I've had ClearWire for about two years now, and have gotten a reliable 1.5Mbps/256kbps connection with no hiccups. Now they have converted me over to a 5Mbps/500kbps connection for the same price (although I seem to be getting around 2.5Mbps instead of 5). I've never had the problems you are complaining about.
And can you refer us to rigorous double-blind studies showing that chiropractors don't do any good beyond the placebo effect?
Unless someone decides to spend the large amount of money required to perform such rigorous testing, anecdotal evidence is the best we will get.
IP and copyright are about business and making a profit. DNA sample collection is about life and liberty. It's also possible to reject current IP and copyright laws (implementations) without rejecting the whole concept (i.e., why not copyright only for 20 years?).
To flip your argument back onto you: you cannot reject the police searching your house whenever they want, without a warrant and without charge, if you don't reject people taking your DNA without being convicted of a crime. In either case, you are being presumed guilty.
My other gripe is how we so feverishly protect our children. Hiding things from children doesn't help them. It hurts them.
One thing you need to understand is that children don't have the experience and coping mechanisms in place to handle all of the content you or I could. There are things that I could watch or read that I would find mildly upsetting that would give my children nightmares for weeks. This is because they don't have the same risk-assessment capabilities that I do, because they don't have the experience.
So yes, I do shield my children from things I think they can't handle yet. When I feel they have reached an age that they are mature enough to, I will gladly let them chose. Treating children as miniature adults, though, is just stupid.
Yeah? I had a coworker who did exactly what you are doing, and had done it for 8 years when he joined our company. He thought he had the IRS tied into knots, and had read all of the relevant tax codes front-to-back.
He was sure he had it all down, and there was nothing that could be done, just like you do. Then, finally, the Federal government got around to him. Took him to court (which he didn't think should have jurisdiction), confiscated some of his property, and sent him to a Federal penitentiary for several years.
You might want to reconsider before this happens to you, as well. You seem to think YOUR interpretation of the laws are what matters. You are wrong. It is the GOVERNMENT'S interpretation.
Really? Tell that to DirectTV. They altered my contract, and when I said I didn't agree to the new one, they slapped the $150 early termination fee on me. Reading the old contract carefully showed that I had agreed to pay early termination fees if I refuse new contract alterations. Their passing my final bill to a collection agency before it was even due was just abusive.
Since then, I have refused to enter into any contract with early termination fees. I pay for cell phone month-by-month, and laugh my ass off now that DirectTV badly wants me back as a customer.
OS X's Mail.app already has full support for email signing and encryption (and has since at least 10.4, when I started using the feature). Public keys can be exchanged by exchanging signed emails. Signing and encrypting are as simple as clicking the appropriate button on the "new message" window (the encryption button is only available when you are sending email to an address you have a public key for).
Wouldn't that be what the Early Termination Fee is for? To compensate them for the lack of your ongoing payments?
Are you arguing that it is too little to fully compensate them for their losses? Wouldn't that be their problem for not using the actual loss value for them?
So, tell me this. I had a year-long service contract with DirectTV for my television programming. This contract had an ETF on it as well. Was it ethical for the company to change the terms of that contract, and tell me that my only option if I didn't like the contract was to cancel the service and pay the ETF?
And you have read the contract between Apple and AT&T, and can testify that it is indeed AT&T demanding these changes?
For some reason, I find that hard to believe, and think instead that you are engaging in wild speculation. It may be true, but then again it may not be. Without access to the actual contract, we will never know.
Well hell, why don't we apply this to ALL areas of life, instead of just cell phones?
Gas station chains that only sell gas to if we agree to enter into a contract to only buy gasoline from their stations, and you agree to buy a minimum of 50 gallons a month! Don't like termination fees? Don't sign a contract agreeing to pay them if you leave. It's not like you have some inalienable god-given right to drive a car. Hence the contract.
I have my own cell phone. I currently use a pay-as-you go system, precisely because I don't want to be force into multi-year contracts, and I typically only have my cell phone for emergency purposes. But let me tell you, I pay significantly more per-minute than those with a contract (about $0.25 a minute, plus fees).
In an ideal world, a competitor would come along to service my needs. In the real world, there are very few companies with the money to buy the spectrum necessary for cell phone use, and those that have have all gotten together and decided that all of them will use this lock-in method. That leaves me with no choice but to pay exorbitant rates for their service without a contract.
And as I said in a post above, I've had providers attempt to lock me into a one-year contract for the mere privilege of changing my phone number after I moved, so don't give me garbage about this contract being used to subsidize the price of phones.
When I was using Sprint as my carrier, and asked them to change my phone number be local to the new location that I had moved to, they told me they wouldn't do it without signing me up to another year-long contract.
This is not subsidizing the price of anything. It is only used to lock me into their service and line their pockets. Since I was done with the contract I had with them, I decided I'd rather switch to a new carrier than be treated like that. They got MUCH more willing to work with me when I told them I was cancelling... to late for them, though.
Actually, I am starting to feel that the warrantee is a scam. I have my whole house running on CFLs with 7+ year warrantees, probably about 30 bulbs in all. I've had around 10-15 fail in the 3 years or so I've had them in. Despite being cooler than incancesdents, many show what looks like heat damage to the plastic base of the bulb (many of mine hang down from ceiling fans and the like).
Now, I bought these bulbs in 6 packs, so they ended up costing around $1.65 each. To get a warrantee replacement, I am going to have to send them off to the manufacturer for a non-trivial amount of money. It will not be that much cheaper than just buying a new bulb. Additionally, I have to go through the effort of keeping the receipt for this cheap product (vs. electronics) for 7 years.
I like CFLs, but I have not been overly impressed with their durability.
If you cretins don't like the iPhone's contract terms, DON'T BUY ONE.
1. My iPhone did not come with a contract. I carefully looked through the box it came in, and none of the documents included came with a contract. Turning on the iPhone, it said I needed to activate it. This also is not a contract. When I then activated my phone via one of the non-iTunes tools, no contract was signed. There was no EULA and no click-through license I had to agree to. Please tell me which iPhone contract you are referring to that I agreed to.
2. It is my legal right to circumvent the DMCA in order to unlock my iPhone to work with other carriers. Why are you so adamant that I should not exercise my legal rights? I'm not hurting you or your iPhone, so why do you care? I guess those guys that reflash their Linksys wireless APs with more capable firmware are also on your list. Not to mention those bastards who put Linux on the iPaq PDA, or the iPod. After all, if we don't like what we get from the Gods of Apple, we just shouldn't buy it, right?
1. Fucked up pricing (why spend $$$$ more when you can get a PC that does the same thing for less?). Some of us look at more than just the pricing of the hardware alone. Apple has excellent, in-country technical support. Can you say the same thing about Dell? This matters a lot to me. Both of my family's Mac laptops had the "bulging battery" issue, and in each case Apple overnighted me a new battery without question. Literally overnight. I'm not saying it's the right choice for you, but it certainly is to me, and that you should be aware of costs and benefits outside of hardware cost alone.
As for your assertion that new versions of OS X are the equivalent of Windows upgrades, I don't agree. Apple gives us plenty of point releases for free... in fact, Tiger is currently up to its tenth point release, and I haven't paid for any of them. Perhaps you are trying to assert that there weren't enough new features in Tiger to make it worthy of "new release" status from Panther? That's a matter of opinion, of course. I certainly found it worth of paying to upgrade. On the Windows side, I can't say that the inclusion of Aero makes Vista worthy of "new release" status either (but then again, I haven't ever used Vista and have been happy with XP).
Personally, I like the fact that Apple will sell me a family license so I can pay a little more and install the new OS on all of my Macs at the same time, and that new versions tend to perform better on the older laptops than the previous version did. I also like that there is no "activation" to worry about, or finding old disks to validate "upgradability", nor any for of Windows Genuine Advantage (from which I take special offense).
These things are all worth extra money to me.
2. Holier-than-thou attitude. So you make your computer choice based on image? Frankly, I haven't seen the type of Mac zealot you are describing in a long time. I'll rave about OS X when my opinion is asked, and rant about Windows when it does things that annoy me, but neither I nor my coworkers with Macs proselytize to anyone. Sorry you've had a bad experience, though. Then again, EVERY platform has their immature pricks (OS X, Windows, and Linux).
As for iPod support, I couldn't say. I've had annoying experiences with iTunes Music Store support (a couple of purchases saying they didn't go through when they did, resulting in double billing), but I've never had to contact iPod AppleCare, and that also seemed to be a different organization from the Mac support people (whom I've never had an issue with).
Odd. I have Ubuntu 7.04 installed on a virtual machine, and I don't remember being told about or asked about this package. I had never heard of it before. Sure enough, it is installed on my system. And when I try to remove it (assuming I am doing it right... it's the first time I've wanted to remove a package... dpkg --remove popularity-contest), I am told that I can't because "ubuntu-standard" relies on it.
Can you tell me where the question appears in the installation? Or by that do you mean I have to go into individual package lists, and know to look for it an disable it during the installation? And no, it didn't default to "no", because I certainly didn't select it explicitly for installation.
Sounds like a problem I had with my iPod. For what it's worth, I fixed it by starting up the "iPod Updater" program, and clicked on the "Restore" button. This apparently reinitializes the hard drive, fixing whatever database or filesystem problem it was having. I did this on my Mac, I'm assuming the Windows version of the updater has a similar feature.
Parallels runs Ubuntu with no problems whatsoever. I use Ubuntu 6.06 on my MacBook Pro as my work development environment, and in general it is faster than my 2.6GHz desktop.
I wish the X-server had better "change resolutions on the fly" capabilities (to handle going from full-screen to windowed mode), but I usually end up just displaying xterms from the Ubuntu virtual machine on my Mac OS X desktop anyway.
Kernel modules have an well-known API, just like user-space programs. The API for kernel modules is covered by the exported symbol names that the modules link against. This is no different than calling routines that exist in a shared library with a known API. These APIs are relatively stable within the same major kernel release (2.4, 2.6, etc.).
Yes, you can technically read from and write to any memory area in the kernel's memory space, but this is extremely dangerous without using the supplied symbol names, especially as locations of most things will change from kernel build to kernel build.
You are confusing the difficulty in forecasting a regional weather pattern with forecasting a global weather pattern, not to mention confusing a specific weather pattern with a weather trend.
Scientists are very good at detecting large-area trends, such as the cycles of hurricane patterns in the Atlantic ocean. Did you notice that they predicted the increased hurricane activity, due to the 30 year cycle? According to your logic, they shouldn't have been able to see this coming, because it was more than a few days out...
Before you install Flip4Mac, make sure to read the EULA that comes with it. Among the terms are that you can't resell or transfer it, and this little gem:
Section 3. Audit Permitted.
Telestream shall have the right, upon reasonable prior notice to You and during Your normal business hours, to audit Your use of the Licensed Materials and to inspect Your records related to any copies of the Software, or portions thereof, made by You.
I'm sorry... I'm not giving that right to anybody.
If FairPlay has the same capabilities as Microsoft's DRM to specify rights on a per-song basis, I have a big problem with other companies being able to produce FairPlay'ed AAC files.
One of the beauties of the iTMS/iTunes/iPod combination is that everything is consistent. On iTMS, each and every song is the same price, and each has the same rights. That was one of the problems with early competitors.
Apple, with the market presence of the iPod, had enough leverage to get the music distributors to agree to these (liberal) terms.
What happens when the RIAA leans on Real's music store to use different rights on "popular" songs? Will I suddenly have to deal with inconsistent rights on individual songs? Apple will no longer have the market clout (of being the sole producer of DRM'ed music on the #1 player) to push the music industry to agree to their terms (including equal footing for independents).
And why should Apple have to deal with end-users suffering problems from music they bought from a different company? What will Real tell people if Apple changes its FairPlay format for some reason? After seeing their petition, I suspect it will be "Apple did this to you! Take it up with them, ask them why they broke your iPod!".
Additionally, while iTMS is currently seen as an enabler for iPod sales, Apple might be trying to leverage it into become a huge, viable distribution method for music. If it takes off, it could end up making Apple a lot of money. So Real's actions could end up being a serious threat to Apple's future plans.
Some people might not care about that, but I like Apple's products and business, and I want to see them make money and continue to produce them.
I buy eBooks from http://www.baen.com/. These are full novels, with no DRM, priced at $4 and $5 a book.
I read them on my PocketPC-based iPaq 1910, which I find quite usable. With the font antialiasing that the OS does, and the good contrast, I often actually prefer to read books this way. Not to mention that I can read in the dark in bed, while my wife sleeps.
In addition, I can bring a whole library with me, so that if I finish one book, I have a selection to continue with, without the weight additional books would cause.
With the Baen website, I can buy an eBook, and download it in formats suitable for PalmOS and PocketPC (I get both as my wife has a Palm PDA), as well as HTML and RTF formats. And if I lose my eBook somehow, I can go and download it again, as they are always available.
What we need to promote eBook usage is more publishers like Baen who "get it". For an eBook, no DRM is very important for me. I upgrade PDAs periodically (and my wife might want to read the book), so I want a format that will continue to work on each new PDA. I'd also prefer that the price be discounted some, as there are no (significant) production, distribution, and stocking costs. Baen gives me both of these, and I hope like hell that they succeed.
Just as iTunes has caused me to buy more music in the past couple of years than I ever have before, Baen is causing me to buy more books.
That was my problem, then. My browser (Safari) wasn't giving me the real link on the status bar (or any other way, either). Instead, I got "Go to # on this page." Kind of makes the test hard to take!
How is the US Bank email fraudulent (the online survey says i was wrong, and that it was a fraud)?
Is usbank.com not a valid domain for U.S. Bank? The website looks legitimate, the link was a secured one. Heck, it even works. The domain appears to be registered to U.S. Bancorp, which appears valid.
If that really was fraudulent, and the links went to where they said they did, I'd really like to know how you can tell!
John
Slashdot Mirror
Is that really a common WiMax experience?
I've had ClearWire for about two years now, and have gotten a reliable 1.5Mbps/256kbps connection with no hiccups. Now they have converted me over to a 5Mbps/500kbps connection for the same price (although I seem to be getting around 2.5Mbps instead of 5). I've never had the problems you are complaining about.
And can you refer us to rigorous double-blind studies showing that chiropractors don't do any good beyond the placebo effect? Unless someone decides to spend the large amount of money required to perform such rigorous testing, anecdotal evidence is the best we will get.
IP and copyright are about business and making a profit. DNA sample collection is about life and liberty. It's also possible to reject current IP and copyright laws (implementations) without rejecting the whole concept (i.e., why not copyright only for 20 years?).
To flip your argument back onto you: you cannot reject the police searching your house whenever they want, without a warrant and without charge, if you don't reject people taking your DNA without being convicted of a crime. In either case, you are being presumed guilty.
My other gripe is how we so feverishly protect our children. Hiding things from children doesn't help them. It hurts them.
One thing you need to understand is that children don't have the experience and coping mechanisms in place to handle all of the content you or I could. There are things that I could watch or read that I would find mildly upsetting that would give my children nightmares for weeks. This is because they don't have the same risk-assessment capabilities that I do, because they don't have the experience.
So yes, I do shield my children from things I think they can't handle yet. When I feel they have reached an age that they are mature enough to, I will gladly let them chose. Treating children as miniature adults, though, is just stupid.
Damn, wrong person to reply to. Sorry!
Yeah? I had a coworker who did exactly what you are doing, and had done it for 8 years when he joined our company. He thought he had the IRS tied into knots, and had read all of the relevant tax codes front-to-back.
He was sure he had it all down, and there was nothing that could be done, just like you do. Then, finally, the Federal government got around to him. Took him to court (which he didn't think should have jurisdiction), confiscated some of his property, and sent him to a Federal penitentiary for several years.
You might want to reconsider before this happens to you, as well. You seem to think YOUR interpretation of the laws are what matters. You are wrong. It is the GOVERNMENT'S interpretation.
Really? Tell that to DirectTV. They altered my contract, and when I said I didn't agree to the new one, they slapped the $150 early termination fee on me. Reading the old contract carefully showed that I had agreed to pay early termination fees if I refuse new contract alterations. Their passing my final bill to a collection agency before it was even due was just abusive.
Since then, I have refused to enter into any contract with early termination fees. I pay for cell phone month-by-month, and laugh my ass off now that DirectTV badly wants me back as a customer.
OS X's Mail.app already has full support for email signing and encryption (and has since at least 10.4, when I started using the feature). Public keys can be exchanged by exchanging signed emails. Signing and encrypting are as simple as clicking the appropriate button on the "new message" window (the encryption button is only available when you are sending email to an address you have a public key for).
Wouldn't that be what the Early Termination Fee is for? To compensate them for the lack of your ongoing payments?
Are you arguing that it is too little to fully compensate them for their losses? Wouldn't that be their problem for not using the actual loss value for them?
So, tell me this. I had a year-long service contract with DirectTV for my television programming. This contract had an ETF on it as well. Was it ethical for the company to change the terms of that contract, and tell me that my only option if I didn't like the contract was to cancel the service and pay the ETF?
And you have read the contract between Apple and AT&T, and can testify that it is indeed AT&T demanding these changes?
For some reason, I find that hard to believe, and think instead that you are engaging in wild speculation. It may be true, but then again it may not be. Without access to the actual contract, we will never know.
Well hell, why don't we apply this to ALL areas of life, instead of just cell phones?
Gas station chains that only sell gas to if we agree to enter into a contract to only buy gasoline from their stations, and you agree to buy a minimum of 50 gallons a month! Don't like termination fees? Don't sign a contract agreeing to pay them if you leave. It's not like you have some inalienable god-given right to drive a car. Hence the contract.
I have my own cell phone. I currently use a pay-as-you go system, precisely because I don't want to be force into multi-year contracts, and I typically only have my cell phone for emergency purposes. But let me tell you, I pay significantly more per-minute than those with a contract (about $0.25 a minute, plus fees).
In an ideal world, a competitor would come along to service my needs. In the real world, there are very few companies with the money to buy the spectrum necessary for cell phone use, and those that have have all gotten together and decided that all of them will use this lock-in method. That leaves me with no choice but to pay exorbitant rates for their service without a contract.
And as I said in a post above, I've had providers attempt to lock me into a one-year contract for the mere privilege of changing my phone number after I moved, so don't give me garbage about this contract being used to subsidize the price of phones.
When I was using Sprint as my carrier, and asked them to change my phone number be local to the new location that I had moved to, they told me they wouldn't do it without signing me up to another year-long contract.
This is not subsidizing the price of anything. It is only used to lock me into their service and line their pockets. Since I was done with the contract I had with them, I decided I'd rather switch to a new carrier than be treated like that. They got MUCH more willing to work with me when I told them I was cancelling... to late for them, though.
Actually, I am starting to feel that the warrantee is a scam. I have my whole house running on CFLs with 7+ year warrantees, probably about 30 bulbs in all. I've had around 10-15 fail in the 3 years or so I've had them in. Despite being cooler than incancesdents, many show what looks like heat damage to the plastic base of the bulb (many of mine hang down from ceiling fans and the like).
Now, I bought these bulbs in 6 packs, so they ended up costing around $1.65 each. To get a warrantee replacement, I am going to have to send them off to the manufacturer for a non-trivial amount of money. It will not be that much cheaper than just buying a new bulb. Additionally, I have to go through the effort of keeping the receipt for this cheap product (vs. electronics) for 7 years.
I like CFLs, but I have not been overly impressed with their durability.
1. My iPhone did not come with a contract. I carefully looked through the box it came in, and none of the documents included came with a contract. Turning on the iPhone, it said I needed to activate it. This also is not a contract. When I then activated my phone via one of the non-iTunes tools, no contract was signed. There was no EULA and no click-through license I had to agree to. Please tell me which iPhone contract you are referring to that I agreed to.
2. It is my legal right to circumvent the DMCA in order to unlock my iPhone to work with other carriers. Why are you so adamant that I should not exercise my legal rights? I'm not hurting you or your iPhone, so why do you care? I guess those guys that reflash their Linksys wireless APs with more capable firmware are also on your list. Not to mention those bastards who put Linux on the iPaq PDA, or the iPod. After all, if we don't like what we get from the Gods of Apple, we just shouldn't buy it, right?
As for your assertion that new versions of OS X are the equivalent of Windows upgrades, I don't agree. Apple gives us plenty of point releases for free... in fact, Tiger is currently up to its tenth point release, and I haven't paid for any of them. Perhaps you are trying to assert that there weren't enough new features in Tiger to make it worthy of "new release" status from Panther? That's a matter of opinion, of course. I certainly found it worth of paying to upgrade. On the Windows side, I can't say that the inclusion of Aero makes Vista worthy of "new release" status either (but then again, I haven't ever used Vista and have been happy with XP).
Personally, I like the fact that Apple will sell me a family license so I can pay a little more and install the new OS on all of my Macs at the same time, and that new versions tend to perform better on the older laptops than the previous version did. I also like that there is no "activation" to worry about, or finding old disks to validate "upgradability", nor any for of Windows Genuine Advantage (from which I take special offense).
These things are all worth extra money to me.
2. Holier-than-thou attitude. So you make your computer choice based on image? Frankly, I haven't seen the type of Mac zealot you are describing in a long time. I'll rave about OS X when my opinion is asked, and rant about Windows when it does things that annoy me, but neither I nor my coworkers with Macs proselytize to anyone. Sorry you've had a bad experience, though. Then again, EVERY platform has their immature pricks (OS X, Windows, and Linux).
As for iPod support, I couldn't say. I've had annoying experiences with iTunes Music Store support (a couple of purchases saying they didn't go through when they did, resulting in double billing), but I've never had to contact iPod AppleCare, and that also seemed to be a different organization from the Mac support people (whom I've never had an issue with).
In any case, to each their own.
Odd. I have Ubuntu 7.04 installed on a virtual machine, and I don't remember being told about or asked about this package. I had never heard of it before. Sure enough, it is installed on my system. And when I try to remove it (assuming I am doing it right... it's the first time I've wanted to remove a package... dpkg --remove popularity-contest), I am told that I can't because "ubuntu-standard" relies on it.
Can you tell me where the question appears in the installation? Or by that do you mean I have to go into individual package lists, and know to look for it an disable it during the installation? And no, it didn't default to "no", because I certainly didn't select it explicitly for installation.
Sounds like a problem I had with my iPod. For what it's worth, I fixed it by starting up the "iPod Updater" program, and clicked on the "Restore" button. This apparently reinitializes the hard drive, fixing whatever database or filesystem problem it was having. I did this on my Mac, I'm assuming the Windows version of the updater has a similar feature.
Parallels runs Ubuntu with no problems whatsoever. I use Ubuntu 6.06 on my MacBook Pro as my work development environment, and in general it is faster than my 2.6GHz desktop.
I wish the X-server had better "change resolutions on the fly" capabilities (to handle going from full-screen to windowed mode), but I usually end up just displaying xterms from the Ubuntu virtual machine on my Mac OS X desktop anyway.
Kernel modules have an well-known API, just like user-space programs. The API for kernel modules is covered by the exported symbol names that the modules link against. This is no different than calling routines that exist in a shared library with a known API. These APIs are relatively stable within the same major kernel release (2.4, 2.6, etc.).
Yes, you can technically read from and write to any memory area in the kernel's memory space, but this is extremely dangerous without using the supplied symbol names, especially as locations of most things will change from kernel build to kernel build.
You are confusing the difficulty in forecasting a regional weather pattern with forecasting a global weather pattern, not to mention confusing a specific weather pattern with a weather trend.
Scientists are very good at detecting large-area trends, such as the cycles of hurricane patterns in the Atlantic ocean. Did you notice that they predicted the increased hurricane activity, due to the 30 year cycle? According to your logic, they shouldn't have been able to see this coming, because it was more than a few days out...
Before you install Flip4Mac, make sure to read the EULA that comes with it. Among the terms are that you can't resell or transfer it, and this little gem:
Section 3. Audit Permitted.
Telestream shall have the right, upon reasonable prior notice to You and during Your normal business hours, to audit Your use of the Licensed Materials and to inspect Your records related to any copies of the Software, or portions thereof, made by You.
I'm sorry... I'm not giving that right to anybody.
If FairPlay has the same capabilities as Microsoft's DRM to specify rights on a per-song basis, I have a big problem with other companies being able to produce FairPlay'ed AAC files.
One of the beauties of the iTMS/iTunes/iPod combination is that everything is consistent. On iTMS, each and every song is the same price, and each has the same rights. That was one of the problems with early competitors.
Apple, with the market presence of the iPod, had enough leverage to get the music distributors to agree to these (liberal) terms.
What happens when the RIAA leans on Real's music store to use different rights on "popular" songs? Will I suddenly have to deal with inconsistent rights on individual songs? Apple will no longer have the market clout (of being the sole producer of DRM'ed music on the #1 player) to push the music industry to agree to their terms (including equal footing for independents).
And why should Apple have to deal with end-users suffering problems from music they bought from a different company? What will Real tell people if Apple changes its FairPlay format for some reason? After seeing their petition, I suspect it will be "Apple did this to you! Take it up with them, ask them why they broke your iPod!".
Additionally, while iTMS is currently seen as an enabler for iPod sales, Apple might be trying to leverage it into become a huge, viable distribution method for music. If it takes off, it could end up making Apple a lot of money. So Real's actions could end up being a serious threat to Apple's future plans.
Some people might not care about that, but I like Apple's products and business, and I want to see them make money and continue to produce them.
John
I buy eBooks from http://www.baen.com/. These are full novels, with no DRM, priced at $4 and $5 a book.
I read them on my PocketPC-based iPaq 1910, which I find quite usable. With the font antialiasing that the OS does, and the good contrast, I often actually prefer to read books this way. Not to mention that I can read in the dark in bed, while my wife sleeps.
In addition, I can bring a whole library with me, so that if I finish one book, I have a selection to continue with, without the weight additional books would cause.
With the Baen website, I can buy an eBook, and download it in formats suitable for PalmOS and PocketPC (I get both as my wife has a Palm PDA), as well as HTML and RTF formats. And if I lose my eBook somehow, I can go and download it again, as they are always available.
What we need to promote eBook usage is more publishers like Baen who "get it". For an eBook, no DRM is very important for me. I upgrade PDAs periodically (and my wife might want to read the book), so I want a format that will continue to work on each new PDA. I'd also prefer that the price be discounted some, as there are no (significant) production, distribution, and stocking costs. Baen gives me both of these, and I hope like hell that they succeed.
Just as iTunes has caused me to buy more music in the past couple of years than I ever have before, Baen is causing me to buy more books.
John
That was my problem, then. My browser (Safari) wasn't giving me the real link on the status bar (or any other way, either). Instead, I got "Go to # on this page." Kind of makes the test hard to take!
John
How is the US Bank email fraudulent (the online survey says i was wrong, and that it was a fraud)? Is usbank.com not a valid domain for U.S. Bank? The website looks legitimate, the link was a secured one. Heck, it even works. The domain appears to be registered to U.S. Bancorp, which appears valid. If that really was fraudulent, and the links went to where they said they did, I'd really like to know how you can tell! John