Me? I'm entirely too lax in this area. I'm opinionated, irreverent, offensive, et cetera. No more than I am in real life, but too much for public discourse.
Suffice to say most of your peers aren't like you.
No, but see the schools act as parents. It's called in loco parentis, and it's well defined in American law. Schools are allowed to discipline students as they see fit in order to better the educational experience of other students. Detentions are considered a deterrent--Saturday detentions, even more so.
Most schools here have a principal and at least two vice principals. They handle all the disciplining, administative manners, etc. They regularly have contact with pupils, and are very involved with the everyday running of the school.
Not entirely. Review the Hazelwood decision, which strictly redefined the Tinker to which you referred. The black armband, actually, was found to have not disrupted the education process, contrary to what you posted.
Student, for skipping detention, gets a Saturday. Skips that.
Student suspended for skipping a Saturday. Gets a couple days off from school, which was the point in the first place.
Generally, the kids who skipped their first detentions were fine with missing school, and my school didn't have the cojones or personnel to enforce in-school suspensions, nor the desire to put kids in the streets by expelling them.
Um...never thought about it. It's SOP. It's considered within the school's prerogative to compel you to be at school on a Saturday for disciplinary reasons, I suppose. Usually Saturday detentions are awarded if you've skipped some regular detentions.
I mean, by your logic, regular after school detentions aren't ok either.
I never thought about it that way, true, but I think this is a good example of school's disciplinary powers reaching beyond what is normally considered the school.
--Petey
I'm from New Hampshire. But most people I know from most places had to deal with the spectre of a Saturday detention hanging over their heads...
Again, this is modded up funny, but let's seriously consider this for a second:
If we're dredging up Samuel Alito's yearbook photo, why is it so far fetched to believe that in the future, the Internet will be scoured for facts about people?
What happens when a future Presidential candidate had a shitty myspace when he was 14?
Any idiot can use Google can become a "websleuth". We have it all the time here on/., with people identifying troll accounts and cross referencing them to actual accounts.
Look, no one is free of skeletons in their closet. But our generation (speaking as a college student) has left a "paper trail" like no other. Imagine if suddenly the New York Times had this sort of access to Bush! AIM transcripts, emails, messageboard postings, facebook groups, et cetera. How much will the Internet Archive be hit up for this sort of thing?
Let's face it: by the time many of us younger/. users are older, we'll have to deal with one of two crises in politics. Either:
A) We'll see new laws enacted somehow barring journalists and bloggers from publicizing past information on candidates (fat chance), or
B) We'll have to, as a nation, come to grips that all of the leading Presidential candidates listened to My Chemical Romance and were, at best, SA Forum Goons and, at worst, XXX password crackers.
You laugh. I think our generation is already bracing for this. I was interviewing kids at my college (William and Mary) about the use of "Tribe" as our nickname. NCAA has asked us to change it, etc, etc. I went to ask some kid upstairs about his opinion as to whether or not it was a valid change, and this sophomore looked at me and said, "seeing as I someday want to run for public office, I'm going to have to decline to answer your question."
Will software corporations hire background investigators to check whether or not you ever frequented a bit-torrent site?
Will the frivolous, unthinking, knee jerk petitions/forums/porn sites/facebook groups we are associated with in our youth some day come back to haunt us in this new, incomparatively open world?
But it really depends on whether or not they have a "code of conduct" clause in their student handbook.
Incidentally, IANAL, but I was disciplined in high school for making a website that criticized a fellow student at the school. Rather, I was disciplined for viewing the website, and fell prey to a rarely-invoked clause about viewing webpages with profanity in them, and for printing it out to show people. They did say they could do nothing to me because I made it at home--and my vice-principal was a lawyer, so perhaps there's something to that...
In any case, they can nail you on a small thing and enforce maximum punishment for something like that. Normal punishment for what I did was to have your computer privileges taken away for a week. I was banned from school computers for the rest of the school year and received two Saturday detentions.
Like I said, maximized penalties based on minor infractions. Like my senior year when, while I was involved in a public dispute with the school board and administration about their underhanded and corrupt tactics on a planned schedule change, I was suspended for going into the girls bathroom.
Speaking of which, does anybody else notice the alarming similarities between ethernet cables and spaghetti? Divine inspiration, derived from His Noodly Appendages, to be sure...
Tell me about it. This update is brutal. My 1.2 GHz Powerbook is freaking out--taking nearly ten minutes in total to reboot, even after I rested it for several hours after the update crashed it.
I think the verdict is trick. Do not download this if your Mac is running fine already.
Incidentally, does anyone know if wiretapping will be extended to AIM based voice chats? If VOIP, than why not iChat? Matter of fact, why not AIM, and email too?
At my school, my English teacher was forced to modify her website. It had a picture of her on it, and the school made her take it down so that there was no way they'd get in trouble if she used her seeming legitimacy to stalk and molest a child. No joke.
As someone who lives in a 6,000 person town in New Hampshire, I can say that there are few things people dread more than the annual town meeting, where people gather to bitch and moan in front of a small portion of their fellow residents.
They drag on for hours and hours. We know where our money (for example, a 23.5 million dollar deal to buy 100 acres of Apple orchards--that couldn't be built on because of arsenic in the water table--to, get this, keep developers from building on them)goes. But trust me. No matter how good direct democracy sounds, I guarantee you 99% of the people at that meeting would much rather leave everything up to a small, embattled group of elected town officials--if those town officials weren't lying, petty, backstabbing scumbags who couldn't be trusted.
Before you get a rosy picture of rosy cheeked, jovial New Englanders cheerfully discussing how to properly use town funds to renovate the one room schoolhouse, come to a four day long, 35-total-hours town meeting.
I too was stopped by that point. They seem to be unrelated. Do we have a journalistic screw up? It seems unlikely that a principal would say something as a rule that wasn't backed up in the handbook, because the law decrees that in many cases the handbook is the law of the school.
Certainly principals have certain unenumerated powers, but by and large the handbook should read "no weblogs" if the policy is "no weblogs".
That's the gist of what I emailed to the school today.
I think a lot of people also have a deep seated misunderstanding of the Constitution's applicability to the present case--at least based on the modded-up posts.
First off, most of the Constitutional rights that can be applied to public schools--as limited as those are--are thrown right out of the window because this is a private school. Since there is no government compulsion to attend a private high school, it is viewed as a consensual activity. You give up your rights. Moreover, I'm somewhat appalled that no./ers have made the connection that this Catholic school is obviously not bound by the establishment clause of the First Amendment--so why should it necessarily be bound by the speech clause?
Don't get me wrong, I'm as against this move by the principal as any other faithful technogeek. Legally speaking, however, I'm not sure there is any reason why the private school *can't* do this. The body of law regarding student speech on the Internet is very unclear. Nothing has mustered certiori, and the assorted state cases have been divided, with some higher courts ruling that a public school official can, in fact, order a student-made website mentioning the school to be taken down (and punish them if they refuse)--and other courts allowing students more latitutde.
Again, you will not see Tinker nor Hazelwood brought up as binding precedents in this case, because it is a private school.
A few Cyberspeech related cases will show what I mean in terms of mixed court opinion:
Beidler v. North Thurston School District, No. 99-2-00236-6 (Wash.Super.Ct.)(7/18/00)
Beussink v. Woodland R-IV School District, 30 F.Supp. 2d 1175 (E.D. Mo. 1998)
Coy v. Board of Education of North Canton Schools, 205 F.Supp. 2d 791 (N.D. Ohio 2002)
Emmett v. Kent School District No. 415, 92 F.Supp. 2d 1089 (W.D. Wash. 2000)
J.S. v. Bethlehem Area School District, 807 A.2d 847 (Pa. 2002)
Klein v. Smith, 635 F.Supp. 1440 (D. Me. 1986)
Mahaffey v. Aldrich, 236 F.Supp. 2d 779 (E.D. Mich. 2002)
O'Brien v. Westlake City Sch. Bd. of Educ., No. 1:98CV647 (E.D. Ohio 1998)
Thomas v. Board of Ed. Granville Central School District, 607 F.2d 1043 (2nd Cir. 1979)
In brief,
* A student's website contained his unflattering opinions of the school and the principal. The student was suspended for 10 days. The principal testified that he disciplined the student because he was upset by the contents of the page-not because he believed it would cause any disruption within the school. A federal court overturned the student's suspension (Beussink v. Woodland R-IV, 1998).
* A student created a website that contained "derogatory, profane, offensive and threatening" comments about a teacher and an administrator. The website featured a drawing of the teacher with her head cut off and solicited $20 donations to help the student pay for a hit man to kill the teacher.
The student was expelled and appealed the expulsion. The Supreme Court of Pennsylvania upheld the districts decision. The court first concluded that the website did not contain "true threat." (If it had, the speech would have received no constitutional protection.) However, the court determined that the student's speech caused a substantial disruption, including emotional and physical injuries to the teacher so severe that she could not continue teaching that year or the next. (J. S. v. Bethlehem Area Sch. Dist., 2002).
* A student and an unidentified classmate created "Satan's webpage" on an off-campus computer. The site contained a list of people the student wished would die and a section entitled "Satan's Mission for You This Week" that encouraged readers to commit acts of violence and murder.
After being alerted about the website by the police, the school district suspended him for posting "intimidation and threats" on the Internet. However, a federal district court held that the student's suspension violated his First Amendm
On my 18th birthday, I received a Gilette razor with a message from the company wishing me congratulations on my birthday.
Same with all the other young men in my rural New Hampshire town.
If Gilette can keep track of the birthday of thousands (if not more) young men, why can't a government aided corporation keep track of printer serials? Sure, it doesn't help on eBayed ones...but it certainly better the chances of apprehension.
However, it doesn't help that much, since it only applies to color printers.
What the hell is feature film support? Were you expecting the iTMS to open with the Nextflix library available for download?
Yes.
And while HD is nice, I think you're missing the point. And getting upset at Apple because, I guess, you were expecting some huge revolution with VR and iPods you connect to your head, and instead you got their first effort at moving toward video.
I was expecting a bigger first movement, I suppose. I'm not upset, really--I'm surprised, and a little let down, but that's where hype gets you.
The iMacs have s-video and composite out, are you mad you can't use them with your coax only TV?
No. But you still have to move your mac around to your T.V. I guess I suppose that, given AirTunes, we'd see some sort of wacky way to hook it up wirelessly (or wired, with some sort of conversion box). Something to make it a little bit more useful. I dunno.
And BSD is dying. True story.
As someone who uses FreeBSD on his server...well, I'm not sure your ill-conceived insult applies to me.
Yeah--I'd be a lot more psyched if South Park, the Simpsons, or any of those other shows were on this program.
Truth be told, I'm kind of disapppointed. We have a video iPod without HD, no feature-film support (except for what you yourself can pirate/rip and convert to mpeg), and no video express station.
We have Front Row, which is an awesome performance that is almost utterly useless if you can't hook it up to a T.V. Never mind that it's only available on these iMacs.
We have a slightly upgraded iMac, in a line that certainly will falter in the face of the impending Intel switch.
I mean...what did Apple really do here that was groundbreaking (other than, as was admirably noted elsewhere, convincing some television shows to go on the iTunes Music Store in a move that both A) paves the way for MPAA expansion and B) gives the RIAA a metaphorical kick in the nuts in terms of their price complaints)? We've all known that the technical ability to play video on an iPod was there. They could have done things much better, especially with FrontRow.
And no video webcast? Even after the fact? I'm miffed.
This is not only a repost, but ThinkSecret's logic is flawed.
Apple tends to use these type of events--and the "One more thing" line--to introduce a major product or make a major announcement. So, if we look what was announced at the last event--the Nano--we must assume that Apple thinks that what they are announcing is big enough to risk overshadowing the Nano.
Considering some analysts are saying Apple may sell 5 million Nanos by the end of the Christmas season, we are faced with two possibilities.
Either:
A) Apple vastly underestimated the impact of the Nano, and mistakenly thought that a minor upgrade--like a 1/3 increase in the capacity of high end iPods--would be more well received than a whoppingly cool replacement for the best selling iPod, or
B) Apple has something huge in the works--something so huge that it is worth drawing away attention from the minis.
Now, I don't see it being a major product increase, because why Apple would spend all the time, energy, and publicity on what will be essentially a dead duck product considering the inevitable Intel switch is beyond me. Unless, of course, Apple is bringing Intel machines to the market way ahead of schedule...
So I think it has to be a new iPod, one that will be targeted towards people who want more than a small capacity, compact listening device (the Nano). They're appealing to a different demographic with this. It has to be something with video, and I'm betting we're going to see a way to easily transfer movies, with a high rate of compression, to your Mac. That's the only thing major enough to be worth this--except for new Intel machines, or possibly an announcement that Apple has finally created workable X-ray specs.
I believe it was the immortal literary genius of J.K. Rowling who once penned--in a similar story of good vs. evil, dark vs. light, corrupt age vs. pristine youth--that "neither could live while the other surivived."
Now, if Google can pull an Apple, and form some sort of alliance with J.K.R.--perhaps bundling an easy-to-use fanfiction word processor, complete with generic slash templates--then the sheer number of Harry Potter fanatics who already use Google to look up the translations for her faux Latin spells might switch over immediately. Give Eric Schmidt a lightning bold scar, and nothing could stand in their way.
Slashdot Mirror
Impressive, young Skywalker.
Me? I'm entirely too lax in this area. I'm opinionated, irreverent, offensive, et cetera. No more than I am in real life, but too much for public discourse.
Suffice to say most of your peers aren't like you.
--Petey
The U.K. is run very differently from the U.S.
No, but see the schools act as parents. It's called in loco parentis, and it's well defined in American law. Schools are allowed to discipline students as they see fit in order to better the educational experience of other students. Detentions are considered a deterrent--Saturday detentions, even more so.
Most schools here have a principal and at least two vice principals. They handle all the disciplining, administative manners, etc. They regularly have contact with pupils, and are very involved with the everyday running of the school.
--Petey
Not entirely. Review the Hazelwood decision, which strictly redefined the Tinker to which you referred. The black armband, actually, was found to have not disrupted the education process, contrary to what you posted.
At my school, it would normally go like this:
Student gets a detention. Skips it.
Student, for skipping detention, gets a Saturday. Skips that.
Student suspended for skipping a Saturday. Gets a couple days off from school, which was the point in the first place.
Generally, the kids who skipped their first detentions were fine with missing school, and my school didn't have the cojones or personnel to enforce in-school suspensions, nor the desire to put kids in the streets by expelling them.
--Petey
Um...never thought about it. It's SOP. It's considered within the school's prerogative to compel you to be at school on a Saturday for disciplinary reasons, I suppose. Usually Saturday detentions are awarded if you've skipped some regular detentions.
I mean, by your logic, regular after school detentions aren't ok either.
I never thought about it that way, true, but I think this is a good example of school's disciplinary powers reaching beyond what is normally considered the school.
--Petey
I'm from New Hampshire. But most people I know from most places had to deal with the spectre of a Saturday detention hanging over their heads...
Again, this is modded up funny, but let's seriously consider this for a second:
/., with people identifying troll accounts and cross referencing them to actual accounts.
/. users are older, we'll have to deal with one of two crises in politics. Either:
If we're dredging up Samuel Alito's yearbook photo, why is it so far fetched to believe that in the future, the Internet will be scoured for facts about people?
What happens when a future Presidential candidate had a shitty myspace when he was 14?
Any idiot can use Google can become a "websleuth". We have it all the time here on
Look, no one is free of skeletons in their closet. But our generation (speaking as a college student) has left a "paper trail" like no other. Imagine if suddenly the New York Times had this sort of access to Bush! AIM transcripts, emails, messageboard postings, facebook groups, et cetera. How much will the Internet Archive be hit up for this sort of thing?
Let's face it: by the time many of us younger
A) We'll see new laws enacted somehow barring journalists and bloggers from publicizing past information on candidates (fat chance), or
B) We'll have to, as a nation, come to grips that all of the leading Presidential candidates listened to My Chemical Romance and were, at best, SA Forum Goons and, at worst, XXX password crackers.
You laugh. I think our generation is already bracing for this. I was interviewing kids at my college (William and Mary) about the use of "Tribe" as our nickname. NCAA has asked us to change it, etc, etc. I went to ask some kid upstairs about his opinion as to whether or not it was a valid change, and this sophomore looked at me and said, "seeing as I someday want to run for public office, I'm going to have to decline to answer your question."
Will software corporations hire background investigators to check whether or not you ever frequented a bit-torrent site?
Will the frivolous, unthinking, knee jerk petitions/forums/porn sites/facebook groups we are associated with in our youth some day come back to haunt us in this new, incomparatively open world?
Stay tuned...
--Petey
You'd think that, wouldn't you?
But it really depends on whether or not they have a "code of conduct" clause in their student handbook.
Incidentally, IANAL, but I was disciplined in high school for making a website that criticized a fellow student at the school. Rather, I was disciplined for viewing the website, and fell prey to a rarely-invoked clause about viewing webpages with profanity in them, and for printing it out to show people. They did say they could do nothing to me because I made it at home--and my vice-principal was a lawyer, so perhaps there's something to that...
In any case, they can nail you on a small thing and enforce maximum punishment for something like that. Normal punishment for what I did was to have your computer privileges taken away for a week. I was banned from school computers for the rest of the school year and received two Saturday detentions.
Like I said, maximized penalties based on minor infractions. Like my senior year when, while I was involved in a public dispute with the school board and administration about their underhanded and corrupt tactics on a planned schedule change, I was suspended for going into the girls bathroom.
Course, I was with two junior girls at the time.
Oh high school.
--Petey
If Al Gore created the Internet, he only did it at the behest of the Flying Spaghetti Monster.
Speaking of which, does anybody else notice the alarming similarities between ethernet cables and spaghetti? Divine inspiration, derived from His Noodly Appendages, to be sure...
--Petey
Yeah.
/. mods and admin haven't abused their points by labeling anything and everything offtopic or flamebait.
/. newbie, but I think my disillusionment with this website is "immanent".
It's a good thing the
I'm a
On the subject of bad administration, why is this modded +1 funny? If anything, it's informative.
No, he's right. We all have our own *immanent* gravity wave detector.
It just takes a few (dozen) drinks to bring it out!
That's right. That drunk you see in the alley behind Fenway Park is actually a physics experiment.
Popped by to say that this should be modded the hell up.
Tell me about it. This update is brutal. My 1.2 GHz Powerbook is freaking out--taking nearly ten minutes in total to reboot, even after I rested it for several hours after the update crashed it.
I think the verdict is trick. Do not download this if your Mac is running fine already.
--Petey
Good point.
Incidentally, does anyone know if wiretapping will be extended to AIM based voice chats? If VOIP, than why not iChat? Matter of fact, why not AIM, and email too?
--Petey
At my school, my English teacher was forced to modify her website. It had a picture of her on it, and the school made her take it down so that there was no way they'd get in trouble if she used her seeming legitimacy to stalk and molest a child. No joke.
As someone who lives in a 6,000 person town in New Hampshire, I can say that there are few things people dread more than the annual town meeting, where people gather to bitch and moan in front of a small portion of their fellow residents.
They drag on for hours and hours. We know where our money (for example, a 23.5 million dollar deal to buy 100 acres of Apple orchards--that couldn't be built on because of arsenic in the water table--to, get this, keep developers from building on them)goes. But trust me. No matter how good direct democracy sounds, I guarantee you 99% of the people at that meeting would much rather leave everything up to a small, embattled group of elected town officials--if those town officials weren't lying, petty, backstabbing scumbags who couldn't be trusted.
Before you get a rosy picture of rosy cheeked, jovial New Englanders cheerfully discussing how to properly use town funds to renovate the one room schoolhouse, come to a four day long, 35-total-hours town meeting.
--Petey
I too was stopped by that point. They seem to be unrelated. Do we have a journalistic screw up? It seems unlikely that a principal would say something as a rule that wasn't backed up in the handbook, because the law decrees that in many cases the handbook is the law of the school.
Certainly principals have certain unenumerated powers, but by and large the handbook should read "no weblogs" if the policy is "no weblogs".
Interesting discrepency.
--Petey
That's the gist of what I emailed to the school today.
./ers have made the connection that this Catholic school is obviously not bound by the establishment clause of the First Amendment--so why should it necessarily be bound by the speech clause?
I think a lot of people also have a deep seated misunderstanding of the Constitution's applicability to the present case--at least based on the modded-up posts.
First off, most of the Constitutional rights that can be applied to public schools--as limited as those are--are thrown right out of the window because this is a private school. Since there is no government compulsion to attend a private high school, it is viewed as a consensual activity. You give up your rights. Moreover, I'm somewhat appalled that no
Don't get me wrong, I'm as against this move by the principal as any other faithful technogeek. Legally speaking, however, I'm not sure there is any reason why the private school *can't* do this. The body of law regarding student speech on the Internet is very unclear. Nothing has mustered certiori, and the assorted state cases have been divided, with some higher courts ruling that a public school official can, in fact, order a student-made website mentioning the school to be taken down (and punish them if they refuse)--and other courts allowing students more latitutde.
Again, you will not see Tinker nor Hazelwood brought up as binding precedents in this case, because it is a private school.
A few Cyberspeech related cases will show what I mean in terms of mixed court opinion: Beidler v. North Thurston School District, No. 99-2-00236-6 (Wash.Super.Ct.)(7/18/00) Beussink v. Woodland R-IV School District, 30 F.Supp. 2d 1175 (E.D. Mo. 1998) Coy v. Board of Education of North Canton Schools, 205 F.Supp. 2d 791 (N.D. Ohio 2002) Emmett v. Kent School District No. 415, 92 F.Supp. 2d 1089 (W.D. Wash. 2000) J.S. v. Bethlehem Area School District, 807 A.2d 847 (Pa. 2002) Klein v. Smith, 635 F.Supp. 1440 (D. Me. 1986) Mahaffey v. Aldrich, 236 F.Supp. 2d 779 (E.D. Mich. 2002) O'Brien v. Westlake City Sch. Bd. of Educ., No. 1:98CV647 (E.D. Ohio 1998) Thomas v. Board of Ed. Granville Central School District, 607 F.2d 1043 (2nd Cir. 1979)
In brief, * A student's website contained his unflattering opinions of the school and the principal. The student was suspended for 10 days. The principal testified that he disciplined the student because he was upset by the contents of the page-not because he believed it would cause any disruption within the school. A federal court overturned the student's suspension (Beussink v. Woodland R-IV, 1998).
* A student created a website that contained "derogatory, profane, offensive and threatening" comments about a teacher and an administrator. The website featured a drawing of the teacher with her head cut off and solicited $20 donations to help the student pay for a hit man to kill the teacher.
The student was expelled and appealed the expulsion. The Supreme Court of Pennsylvania upheld the districts decision. The court first concluded that the website did not contain "true threat." (If it had, the speech would have received no constitutional protection.) However, the court determined that the student's speech caused a substantial disruption, including emotional and physical injuries to the teacher so severe that she could not continue teaching that year or the next. (J. S. v. Bethlehem Area Sch. Dist., 2002).
* A student and an unidentified classmate created "Satan's webpage" on an off-campus computer. The site contained a list of people the student wished would die and a section entitled "Satan's Mission for You This Week" that encouraged readers to commit acts of violence and murder.
After being alerted about the website by the police, the school district suspended him for posting "intimidation and threats" on the Internet. However, a federal district court held that the student's suspension violated his First Amendm
There are such databases.
On my 18th birthday, I received a Gilette razor with a message from the company wishing me congratulations on my birthday.
Same with all the other young men in my rural New Hampshire town.
If Gilette can keep track of the birthday of thousands (if not more) young men, why can't a government aided corporation keep track of printer serials? Sure, it doesn't help on eBayed ones...but it certainly better the chances of apprehension.
However, it doesn't help that much, since it only applies to color printers.
--Petey
It's day one, give it time.
True.
What the hell is feature film support? Were you expecting the iTMS to open with the Nextflix library available for download?
Yes.
And while HD is nice, I think you're missing the point. And getting upset at Apple because, I guess, you were expecting some huge revolution with VR and iPods you connect to your head, and instead you got their first effort at moving toward video.
I was expecting a bigger first movement, I suppose. I'm not upset, really--I'm surprised, and a little let down, but that's where hype gets you.
The iMacs have s-video and composite out, are you mad you can't use them with your coax only TV?
No. But you still have to move your mac around to your T.V. I guess I suppose that, given AirTunes, we'd see some sort of wacky way to hook it up wirelessly (or wired, with some sort of conversion box). Something to make it a little bit more useful. I dunno.
And BSD is dying. True story.
As someone who uses FreeBSD on his server...well, I'm not sure your ill-conceived insult applies to me.
--Petey
Yeah--I'd be a lot more psyched if South Park, the Simpsons, or any of those other shows were on this program.
Truth be told, I'm kind of disapppointed. We have a video iPod without HD, no feature-film support (except for what you yourself can pirate/rip and convert to mpeg), and no video express station.
We have Front Row, which is an awesome performance that is almost utterly useless if you can't hook it up to a T.V. Never mind that it's only available on these iMacs.
We have a slightly upgraded iMac, in a line that certainly will falter in the face of the impending Intel switch.
I mean...what did Apple really do here that was groundbreaking (other than, as was admirably noted elsewhere, convincing some television shows to go on the iTunes Music Store in a move that both A) paves the way for MPAA expansion and B) gives the RIAA a metaphorical kick in the nuts in terms of their price complaints)? We've all known that the technical ability to play video on an iPod was there. They could have done things much better, especially with FrontRow.
And no video webcast? Even after the fact? I'm miffed.
--Petey
This is not only a repost, but ThinkSecret's logic is flawed.
Apple tends to use these type of events--and the "One more thing" line--to introduce a major product or make a major announcement. So, if we look what was announced at the last event--the Nano--we must assume that Apple thinks that what they are announcing is big enough to risk overshadowing the Nano.
Considering some analysts are saying Apple may sell 5 million Nanos by the end of the Christmas season, we are faced with two possibilities.
Either:
A) Apple vastly underestimated the impact of the Nano, and mistakenly thought that a minor upgrade--like a 1/3 increase in the capacity of high end iPods--would be more well received than a whoppingly cool replacement for the best selling iPod, or
B) Apple has something huge in the works--something so huge that it is worth drawing away attention from the minis.
Now, I don't see it being a major product increase, because why Apple would spend all the time, energy, and publicity on what will be essentially a dead duck product considering the inevitable Intel switch is beyond me. Unless, of course, Apple is bringing Intel machines to the market way ahead of schedule...
So I think it has to be a new iPod, one that will be targeted towards people who want more than a small capacity, compact listening device (the Nano). They're appealing to a different demographic with this. It has to be something with video, and I'm betting we're going to see a way to easily transfer movies, with a high rate of compression, to your Mac. That's the only thing major enough to be worth this--except for new Intel machines, or possibly an announcement that Apple has finally created workable X-ray specs.
--Petey
I believe it was the immortal literary genius of J.K. Rowling who once penned--in a similar story of good vs. evil, dark vs. light, corrupt age vs. pristine youth--that "neither could live while the other surivived."
Now, if Google can pull an Apple, and form some sort of alliance with J.K.R.--perhaps bundling an easy-to-use fanfiction word processor, complete with generic slash templates--then the sheer number of Harry Potter fanatics who already use Google to look up the translations for her faux Latin spells might switch over immediately. Give Eric Schmidt a lightning bold scar, and nothing could stand in their way.
--Petey
At the risk of reviving a dead meme... All your movies are belong to us
...as further pieces of the viPod puzzle fall into place, perhaps?
Interesting.
--Petey