More accurately, let's just add that to the cost of keeping the RIAA and MPAA afloat. If we just let them fail, then this money would not "have to" be spent either, and as an added bonus, fewer innocent grannies would be dragged into court.
I actually purchased a similar product for precisely this reason, and unfortunately, it's not sufficient. Not only is the vibration not enough to wake a sleeping person, but it also doesn't vibrate on text messages, only on phone calls (much in the way that a non-A2DP headset will generally alert you to incoming calls, but not text messages. I presume this is a limitation of the Bluetooth profile). Ultimately, the only things it's really good for are alerting me to calls (which are rare, since the alerts are all text messages), and keeping me from leaving the phone behind (the bracelet vibrates when the signal is lost).
I don't know how strong the vibration is in the model featured in the article, but I suspect that it probably still doesn't vibrate for text messages.
Well, there is a problem, but it has nothing to do with UAVs. The problem is that there is a market that is not served by legitimate means, and that this market is large enough to float operations that could potentially afford to purchase/build UAVs to smuggle/distribute their product over borders. The solution is not to ban the UAVs, but to satisfy the market via legal means, such as legalizing regulated sales of the more popular controlled substances. But then, we've known that for a while now, the end of prohibition being a shining example.
If memory serves, it is generally the opinion of everyone with a functioning brain that, for all situations wherein technology makes an illegal act easier, the correct solution is not to ban the technology.
It's funny you should say that. I bought a Mac Mini just to test the OS X waters about three or four years ago, and found myself switching entirely to Mac within just a few months. I now have a Mac Mini in my office and a Mac Mini as part of my home theater system, each directly hooked to an external Time Machine drive, and my wife and I have MacBooks that use a DroboFS for wireless backups, approximating the experience of using a Time Capsule. Every one of these machines has performed Time Machine backups hourly for the entire duration that they have been powered up, and I have yet to have a single issue backing up or retrieving data from a backup.
I am not an Apple fanboy, but I am a "things that work exactly like they're supposed to" fanboy. YMMV of course, but in my experience, Time Machine has been nothing short of stellar.
That said, and back to the topic at hand, a DroboFS on your network makes a fantastic Time-Capsule-alike, especially since you can expand the capacity as needed.
FWIW -- and please don't take this as a slight, as clearly your heart is in the right place -- donating blood is not as big a help as people tend to think it is when it comes to disasters that occur outside the US. That blood will not go to Japan. The expense of properly storing and transporting it overseas would make it impractical.
That said, if you were donating blood for its own sake, good on you. Just know that if your goal is to aid the victims of a foreign disaster, making a monetary donation to the American Red Cross is a better choice than donating blood.
Ugh, yes. The scene where she telnets to an email address just makes me sad. It's like someone knew that telnet was a thing, but wasn't willing to do the thirty seconds of research to find out how to use it.
Perhaps you didn't read the part where I wrote "an issue with makers of Android handsets".
I agree, the Android OS itself isn't at fault, I don't know how one could get that out of what I wrote. My point (and one that I thought I was clear about, but apparently I was wrong) was that the Android OS is plagued with handset makers that sit on OS updates either out of laziness, out of a need to protect the bottom line ("adding functionality to products we've already sold doesn't make us any money!"), or out of a desire to sell the features in the newest version of the OS as "features" of the next iteration of the handset.
Apple does not have this problem, as they will offer iOS updates out to every device that can handle them (and, as you and I both seem to have learned the hard way with the iPhone 3G, even some devices that cannot properly handle them). This is a unique problem for Android handsets at the moment, but I suspect we will soon see this issue across Windows Phone 7 handsets as well, should anyone actually buy one.
Honeycomb and Ice Cream will offer full data encryption options.
Great, because planned obsolescence by way of refusing to release OS updates for older hardware certainly hasn't been an issue with makers of Android handsets in the past.
This idiot's frivolous lawsuit has brought me to the realization that there are just too many stupid people in the world with access to both lawyers and the internet.
This new information scares me.
Can I sue this guy for scaring me with his suing over being scared?
Given that the hardware in every Dell I've ever used has been utter shit (seriously, they shipped my employer several dozen desktops, and when they couldn't get dual monitors working via DVI, they comped us a bunch of VGA splitters. THAT WAS THEIR SOLUTION.), I like that "Apple Tax" very much, thank you.
...but every Mac I've ever bought has had install discs for the OS and any additional applications in the box. They are rarely needed, since Time Machine does a fantastic job of providing a backup that I can restore to, but they are there.
That in itself might be worth the so-called "Apple Tax".
While I would normally agree with you, Apple seems to be the exception to the rule. Apple has this yearly release cycle for each of their product lines, and even without pressure from competition, they are driven to improve their product lines with each iteration to keep their customers coming back for the latest & greatest. Each year they are competing with their own products, and they have to provide an impetus for customers to upgrade.
Look at the iPod. Apple has never, ever had any real, serious competition in the PMP space. Yet they continued to improve the iPod generation after generation. Larger capacities, color display, smaller form factor, video playback, Genius playlists, touchscreen, apps... Apple has made it their job to ensure that their customers always have a significant reason to upgrade, regardless of what the competition is doing.
Tablets PCs have been around for a long time, indeed. However, tablet devices as a distinct platform -- and not as just another PC but with a touchscreen instead of a mouse & keyboard -- have not.
And if there's anything that Microsoft as a company should be angry about, that's it. Bill Gates stood there ten years ago and told us that tablet PCs were the future of computing, that a significant portion of PCs sold would be tablets within a few years, and Microsoft failed to make it happen. They failed to make tablet computing sufficiently different from a laptop PC experience, and consumers didn't give tablet PCs a second look.
Now Apple has succeeded in a major way at what Microsoft completely failed at, and boy, that must be embarrassing.
That's funny, because every Windows Mobile phone I've ever used has had me on the verge of throwing it against a wall more times than is acceptable for any gadget that isn't still in beta testing. I've had them mysteriously lose settings, crash repeatedly, and lock up -- sometimes right in the middle of a phone call.
There may be WinMo phones that "spec wise pound the iphone to dust", but impressive hardware is nothing if the software on top of it drives users into fits of rage. There may be a lot of things that a WinMo phone can do that my iPhone can't, but one of them happens to be "piss me off on a daily basis." And I'm just fine with that.
This does get talked about, actually. The Gadgeteer ran an article two days ago (making that one day before this article or its source material) that brings up this exact issue.
I'll agree with the largely cyclical nature of Apple's setup, but there is -- and always must be -- an entry point. I did not buy my first iPod because Apple is cool. I bought my first iPod because it was a hard drive-based portable media player, and nobody else was doing that. It was everything I wanted in a PMP at the time.
While it's true that many people may want what Apple produces because Apple is cool, something had to happen to make Apple cool. And making something you already do easier or more fun is the fastest and most direct route to coolness.
AT&T has no room to complain. They signed up for this when they demanded to be the exclusive carrier for the iPhone in the US. All of us bandwidth-slurping iPhone users have no choice but to crowd AT&T's network, because we aren't allowed to be anywhere else. If the iPhone was available with other carriers, you'd no doubt see the load shared, as iPhone users would be allowed to choose their carrier based on something in addition to device availability. I'm sure AT&T saw iPhone exclusivity as a huge cash cow, and it's dismaying (though not necessarily surprising) if they didn't consider what it would take to support the first mobile phone that actually has a decent web browser.
If you're the only restaurant in town that serves french fries, you might want to invest in some ketchup.
It sounds like this is not simply a lawsuit over the trademark of a sound, but more specifically, the use of a specific sound for a specific purpose.
In this case, they are not attempting to trademark the sound of a duck quacking, but the use of a duck quack as a noise made by tourists on an amphibious vehicle tour. That's it. You can make a duck quack sound in your own home, in your car, or in your local Starbucks, but you can't make it if you're on somebody else's amphibious vehicle tour.
To address an earlier comment, this is less like Disney trademarking the sound of farts in general, and more like Microsoft trademarking the fart sound as the sound made by a computer operating system upon start-up.
I'd really love to know how they plan on distinguishing video games, DVDs, and junk food that makes one fat from those that don't.
Wii Fit, for example, is a video game that, presuming you actually use it, requires some measure of physical activity. It's not running a marathon by any stretch, but some activity is certainly healthier than none.
And DVDs... shouldn't exercise DVDs be excluded from this tax? And if so, what counts as exercise? Pilates? Yoga? Meditation?
Finally, junk food. One can walk into GNC, Dick's Sporting Goods, or REI and pick up "energy" bars that are designed to replenish energy in active individuals. Many of these contain more calories than a Snickers bar. Should we tax those, too? A kid can get just as fat chomping on those as he can on regular candy bars.
I hate using these words but... it's a slippery slope.
Most of us are outraged about this, but few of us can do anything about it. If you live in North Carolina, I urge you to contact your state congresspeople and let them know just how you, as a voter, feel about this.
The bills in question are NC Senate bill 1004 and NC House bill 1242. You can find contact information for your state congresspeople here:
And remember, even if you're a NC resident who doesn't live in Wilson, this is a *state-level* issue, and your opinion counts. Not only that, but if these bills pass, it means no cheap internet for you, either. Be heard now, while it matters.
Slashdot Mirror
Just the facts, man.
AhahahahahahahaNo. Your source is bad, and you should feel bad.
Just because they call themselves "non-partisan" doesn't mean that they actually are.
More accurately, let's just add that to the cost of keeping the RIAA and MPAA afloat. If we just let them fail, then this money would not "have to" be spent either, and as an added bonus, fewer innocent grannies would be dragged into court.
I actually purchased a similar product for precisely this reason, and unfortunately, it's not sufficient. Not only is the vibration not enough to wake a sleeping person, but it also doesn't vibrate on text messages, only on phone calls (much in the way that a non-A2DP headset will generally alert you to incoming calls, but not text messages. I presume this is a limitation of the Bluetooth profile). Ultimately, the only things it's really good for are alerting me to calls (which are rare, since the alerts are all text messages), and keeping me from leaving the phone behind (the bracelet vibrates when the signal is lost).
I don't know how strong the vibration is in the model featured in the article, but I suspect that it probably still doesn't vibrate for text messages.
You buy electronics at crackhead prices, don't be surprised if you get burned.
I guess I should cancel my order for that $99 TouchPad, then?
Well, there is a problem, but it has nothing to do with UAVs. The problem is that there is a market that is not served by legitimate means, and that this market is large enough to float operations that could potentially afford to purchase/build UAVs to smuggle/distribute their product over borders. The solution is not to ban the UAVs, but to satisfy the market via legal means, such as legalizing regulated sales of the more popular controlled substances. But then, we've known that for a while now, the end of prohibition being a shining example.
If memory serves, it is generally the opinion of everyone with a functioning brain that, for all situations wherein technology makes an illegal act easier, the correct solution is not to ban the technology.
It's funny you should say that. I bought a Mac Mini just to test the OS X waters about three or four years ago, and found myself switching entirely to Mac within just a few months. I now have a Mac Mini in my office and a Mac Mini as part of my home theater system, each directly hooked to an external Time Machine drive, and my wife and I have MacBooks that use a DroboFS for wireless backups, approximating the experience of using a Time Capsule. Every one of these machines has performed Time Machine backups hourly for the entire duration that they have been powered up, and I have yet to have a single issue backing up or retrieving data from a backup.
I am not an Apple fanboy, but I am a "things that work exactly like they're supposed to" fanboy. YMMV of course, but in my experience, Time Machine has been nothing short of stellar.
That said, and back to the topic at hand, a DroboFS on your network makes a fantastic Time-Capsule-alike, especially since you can expand the capacity as needed.
FWIW -- and please don't take this as a slight, as clearly your heart is in the right place -- donating blood is not as big a help as people tend to think it is when it comes to disasters that occur outside the US. That blood will not go to Japan. The expense of properly storing and transporting it overseas would make it impractical.
That said, if you were donating blood for its own sake, good on you. Just know that if your goal is to aid the victims of a foreign disaster, making a monetary donation to the American Red Cross is a better choice than donating blood.
Ugh, yes. The scene where she telnets to an email address just makes me sad. It's like someone knew that telnet was a thing, but wasn't willing to do the thirty seconds of research to find out how to use it.
...they should have chosen an example that is more universally considered shameful, such as "working at Microsoft".
Perhaps you didn't read the part where I wrote "an issue with makers of Android handsets".
I agree, the Android OS itself isn't at fault, I don't know how one could get that out of what I wrote. My point (and one that I thought I was clear about, but apparently I was wrong) was that the Android OS is plagued with handset makers that sit on OS updates either out of laziness, out of a need to protect the bottom line ("adding functionality to products we've already sold doesn't make us any money!"), or out of a desire to sell the features in the newest version of the OS as "features" of the next iteration of the handset.
Apple does not have this problem, as they will offer iOS updates out to every device that can handle them (and, as you and I both seem to have learned the hard way with the iPhone 3G, even some devices that cannot properly handle them). This is a unique problem for Android handsets at the moment, but I suspect we will soon see this issue across Windows Phone 7 handsets as well, should anyone actually buy one.
Honeycomb and Ice Cream will offer full data encryption options.
Great, because planned obsolescence by way of refusing to release OS updates for older hardware certainly hasn't been an issue with makers of Android handsets in the past.
This idiot's frivolous lawsuit has brought me to the realization that there are just too many stupid people in the world with access to both lawyers and the internet.
This new information scares me.
Can I sue this guy for scaring me with his suing over being scared?
Given that the hardware in every Dell I've ever used has been utter shit (seriously, they shipped my employer several dozen desktops, and when they couldn't get dual monitors working via DVI, they comped us a bunch of VGA splitters. THAT WAS THEIR SOLUTION.), I like that "Apple Tax" very much, thank you.
...but every Mac I've ever bought has had install discs for the OS and any additional applications in the box. They are rarely needed, since Time Machine does a fantastic job of providing a backup that I can restore to, but they are there.
That in itself might be worth the so-called "Apple Tax".
While I would normally agree with you, Apple seems to be the exception to the rule. Apple has this yearly release cycle for each of their product lines, and even without pressure from competition, they are driven to improve their product lines with each iteration to keep their customers coming back for the latest & greatest. Each year they are competing with their own products, and they have to provide an impetus for customers to upgrade.
Look at the iPod. Apple has never, ever had any real, serious competition in the PMP space. Yet they continued to improve the iPod generation after generation. Larger capacities, color display, smaller form factor, video playback, Genius playlists, touchscreen, apps... Apple has made it their job to ensure that their customers always have a significant reason to upgrade, regardless of what the competition is doing.
Tablets PCs have been around for a long time, indeed. However, tablet devices as a distinct platform -- and not as just another PC but with a touchscreen instead of a mouse & keyboard -- have not.
And if there's anything that Microsoft as a company should be angry about, that's it. Bill Gates stood there ten years ago and told us that tablet PCs were the future of computing, that a significant portion of PCs sold would be tablets within a few years, and Microsoft failed to make it happen. They failed to make tablet computing sufficiently different from a laptop PC experience, and consumers didn't give tablet PCs a second look.
Now Apple has succeeded in a major way at what Microsoft completely failed at, and boy, that must be embarrassing.
Cryptochrome should totally be the name of a band that does Industrial covers of Paul Simon songs.
That's funny, because every Windows Mobile phone I've ever used has had me on the verge of throwing it against a wall more times than is acceptable for any gadget that isn't still in beta testing. I've had them mysteriously lose settings, crash repeatedly, and lock up -- sometimes right in the middle of a phone call.
There may be WinMo phones that "spec wise pound the iphone to dust", but impressive hardware is nothing if the software on top of it drives users into fits of rage. There may be a lot of things that a WinMo phone can do that my iPhone can't, but one of them happens to be "piss me off on a daily basis." And I'm just fine with that.
This does get talked about, actually. The Gadgeteer ran an article two days ago (making that one day before this article or its source material) that brings up this exact issue.
I'll agree with the largely cyclical nature of Apple's setup, but there is -- and always must be -- an entry point. I did not buy my first iPod because Apple is cool. I bought my first iPod because it was a hard drive-based portable media player, and nobody else was doing that. It was everything I wanted in a PMP at the time.
While it's true that many people may want what Apple produces because Apple is cool, something had to happen to make Apple cool. And making something you already do easier or more fun is the fastest and most direct route to coolness.
AT&T has no room to complain. They signed up for this when they demanded to be the exclusive carrier for the iPhone in the US. All of us bandwidth-slurping iPhone users have no choice but to crowd AT&T's network, because we aren't allowed to be anywhere else. If the iPhone was available with other carriers, you'd no doubt see the load shared, as iPhone users would be allowed to choose their carrier based on something in addition to device availability. I'm sure AT&T saw iPhone exclusivity as a huge cash cow, and it's dismaying (though not necessarily surprising) if they didn't consider what it would take to support the first mobile phone that actually has a decent web browser.
If you're the only restaurant in town that serves french fries, you might want to invest in some ketchup.
It sounds like this is not simply a lawsuit over the trademark of a sound, but more specifically, the use of a specific sound for a specific purpose.
In this case, they are not attempting to trademark the sound of a duck quacking, but the use of a duck quack as a noise made by tourists on an amphibious vehicle tour. That's it. You can make a duck quack sound in your own home, in your car, or in your local Starbucks, but you can't make it if you're on somebody else's amphibious vehicle tour.
To address an earlier comment, this is less like Disney trademarking the sound of farts in general, and more like Microsoft trademarking the fart sound as the sound made by a computer operating system upon start-up.
So, you're suggesting that we supplement with more bacon?
I'd really love to know how they plan on distinguishing video games, DVDs, and junk food that makes one fat from those that don't.
Wii Fit, for example, is a video game that, presuming you actually use it, requires some measure of physical activity. It's not running a marathon by any stretch, but some activity is certainly healthier than none.
And DVDs... shouldn't exercise DVDs be excluded from this tax? And if so, what counts as exercise? Pilates? Yoga? Meditation?
Finally, junk food. One can walk into GNC, Dick's Sporting Goods, or REI and pick up "energy" bars that are designed to replenish energy in active individuals. Many of these contain more calories than a Snickers bar. Should we tax those, too? A kid can get just as fat chomping on those as he can on regular candy bars.
I hate using these words but... it's a slippery slope.
Most of us are outraged about this, but few of us can do anything about it. If you live in North Carolina, I urge you to contact your state congresspeople and let them know just how you, as a voter, feel about this.
The bills in question are NC Senate bill 1004 and NC House bill 1242. You can find contact information for your state congresspeople here:
http://www.votesmart.org/index.htm
And remember, even if you're a NC resident who doesn't live in Wilson, this is a *state-level* issue, and your opinion counts. Not only that, but if these bills pass, it means no cheap internet for you, either. Be heard now, while it matters.