people. Yes, ISPs are evil and do bad things. That doesn't give us license to deliberately confuse things in order to make them look worse. It's unnecessary.
Which is why our system of prosecutorial discretion needs to be overhauled. It undermines the concept of equal protection under the law.
While all are ensured equitable and fair treatment in court, the odds of their ever coming to trial is totally dependant on the whim of the prosecutor. And eventually the majority that elected him/her to office. Which is something that our Constitution and Bill of Rights is supposed to protect us from.
The alternative is what... having it depend on the whim of the plaintiffs? Allowing for the same kind of litigous attidue that permeates the civil courts into the criminal courts, where the accused have a right to a public defender, paid for by public funds?
How with the massive increase in caseload be dealt with? Who will pay for the huge influx of new prosecuting attorneys-- the public? The plaintiffs? All this does is take the undermining of equal protection under the law that already exists in the civil system, where the side that can bear the legal expenses longest often wins-- and moves it into the criminal arena, where the potential penalties aren't merely pecuniary, but run to the loss of freedom or, depending on the state, loss of life.
Fraud requires representation of a material fact, it has to be false, the person making the representation has to know it's false and intend the other person act on that fact, the other person has to be ignorant of it, rely on the representation, have a right to rely on the representation, and suffer damages.
See the difficulty?
In this case the spying was covert...
From what I saw, it was never reported that the school assured students They could not activate the webcams remotely
For it to be fraud, the staff would have had to have lied about something.....
What if it were reasonable for a person to assume that the webcams either could not or would not be activated remotely, and the school was aware that they could, and perhaps would be activated remotely, could it be said that they had a positive responsibility to disclose this relevant fact when giving out the laptops?
Or are we to consider it reasonable that any such device with a camera will be used for such a purpose?
The problem is there's no way to prove the physical connection between who typed that comment and posted the pictures and the person potentially breaking the law.
What if he had a falling out with his brother and his brother used the computer to try and frame him for example?
This is quite different to someone admitting in front of witnesses they have committed a crime, because there the witnesses have witnessed the perpetrator in question admitting the crime directly.
This is the fundamental problem with computer crimes, people are arrested and convicted on much lower standards of evidence than have come to be expected in real life. Say a computer is used for a crime online, and the police trace the IP back to the house, and they can somehow prove the IP has always been attached to that computer and only that computer and they search that computer and find evidence of the crime, then can they prove the owner of the computer committed it? Say they check for finger prints and DNA evidence on the keyboard even, can they prove someone didn't just plug in another keyboard for the purpose of carrying out the crime?
It's the fundamental disconnect between the system used to commit the crime and the person who used that system to commit it that is the problem, and short of someone making a mistake and incriminating themselves physically in real life or someone physically witnessing the crime being committed I'm not sure it's ever possible to conclusively prove people responsible for digital crimes, at best you can get a decent amount of evidence, but many cases of non-digital crimes upto and including the most serious have fallen flat on such low standards of evidence even where the person is guilty.
I'm not familiar with this case, but I hope he was convicted on the basis that he also admitted guilt in real life, in person, and not purely on an internet posting as that'd be a bad precedent, a green light for smart criminals to frame people for anything from this sort of crime through to child porn crimes to hacking crimes.
A crime being linked to an IP seems fair enough justification to investigate the system or systems behind that IP and their owners, but not enough in itself to fairly secure a conviction.
Such claims are repeated often and aren't quite as meritorious as people think, especially when the standard of proof is merely "beyond a reasonable doubt".
Let's say you trace an IP to a given household during the period in question. On the basis of the forum post and the IP identification, you get a warrant and search the computer. You gain access to logfiles, cookies, browser history. Even if the computer is shared, you'll gain some information that would corroborate the forum post.
You may well allege, at this point, that the IP, the logfiles, the forum post, and all of this other, admittedly circumstantial evidence, points only to the computer. But that's not entirely true. You may gain access to other online identities this person uses.
The site itself may show you the poster's history, corroborating other elements of the story-- that correlate between the individual in question and the online identity which made the claim. If the content of other posts by the same online identity, also made from the same IP address, from the same computer at the same address, are consistent with other details of the individual's life, then that also generates a relatively high level of confidence in the accuracy of the post. Perhaps the poster's own history contains other, similar claims.
At that point, the question does not become whether or not all this circumstantial evidence proves unequivocally that the suspect was the one who actually made that post, and thus committed the infraction in question, but whether that is more or less plausible than believing that this single post, among all others made by that identity on one or more sites, which are consistent with being made by the suspect, was made fraudulently by someone else with ac
So, if I said I just caused world peace, does that mean I win myself the Nobel Peace Prize?
No, because your claim is much less plausible than his.
In your case, the implausibility of your claim, and the relative ease with which evidence to refute it may be gathered, gives quick rise to reasonable doubt. Any credible news media claim of conflict anywhere in the world negates your Nobel chances immediately.
In his case, the claim is quite plausible. His car is capable of that speed. Many people speed, every day. There is little incentive to lie about such a feat, and no easy way to positively verify it without eye witnesses. TFA is short on details, but I can easily imagine a scenario where a forum boast generates, at the very least, probable cause, which leads to a warrant to search the home and the car, where a diagnostic tool or perhaps even an onboard navigation system provides independent confirmation of the original claim.
It may even have been simpler than that. He may have arrogantly believed that his forum post was not enough to earn sanction, and perhaps even repeated the claim to police, believing that unless they had personally witnessed the event, anything he said, online or offline, was not sufficient. I seem to recall engaging in conflicts with motorists who were under the impression that traffic police could not take action against any driver for infractions they did not personally witness. This seems not to be the case.
He's comparing the byproduct of IP sharing through NAT (incoming traffic cannot reach a destination past the router without extraordinary means (preconfigured port forwarding, DMZ) without a pre-established connection. Your local IP address behind the NAT router is inaccessible, except when the router sees you've established a connection with an external public IP, and then it creates a temporary port mapping table that connects the public IP and its port (say, 80 in the case of a webserver) with the public IP of your router at some high arbitrary port, which then maps to your local NAT IP address at port 80 so your web browser can read the page. Without your initial connection attempt (loading a web page) this port mapping is not created, and computers with public IP addresses cannot "see" or contact your machine.
Greylisting does intentionally for email what NAT does as a byproduct. Unlike blacklisting, which enumerates email addresses to block, and whitelisting, which unemerates email addresses to allow, greylisting allows messages from only email addresses you've sent messages to-- like NAT only allows IP connections from IP addresses you've already contacted.
Have you seen the shareholder agreements of the companies in question? If you haven't, I'm not sure how you can say that. It is entirely possible for a shareholder agreement to provide for special voting rights of one party or another, and for a party who owns only 50% of all outstanding shares, or even less, to have a majority of votes, and therefore a "controlling interest".
One may not safely conclude whether or not an interest is "controlling" or not merely by asking for the percentages owned by all the shareholders, or even by specific knowledge of the governing law of the countries in which the companies are registered. One must specifically ask who has voting control, and on what basis.
It may be so that the FT only owns 50% of the Economist AND does not have a majority of voting rights, but one does not necessarily follow from the other.
"All this puts Wikipedia in the confusing position of not allowing a page for an undefined word whose meaning is defined via the Wikipedia page for that word — and now I have to lie down for a moment."
The meaning was not defined by Wikipedia. It was defined (or, more accurately, coined) by xkcd by way of a mockup of a nonexistent Wikipedia page that was then later created. Only those going out of their way to try and create a situation where Wikipedia is contradicting itself see it that way. Which is not to say that Wikipedia doesn't constantly contradict itself; merely having a page that cites a frame of xkcd citing a fictional Wikipedia page (that is then later created) does not constitute a self-contradiction.
There's a big problem here reconciling the phrase "fit for purpose" and the other phrases used in the summary attributed to Toulmin, namely all the comparatives: increased revenue, increased occupancy, quicker check-in and check-out. These aren't purpose. Whether the system in question is quicker or better depends entirely on what you're comparing it to: what old system (if any) was in place. A poor system not fit for purpose might well perform better than the old one if the old one was even worse. LIkewise, a good system might not generate improvement in any of these areas if the system it is replacing was better (and perhaps more expensive).
"We're talking about a *game*, not your oxygen supply"
We are talking about money paid, and the principle of having companies take away our ability to use what we have legally paid for, just because they have us by the balls.
If all you bought is Halo 2, you have no legal right to online multiplayer-- you didn't buy it.
If you bought XBL Gold, you could play Halo 2 and other Xbox and Xbox 360 games online for $50 a year. Now that system doesn't support the original Xbox games anymore (either on the Xbox console or on the 360 in emulation).
If you don't want the service anymore because of the closure of that service, then you can cancel your subscription. No one has taken away any ability to use something for which they have paid. Your ability in the past to play online was covered by your subscription fee. Microsoft no longer offers that service. If you don't want the service Microsoft does offer, you can cancel it. That doesn't take away anything from what you paid for Halo 2 because Halo 2, without the XBL service, could not pay online anyway, and now you won't be paying for it anymore.
No, what CONSUMERS "should" do is to QUIT buying software that's subject to such prone-obsolescence systems. If consumers are too stupid or unable to resist buying the latest and greatest despite such issues, then companies will continue to find it in their financial best interests to do so.
At least with a PC, there are methods to hack around this (even WoW has private servers, illegal but they're there), but now you see part of the actual total-cost-of-ownership for that console.
The total cost was never hidden. Halo 2 cost $50, and if you wanted to play online, you needed XBL Gold, which cost $50/yr. They aren't just seeing the TCO now, it was always immediately obvious. If you were paying that just to get Halo 2 online, then now it is not worth it to you-- so stop paying it. You're no longer getting the service, but you're no longer paying for it. There is no loss there. If you own a 360 and you have other games you can play online (like Halo 3) you can decide if that is worth $50 to you or not. The second it is not, you can also cancel.
This is a non-story and has been from the beginning.
really be required to legally release server side software for the PC to enable people to play their Xbox games. Quite frankly I really hate this bullshit service where companies have control over games people paid for in a "forced obsolescence" model of attempting to control the lifespan of a product and when to torch it to force people to upgrade.
It's unfortunate that the copyright and software licensing nazi's got control of the law due to the ignorance of the people.
This is bogus. Online multiplayer is NOT included in Halo 2. It is a separate subscription fee (Xbox Live Gold). There is absolutely no legal basis whatsoever to justify forcing MS to release this functionality, because it was never included in the price you paid for Halo 2; it was always separate.
If you weren't an Xbox Live Gold subscriber, then you're not missing out on anything now that you had before, because online play was never available to you anyway. If you're paying the XBL Gold fee to play Halo 2 online and they don't support it anymore, cancel your subscription or buy a new game.
I hear Halo 3 is pretty good.
Uninformed comments like these are exactly why MS charges for online play instead of giving it away for free. It means that as a vendor they get to decide what to sell, instead of being forced to sell or support a product they no longer want to offer, or being railroaded into giving it away for free.
I remember that one, I think it opened with a bugs bunny-ish skit depicting Bin Laden in some slapstick comedy.
Different one. They depicted Mohammad in the episode about the Super Best Friends, along with Lao Tzu, Seaman, Moses (as the MCP in Tron) and Buddha. Oh, and a giant stone Abraham Lincoln that gets shot by a giant stone John Wilkes Booth. And David Blaine's suicide cult.
Because the other characters say it is? So now it's unacceptable to mention Mohammad? What if the narrator is unreliable? Wouldn't the logical position of a devout Muslim be that Muhammad did never and would never wear a bear suit, and so this depiction is NOT Muhammad?
What if two on-screen characters disagree? What if one says "that's Mohammad over there in the bear suit" and the second one says "no it isn't".
Have they "depicted" Mohammad in any readily recognizable fashion whatsoever?
I think the site has done a good job on the analysis. Gizmodo was a greedy site who wanted more hits, the author's an asshole who just wanted to cause more trouble for that guy for kicks.
Sure, he lost a prototype, but does he deserve his career ruined at other firms too? Definitely not. Especially problematic in the tech industry where employers are sure to run a Google search on prospective employees.
If he doesn't deserve that, it won't happen.
If potential employers consider that relevant, and are willing to take that action, on what basis can you allege it is undeserved?
Why is a tech blog expected to be understanding of the fact that a guy needs a job even if he does lose an expensive prototype telephone if the company that gave it to him isn't, and other companies that do similar work aren't? Why is the website's profit motive less sacrosanct than that of Apple or other prospective employers for this guy?
If he honestly believes that the single best way he can promote development on Android is to criticize development on the iPhone, then he's probably destined to fail.
It's not enough to say what's bad-- or, more appropriately, what he doesn't like-- about how Apple's program works. He'll need to illustrate what's good about how Google and Android work above and beyond just not having some of Apple's deficiencies, since it's clear that for many developers, these deficiencies aren't relevant, or if they are, they are overridden by the size of the potential audience the iPhone platform represents.
Disneyfied? If you're not making adult content, you probably aren't interested in that.
Walled garden? Either he's unfamiliar with the term or is being disingenuous. The barrier of entry into Apple's developer program for iPhone development is very low; perhaps not as low as Google's, but lower than other mobile platforms that support third-party development have been historically (RIM, Symbian).
Defended by lawyers? There I assume he's talking about the suit against HTC et al over Android: I doubt users and developers, by and large, care about that, since it concerns the platform itself and not programs developed for it. Except that, you know, if they think there's a chance in hell Apple might win they might want to consider developing for the iPhone to hedge their bets. If they think Apple's suits have no merit and won't win... then who cares if Apple wastes money on lawyers?
This guy is doing his job-- promoting the interest of his parent company and their partners. Apple has guys who do the same. Where is the high road here, supposedly?
Slashdot Mirror
2. Atheism without religion is meaningless. Every child is born an atheist, but there's a massive difference between the atheism of a newborn, and the atheism of, say, Richard Dawkins. Atheism based on ignorance is no better than religion.
That doesn't seem to coincide with the underpinnings of atheism: the refusal to believe in something without evidence.
A child ignorant of the existence of religion is an atheist for precisely the right reason: because he (or she) has seen no evidence that any being called or described as "God" exists.
Atheism does not gain its meaning from the existence of religion. All religion creates is a need to give atheism a name.
The trouble with that is simple: Time marches on, and specialized devices eventually cease being useful. I've had two DVD players that once played everything which have been supplanted by the shift to h.264 and AAC, for instance.
Formats get old. Does-everything black boxes turn into do-nothing black boxes at the same rate.
Whatever specialized box you have will eventually cease to be useful without software maintenance. And while software maintenance is a pain, chasing formats around is even more painful.
This is no less true of general purpose devices. Formats change and hardware requirements change as well.
I'd be willing to bet on the useful lifetime of a Boxee Box purchased this coming November as being as long as or longer than an atom-powered Acer Aspire, and the Aspire, the Windows operating system on it, and the hand-assembled collection of software on it mentioned in the post above-- some flavor XBMC, plus CoreAVC) would most certainly require more care and feeding than the more specialized device.
Industry trends wax and wane, to and from general purpose and single purpose, with lots of items along the spectrum in between. Cost is a big factor. When components are expensive, a device must be multifunction, and perhaps even user serviceable, to justify its price. When components become cheaper, more specialized devices are acceptable, if they do the things they do very well and require minimal maintenance.
A netbook is the worst of both worlds in this scenario. It wasn't made for the purpose it is being used for, can't effectively be used for many of the purposes it was intended for (general computing) and requires more user maintenance than a comparable specialized device for a similar price (Boxee Box) or half the price (Apple TV).
Besides, I do enjoy tinkering with things, even though I have also wife+house+job+kids. It's not the most glorious hobby in the world, but it's mine. I'd so much rather tinker*, than work to pay someone else to tinker on my behalf and deliver the fruits of their efforts in the form of a does-everything (for today!) black box.
This is why it won't pay either for the device industry, or for the content industry, to cater to your usage patterns, because you'd prefer not to involve either of them. You're essentially not a customer for anyone except for the maker of the general purpose operating systems you do your tinkering on.
(*Yes, I generally get to choose how much I work in a week, or in a day. It makes it easy to justify spending time on personal stuff, and not just with computers. Things like: Gosh, I could pay a carpenter $900 to do that job, or I could take a few days off of work and do it myself. Or: I could pay $1,600 for a new clutch to be installed, or... etc. YMMV, but if you're really just a suburbanite consumer, you're doing it by choice.)
I suppose that just depends on whether or not you can make $900 in "a few days" or not. Not everyone is a jack of all trades. Some pay for such services because they are unable, or can't be bothered. Some do it yourselfers do so because it's cheaper, others because they just prefer it, irrespective of cost.
The problem is that in many cases, the do-it-yourselfers are not an addressable market, and so products that hit the marketplace do not cater to their usage patterns. This explains a high percentage of the complaints on Slashdot regarding the Apple/iTunes ecosystem.
Seriously, give credit where it's due. The Apple one watches you as much as (or more than?) the Google one.
Perhaps, but for most people, Apple has less data to correlate.
Both run an email service, but I'm willing to wager that Google's is more ubiquitous.
Google runs a search engine; Apple doesn't. Google uses information in your mailbox to figure out what ads to show you on any device where you use a Google account. There's no iAd program I'm aware of outside the handheld sphere. So while Apple is watching you while you're on an iOS device, Google is watching you everywhere.
Google's business model gives them a lot more interest in leveraging information they have about you in some other sphere, and hence more incentive to abuse, than Apple currently does, because most of Apple's ecosystems exist to add value to their primary products, which are consumer electronics devices, not content.
Google has no such business. It's in advertising. Google's information about you is their business. The free services they offer are just ways to get you to give them that information. Every new potential use of that information is a new potential revenue stream for Google, whereas if new information about you doesn't lead directly to you having a better feeling about your Apple device, or make you more likely to buy more Apple devices in the future, it has relatively little value to Apple-- at least, at the current time.
With the growth of iAds being what it is, this may not be the case for much longer.
>>>I assumed we were talking about "broadband" in the networking sense, not in the RF sense.
Then you are using the word incorrectly. The word "broadband" can only ever be used when talking about Frequencies, not bits. The latter is the DATARATE. :-) You could have a channel that is very broad in frequency, but still very slow in datarate. Like TV closed captioning. Or ELF radio. .
>>>The relevant meaning of "broadband" is something more like "at least 1MBps and reasonable latency for both download and upload"
Citation please. Last I checked anything greater than Dialup (56k) or ISDN (128k) speed is considered a high speed network. Even my 750k line is considered high speed per FCC regs. .
>>> a standard which satellite didn't meet, last time I checked (have they moved beyond dialup upload by now?)
Satellite provides 1.5 Mbit/s (Wild Blue company). Or more.
The FCC defines broadband as 4Mbps and higher.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broadband_Internet_access
While the note about frequencies vs data rate is technically correct (the best kind of correct) in the context of this discussion, it is a bit pedantic. The term "broadband" is being used as generally understood-- as high data rate, relatively low latency Internet access.
Even if we extended the definition, as many people do, beyond the FCC's 4Mbps to commonly available services down to 1Mbps, any satellite system with telco return (56K dialup or perhaps ISDN) would not qualify.
Most people in the US have, at best, a choice between two such providers, where they have any. Many have only one choice.
A DOLLAR for a TV show? that's what Apple wants! If you ask me (and you won't) that's just stupid.
That is what Apple is proposing to charge. I do not suppose this is necessarily what Apple wants. I'd be surprised if Apple weren't happy with whatever their normal percentage is of whatever the content providers are willing to sell content for.
Historically, content providers have wanted higher pricing than Apple wanted, something they disguised behind a request for more flexible pricing.
What I do find curious about all of this is the bifurcation between the radio/music ecosystem on one hand, and the television/video ecosystem on the other.
Obviously enough people feel that $0.99 for a track of music (say around three minutes of stereo audio) is a reasonable proposition.
However, $1.99 for twenty-two minutes of video is too expensive, and $0.99 for rental of that same program is also unacceptable.
I'm not saying I disagree, I'm just saying that objectively, that would seem to be in line. Both represent transitions from advertising-supported distribution networks that are free to the end user, to an a la carte model where you pay for only what you want. Yet somehow, the much smaller music file is worth far more money per bit than the television program. Or perhaps it's just the DRM and other restrictions that make music a worthwhile purchase, and iTunes video not so much.
So you're saying that bad behavior by a corporation is OK, as long as they're not #1.
I'll have to think about that a while.
He's not saying that.
He's saying behavior crosses the line from being bad to being actionable when there is not enough competition in a market to allow for real choice, as in cases of a company that abuses a monopoly position.
I do expect Apple will have to consider banning jailbroken phones from GameCenter. I don't see how that is not analogous to MS banning modified consoles from XBL. Neither party needs to brick the device or disable it in any other way-- just disable the ability to potentially use those modifications on a service where such modifications might grant them an unfair advantage, and ruin the service for others.
> What does Plex get you that using the file browser and double clicking does not?
Metadata. Being able to filter and sort by year, by genre, by actor, by director, or by whether you've watched them before or not.
Posters and frame previews. Plot summaries for both movies and television episodes.
Attractive graphical representations of file contents-- resolution, video codec, audio format.
Ratings for content, and the ability to submit ratings.
XBMC and all its forks (like Plex and Boxee) are specifically designed to give you a fundamentally different kind of experience than just looking at a list of files and then double-clicking to open.
If none of those things are interesting (or if you're willing to go to the trouble to install your own jukebox and configure it) you're better off going with an NMT-based device like a PopcornHour or something similar. They're much less expensive, and many have options for local storage if you don't want to run a server, and can access NAS devices directly if you have any.
If you want the metadata, but only need it on a single machine, or have a NAS and don't want to run a server, look at XBMC.
If you want the metadata, need to access it from several different places and devices (iOS devices, Mac Mini as an HTPC) and are willing to run a server, look at Plex9.
Another alternative is coming later this year: the Boxee box. A fork of XBMC running on a linux-based machine rather like many of the NMT devices, but $100 more than an AppleTV.
An AppleTV is really only useful if you either already have all your content in iTunes and are prepared to keep a computer running to serve it from, or if you're happy with Apple's content rental offerings.
Both XBMC and Plex have supported hardware acceleration on the 2010 mini for a few months now. XBMC "dharma" supports it, Plex9 supports it, and there's a standalone binary of Plex 0.85 that supports it.
If you haven't already I suggest enabling the "true fullscreen" option in Plex. (Go to windowed mode, and in the Plex menu, open "advanced settings" and enable "True fullscreen".
If you're seeing dropped frames or stuttering that makes you think Plex9 can't do 1080p full screen, try this option. I've actually had no problem doing this on older machines than a 2010 mini, and using less capable video hardware, like the 9400M instead of the mini's GF 320M.
This is not a copyright troll.
If the OP or many of the posters had bothered to read TFA they would understand why not.
Righthaven's client in this case is the Review-Journal of Las Vegas. Like many media outlets, its core business is creating content, and while it has an interest in having its intellectual property rights protected, it lacks the internal resources for doing so.
They engage Righthaven to search the Internet for infringing material. When they find it, they purchase the rights from the content producer for the express purpose of suing the infringer for damages.
There are several ideas here: one, that monitoring the Internet for this kind of content is a full-time job, and would be a big distraction if every content producer had to do it full-time.
Two, that issuing takedown notices is ultimately ineffective, since it is possible for considerable time to elapse between when infringing material is made available and when a takedown notice ultimately results in a takedown. If the infringer were a news site or an aggregator, reproducing content in full without permission, link, or attribution, all the while collecting advertising revenue and other benefits from the infringing content, a takedown notice may not provide enough deterrent against future infringement. Such an infringer would likely receive a small number of complaints compared to the amount of content they infringe upon. It is easier just to take the risk, knowing that no one will notice the content immediately, and afterwards it can be taken down-- by which time it has already served its purpose.
The approach used by Righthaven and its clients is to put some teeth into the deterrent by suing for damages. This is what makes it necessary for them to buy the rights from the content producer in order to sue for damages. I don't know what financial arrangements are made; possibly they pay Righthaven a monthly fee for monitoring, plus the sale of the rights on each piece of infringing content, plus damages, if any-- or perhaps damages are shared. I can only guess.
The point, however, is that this outfit is not out there just looking for random infringing content and then profiteering by suing for infringement. They are performing a service, outsourced to them by content producers, for policing the Internet for infringing content, for which any damages paid may (or may not) constitute part of their compensation for doing the monitoring and the litigation.
Intellectual property rights are like other rights-- rights over property. Like real property, it can be bought and sold. In this case, Righthaven buys it in order to make it part of a service they provide to the paper, which is to try and ensure that others are not reproducing content without permission.
The term "copyright troll" invokes an unfair comparison to the term "patent troll" in which a company buys patents or companies that hold patents that have never been, nor were ever likely to be, commercialized, in the hopes of building revenue from court enforced settlements alone. There is an important distinction here: while Righthaven itself does not produce content, it has a content producer as its client, and the content in question is part of that client's real, commercial activity: the newspaper.
In a patent troll situation, the link between the patent and the activities of the companies being sued can be entirely arbitrary. They need not have been aware of nor at any time in contact with the company that holds the patent. It need not be proved that the companies being sued had any special knowledge, conducted any industrial espionage, or undertook any reverse engineering. All they need to have done was to have reproduced some method for achieving a goal that is sufficiently similar to one previously registered by the patent office.
The link between the infringing content in this case and the commercial product of Righthaven's client is not coincidental or arbitrary: they are one and the same.
They find that on average, the advertised speeds were 'up to 6.7 Mbps' while the real median was 3 Mbps and the mean was 4 Mbps. This implies that ISPs were falsely advertising by at least 50%."
This implies that the author of the post does not understand the distinction between "peak" (meaning by "up to") and average or median.
C'mon, people. Yes, ISPs are evil and do bad things. That doesn't give us license to deliberately confuse things in order to make them look worse. It's unnecessary.
Which is why our system of
prosecutorial discretion needs to be overhauled. It undermines the concept of equal protection under the law.
While all are ensured equitable and fair treatment in court, the odds of their ever coming to trial is totally dependant on the whim of the prosecutor. And eventually the majority that elected him/her to office. Which is something that our Constitution and Bill of Rights is supposed to protect us from.
The alternative is what... having it depend on the whim of the plaintiffs? Allowing for the same kind of litigous attidue that permeates the civil courts into the criminal courts, where the accused have a right to a public defender, paid for by public funds?
How with the massive increase in caseload be dealt with? Who will pay for the huge influx of new prosecuting attorneys-- the public? The plaintiffs? All this does is take the undermining of equal protection under the law that already exists in the civil system, where the side that can bear the legal expenses longest often wins-- and moves it into the criminal arena, where the potential penalties aren't merely pecuniary, but run to the loss of freedom or, depending on the state, loss of life.
You can't be serious.
Fraud requires representation of a material fact, it has to be false, the person making the representation has to know it's false and intend the other person act on that fact, the other person has to be ignorant of it, rely on the representation, have a right to rely on the representation, and suffer damages.
See the difficulty?
In this case the spying was covert...
From what I saw, it was never reported that the school assured students They could not activate the webcams remotely
For it to be fraud, the staff would have had to have lied about something.....
What if it were reasonable for a person to assume that the webcams either could not or would not be activated remotely, and the school was aware that they could, and perhaps would be activated remotely, could it be said that they had a positive responsibility to disclose this relevant fact when giving out the laptops?
Or are we to consider it reasonable that any such device with a camera will be used for such a purpose?
The problem is there's no way to prove the physical connection between who typed that comment and posted the pictures and the person potentially breaking the law.
What if he had a falling out with his brother and his brother used the computer to try and frame him for example?
This is quite different to someone admitting in front of witnesses they have committed a crime, because there the witnesses have witnessed the perpetrator in question admitting the crime directly.
This is the fundamental problem with computer crimes, people are arrested and convicted on much lower standards of evidence than have come to be expected in real life. Say a computer is used for a crime online, and the police trace the IP back to the house, and they can somehow prove the IP has always been attached to that computer and only that computer and they search that computer and find evidence of the crime, then can they prove the owner of the computer committed it? Say they check for finger prints and DNA evidence on the keyboard even, can they prove someone didn't just plug in another keyboard for the purpose of carrying out the crime?
It's the fundamental disconnect between the system used to commit the crime and the person who used that system to commit it that is the problem, and short of someone making a mistake and incriminating themselves physically in real life or someone physically witnessing the crime being committed I'm not sure it's ever possible to conclusively prove people responsible for digital crimes, at best you can get a decent amount of evidence, but many cases of non-digital crimes upto and including the most serious have fallen flat on such low standards of evidence even where the person is guilty.
I'm not familiar with this case, but I hope he was convicted on the basis that he also admitted guilt in real life, in person, and not purely on an internet posting as that'd be a bad precedent, a green light for smart criminals to frame people for anything from this sort of crime through to child porn crimes to hacking crimes.
A crime being linked to an IP seems fair enough justification to investigate the system or systems behind that IP and their owners, but not enough in itself to fairly secure a conviction.
Such claims are repeated often and aren't quite as meritorious as people think, especially when the standard of proof is merely "beyond a reasonable doubt".
Let's say you trace an IP to a given household during the period in question. On the basis of the forum post and the IP identification, you get a warrant and search the computer. You gain access to logfiles, cookies, browser history. Even if the computer is shared, you'll gain some information that would corroborate the forum post.
You may well allege, at this point, that the IP, the logfiles, the forum post, and all of this other, admittedly circumstantial evidence, points only to the computer. But that's not entirely true. You may gain access to other online identities this person uses.
The site itself may show you the poster's history, corroborating other elements of the story-- that correlate between the individual in question and the online identity which made the claim. If the content of other posts by the same online identity, also made from the same IP address, from the same computer at the same address, are consistent with other details of the individual's life, then that also generates a relatively high level of confidence in the accuracy of the post. Perhaps the poster's own history contains other, similar claims.
At that point, the question does not become whether or not all this circumstantial evidence proves unequivocally that the suspect was the one who actually made that post, and thus committed the infraction in question, but whether that is more or less plausible than believing that this single post, among all others made by that identity on one or more sites, which are consistent with being made by the suspect, was made fraudulently by someone else with ac
So, if I said I just caused world peace, does that mean I win myself the Nobel Peace Prize?
No, because your claim is much less plausible than his.
In your case, the implausibility of your claim, and the relative ease with which evidence to refute it may be gathered, gives quick rise to reasonable doubt. Any credible news media claim of conflict anywhere in the world negates your Nobel chances immediately.
In his case, the claim is quite plausible. His car is capable of that speed. Many people speed, every day. There is little incentive to lie about such a feat, and no easy way to positively verify it without eye witnesses. TFA is short on details, but I can easily imagine a scenario where a forum boast generates, at the very least, probable cause, which leads to a warrant to search the home and the car, where a diagnostic tool or perhaps even an onboard navigation system provides independent confirmation of the original claim.
It may even have been simpler than that. He may have arrogantly believed that his forum post was not enough to earn sanction, and perhaps even repeated the claim to police, believing that unless they had personally witnessed the event, anything he said, online or offline, was not sufficient. I seem to recall engaging in conflicts with motorists who were under the impression that traffic police could not take action against any driver for infractions they did not personally witness. This seems not to be the case.
He's comparing the byproduct of IP sharing through NAT (incoming traffic cannot reach a destination past the router without extraordinary means (preconfigured port forwarding, DMZ) without a pre-established connection. Your local IP address behind the NAT router is inaccessible, except when the router sees you've established a connection with an external public IP, and then it creates a temporary port mapping table that connects the public IP and its port (say, 80 in the case of a webserver) with the public IP of your router at some high arbitrary port, which then maps to your local NAT IP address at port 80 so your web browser can read the page. Without your initial connection attempt (loading a web page) this port mapping is not created, and computers with public IP addresses cannot "see" or contact your machine.
Greylisting does intentionally for email what NAT does as a byproduct. Unlike blacklisting, which enumerates email addresses to block, and whitelisting, which unemerates email addresses to allow, greylisting allows messages from only email addresses you've sent messages to-- like NAT only allows IP connections from IP addresses you've already contacted.
Have you seen the shareholder agreements of the companies in question? If you haven't, I'm not sure how you can say that. It is entirely possible for a shareholder agreement to provide for special voting rights of one party or another, and for a party who owns only 50% of all outstanding shares, or even less, to have a majority of votes, and therefore a "controlling interest".
One may not safely conclude whether or not an interest is "controlling" or not merely by asking for the percentages owned by all the shareholders, or even by specific knowledge of the governing law of the countries in which the companies are registered. One must specifically ask who has voting control, and on what basis.
It may be so that the FT only owns 50% of the Economist AND does not have a majority of voting rights, but one does not necessarily follow from the other.
"All this puts Wikipedia in the confusing position of not allowing a page for an undefined word whose meaning is defined via the Wikipedia page for that word — and now I have to lie down for a moment."
The meaning was not defined by Wikipedia. It was defined (or, more accurately, coined) by xkcd by way of a mockup of a nonexistent Wikipedia page that was then later created. Only those going out of their way to try and create a situation where Wikipedia is contradicting itself see it that way. Which is not to say that Wikipedia doesn't constantly contradict itself; merely having a page that cites a frame of xkcd citing a fictional Wikipedia page (that is then later created) does not constitute a self-contradiction.
There's a big problem here reconciling the phrase "fit for purpose" and the other phrases used in the summary attributed to Toulmin, namely all the comparatives: increased revenue, increased occupancy, quicker check-in and check-out. These aren't purpose. Whether the system in question is quicker or better depends entirely on what you're comparing it to: what old system (if any) was in place. A poor system not fit for purpose might well perform better than the old one if the old one was even worse. LIkewise, a good system might not generate improvement in any of these areas if the system it is replacing was better (and perhaps more expensive).
"We're talking about a *game*, not your oxygen supply"
We are talking about money paid, and the principle of having companies take away our ability to use what we have legally paid for, just because they have us by the balls.
If all you bought is Halo 2, you have no legal right to online multiplayer-- you didn't buy it.
If you bought XBL Gold, you could play Halo 2 and other Xbox and Xbox 360 games online for $50 a year. Now that system doesn't support the original Xbox games anymore (either on the Xbox console or on the 360 in emulation).
If you don't want the service anymore because of the closure of that service, then you can cancel your subscription. No one has taken away any ability to use something for which they have paid. Your ability in the past to play online was covered by your subscription fee. Microsoft no longer offers that service. If you don't want the service Microsoft does offer, you can cancel it. That doesn't take away anything from what you paid for Halo 2 because Halo 2, without the XBL service, could not pay online anyway, and now you won't be paying for it anymore.
No, what CONSUMERS "should" do is to QUIT buying software that's subject to such prone-obsolescence systems. If consumers are too stupid or unable to resist buying the latest and greatest despite such issues, then companies will continue to find it in their financial best interests to do so.
At least with a PC, there are methods to hack around this (even WoW has private servers, illegal but they're there), but now you see part of the actual total-cost-of-ownership for that console.
The total cost was never hidden. Halo 2 cost $50, and if you wanted to play online, you needed XBL Gold, which cost $50/yr. They aren't just seeing the TCO now, it was always immediately obvious. If you were paying that just to get Halo 2 online, then now it is not worth it to you-- so stop paying it. You're no longer getting the service, but you're no longer paying for it. There is no loss there. If you own a 360 and you have other games you can play online (like Halo 3) you can decide if that is worth $50 to you or not. The second it is not, you can also cancel.
This is a non-story and has been from the beginning.
really be required to legally release server side software for the PC to enable people to play their Xbox games. Quite frankly I really hate this bullshit service where companies have control over games people paid for in a "forced obsolescence" model of attempting to control the lifespan of a product and when to torch it to force people to upgrade.
It's unfortunate that the copyright and software licensing nazi's got control of the law due to the ignorance of the people.
This is bogus. Online multiplayer is NOT included in Halo 2. It is a separate subscription fee (Xbox Live Gold). There is absolutely no legal basis whatsoever to justify forcing MS to release this functionality, because it was never included in the price you paid for Halo 2; it was always separate.
If you weren't an Xbox Live Gold subscriber, then you're not missing out on anything now that you had before, because online play was never available to you anyway. If you're paying the XBL Gold fee to play Halo 2 online and they don't support it anymore, cancel your subscription or buy a new game.
I hear Halo 3 is pretty good.
Uninformed comments like these are exactly why MS charges for online play instead of giving it away for free. It means that as a vendor they get to decide what to sell, instead of being forced to sell or support a product they no longer want to offer, or being railroaded into giving it away for free.
I remember that one, I think it opened with a bugs bunny-ish skit depicting Bin Laden in some slapstick comedy.
Different one. They depicted Mohammad in the episode about the Super Best Friends, along with Lao Tzu, Seaman, Moses (as the MCP in Tron) and Buddha. Oh, and a giant stone Abraham Lincoln that gets shot by a giant stone John Wilkes Booth. And David Blaine's suicide cult.
It's a bear suit. How do they know it's Muhammad?
Because the other characters say it is? So now it's unacceptable to mention Mohammad? What if the narrator is unreliable? Wouldn't the logical position of a devout Muslim be that Muhammad did never and would never wear a bear suit, and so this depiction is NOT Muhammad?
What if two on-screen characters disagree? What if one says "that's Mohammad over there in the bear suit" and the second one says "no it isn't".
Have they "depicted" Mohammad in any readily recognizable fashion whatsoever?
I think the site has done a good job on the analysis.
Gizmodo was a greedy site who wanted more hits, the author's an asshole who just wanted to cause more trouble for that guy for kicks.
Sure, he lost a prototype, but does he deserve his career ruined at other firms too? Definitely not.
Especially problematic in the tech industry where employers are sure to run a Google search on prospective employees.
If he doesn't deserve that, it won't happen.
If potential employers consider that relevant, and are willing to take that action, on what basis can you allege it is undeserved?
Why is a tech blog expected to be understanding of the fact that a guy needs a job even if he does lose an expensive prototype telephone if the company that gave it to him isn't, and other companies that do similar work aren't? Why is the website's profit motive less sacrosanct than that of Apple or other prospective employers for this guy?
If he honestly believes that the single best way he can promote development on Android is to criticize development on the iPhone, then he's probably destined to fail.
It's not enough to say what's bad-- or, more appropriately, what he doesn't like-- about how Apple's program works. He'll need to illustrate what's good about how Google and Android work above and beyond just not having some of Apple's deficiencies, since it's clear that for many developers, these deficiencies aren't relevant, or if they are, they are overridden by the size of the potential audience the iPhone platform represents.
Disneyfied? If you're not making adult content, you probably aren't interested in that.
Walled garden? Either he's unfamiliar with the term or is being disingenuous. The barrier of entry into Apple's developer program for iPhone development is very low; perhaps not as low as Google's, but lower than other mobile platforms that support third-party development have been historically (RIM, Symbian).
Defended by lawyers? There I assume he's talking about the suit against HTC et al over Android: I doubt users and developers, by and large, care about that, since it concerns the platform itself and not programs developed for it. Except that, you know, if they think there's a chance in hell Apple might win they might want to consider developing for the iPhone to hedge their bets. If they think Apple's suits have no merit and won't win... then who cares if Apple wastes money on lawyers?
This guy is doing his job-- promoting the interest of his parent company and their partners. Apple has guys who do the same. Where is the high road here, supposedly?