....they are actually providing me with the courtesy of not destroying my container to access the contents........
Your analogy breaks down, because with a properly encrypted computer they cannot open the container, no matter what. If they could, they would take your computer, just like the safe, and brute force it open. You KNOW they can open your safe, so you might as well give them the combination. Also they and you both know that they cannot open the encrypted files, so you don't give them the key. So now they will try to get around the Constitution in some way. In the UK they can put you in prison for not giving them the key, but in the US, that inconvenient document called the Constitution still stands in the way, at least for now.
....But in getting that "key to the safe" i.......
The key itself may be a physical object, but the information as to where that key is hidden is only in the defendant's brain. Why should he be forced to divulge THAT particular information as to the secret hiding place and not be forced to provide the information out of his brain of the secret pass code? Why is a difference made in secrets? Are some secrets more secret that others? It seems to me that all secrets are protected if the release thereof would incriminate the possessor of the secret.
....A physical key that opens a physical object (safe, lockbox, closet, etc.).......
What if the information as to the whereabouts of the physical key is only in the mind of the defendant? Does that now also qualify alternative #3 for protection? It seems to me that a securely encrypted computer file is equivalent to a safe that cannot be opened even with all the resources of the government applied. No such physical safe exists, but it seems that at present, a properly encrypted computer is equivalent to such an uncrackable safe, even to the government.
There is nothing that all governments hate more that the loss of power. In the case of an encrypted file, even the most powerful government is powerless. That is really at the center of this matter. The framers of the constitution did NOT want or government to have godlike powers over individuals.
...... The problem is that we have a lot of hard-to-move infrastructure.......
Don't you think in two or three centuries all that stuff will be worn out or hopelessly obsolete? What infrastructure from 1707 are we still dependent on? How about in other parts of the world?
Maybe we better work at not blowing ourselves off the planet with WMDs or exterminating all living things by some fancy military biological means. Keeping and bringing freedom, health and dignity NOW to large segments of humanity might a better way to expend our efforts, rather than worrying about what might happen to the climate centuries or even millennia from today. If we don't solve of the much more pressing problems facing the human race TODAY, the hot or cold of the climate, centuries, or even decades from now, won't matter one bit.
.......ruin the lives of a hundred million people or two......
The process of warming is very slow, compared to human civilizations. Even the worst case global warming models take centuries at least. Warming is also far from uniform. The coldest places will and have been experiencing the most warming. The already warm areas have changed barely and will not change all that much. Most of the northern polar ice is already displacing water, thus not raising the seas even a millimeter if it ALL melts. The ice on land that melts will raise the oceans some. How much is unknown, because it is unknown how much of the land ice will melt.
Even if ALL the land ice melts, the possible loss of a bit of coastal land is greatly offset by the vast areas of land unproductive and uninhabitable now, becoming useful then, because it is just to darn cold there right now. In addition, as the whole atmosphere warms it can hold a tremendous quantity of water in suspension. The huge amounts of water that dumps when warm, tropical air dumps, as from a hurricane is powerful evidence of this. This effect may be enough to more than offset the melting ice. There is evidence that the continental shelves were once dry. Where did all that extra water originate? Did it precipitate out of a formerly MUCH warmer, more humid atmosphere? Would a warm, humid atmosphere result in rainfall, even in areas now desert?
You see, the scenario of the warming alarmists may be grossly overstated or even dead wrong. There are other possibilities and scenarios as well.
.....Sure, if we start planting gardens on our roofs, driveways, and airports.....
One look at a globe would tell you that the earth's climate and weather as a whole is determined by the oceans, not the land mass. In the same way, it is the plant life in the oceans that is removing most of the CO2 from the air.
Not necessarily, it depends on a number of other factors. A warming ocean makes for more evaporation. That extra water has to come back down SOMEWHERE. Where that might be is hard to predict. The Sahara, as well as the Arabian desert used to be a fruitful and well watered. How else could there be such great quantities of fossil fuels under now desert places of the earth? Even human records show that the Sahara was one fruitful land.
We are talking about fossil fuels, not lime stone. Don't obfuscate the topic. Being polite and not insulting might increase you credibility.
......our climate has been pretty stable for about ten thousand years......
That isn't really true. There have been rather large, much larger temperature swings in recorded human history, than anything we have observed since we began using fossil fuels stored within the earth from long ago. Greenland was not always a mass of ice, even in human history. That's why it is still called GREENland, a land of forests, similar to the eastern USA. There is very strong evidence of that, not only from human records, but also from present day research. There is also evidence that most of the parts of the oceans we call the continental shelves were once habitable land. Where did all that extra water come from, even though some of it is now locked up as ice on land?
The climate back when the fossil fuels were formed was conducive to all life forms back then. There were more species of all kinds of plants and animals alive back then, than we have today. Even before modern fossil fuel use came along, species were going extinct every day. Life was FAR more prolific all over the ENTIRE planet, than it is today. How did all that oil get underneath the now desert landscape of Arabia and other deserts? Could it be that those places once teemed with abundant life?
As the earth warms, it is not a given that the now hot places will become that much hotter. If fact even measurements today show that most of the warming is taking place in the up to now cold places. The tropical sea and atmosphere temperature increases are barely measurable. In 2006 warming alarmists have blamed monster hurricanes on global warming. In 2007, with just as much warming or more, there were few such monster storms.
To restore the earth to former conditions or warmth would not be an unmitigated catastrophe because it would happen slowly, at most, over many centuries. Few, if any civilizations have lasted that long. What arrogance makes us, the present one, think we will be any different? Life, including human life is incredibly adaptable. If our descendants 500 years from now are able to grow Oranges in Manitoba, I don't think they would mind.
.... fossil fuels are so fabulous because you only need to expend the energy necessary to go dig them up to be able to use them.......
The US has enough coal to last for centuries. Where did all that carbon in coal come from originally? We call coal, oil and natural gas "fossil fuels" because they were produced by living things, mostly plants. These plants needed sunshine and therefore were on the surface of the earth using up the carbon in the atmosphere. These living things were then buried, leaving the earth with much less carbon in the air. Without the activity of man, the a balance between carbon production and carbon removal was reached long ago.
Now if we liberate this carbon from the past, the plants will grow better because they have more CO2 to use. Also, plants grow better in warmer conditions. At some point there should be a new equilibrium where the amount of carbon the plants remove equals the amount we put back by burning them and/or their ancestors. This would likely happens long before we have liberated all of the carbon now stored underground. All that carbon used to be in the air, making the globe warmer than it is today. So global warming might not be such a cataclysmic thing it is made out to be. As the earth gets warmer, less energy is needed for heating. Solar absorption panels can be used for cooling. Global warming could even be beneficial in the long term!
.... that argument truly respects the difficulties in transporting "base loads"..........
Transporting large amounts of electricity long distances is lossy and therefore expensive. It is also difficult to build huge power lines because of NIMBY from a large number of property owners. There are places where it is cheaper to build certain kinds of power plants, but getting that power to the population centers where it it most needed is expensive to construct. Nuclear power stations can be built much closer to the places where the power is needed.
......Is that too much to ask for? Can it be that hard to do?.....
I have heard that these kinds of gadgets are available in lots of places. They are called laptop or notebook computers. There are cheap versions of these, not much more expensive than this Kindle toy.
Re:Lol, I bought the Sony ebook reader
on
The Cult of Kindle
·
· Score: 1
......So, Kindle was a miss for me......
Any kind of electronic "book" that doesn't allow the lending, selling or giving thereof to friend, relative or used book store, they way it is possible to do with a real book, is a show stopper out the gate. Any DRM that is supposed to prevent copying, will also prevent these ordinary things that are done every day with a normal, old fashioned printed book. This is especially true if the electronic book costs more than the cheapest paperback available.
.....Presumably, for a certain subsection of the population internet access is a basic requirement - email, web-browsing, instant-messenger, online-banking, etc..........
For all those activities, the vastly cheaper dial up access will do just fine. Our ISP advertises the fact that content can be downloaded FAST over their broadband service. If that service gets throttled, then what's the point of paying so much extra than basic dial up service costs? A computer that is only connected to the Internet when it owner is actively using it, is MUCH less likely to be infected with malware or become part of a botnet. If our ISP would throttle the speed for *any* traffic whatsoever, I'd just go back to dial up and confine my Internet activity to just those services you mentioned above. Dial up is plenty fast enough for email, finding out my bank balance and an occasional Google search..
......The bandwidth savings would be in effect all the time.......
Yes, and if they filter too many bits, there won't be enough bits left that most people will want to pay for and the ISP will go bankrupt. Is the bill for a high speed connection worth it if all that can be gotten over it is a few web pages and lots of spam? What's the point of paying for a relatively expensive high speed connection if most of the content can be also be gotten over a dirt cheap dial up line?
ISPs should not concern themselves about what's inside the packets, any more than the post office reads the messages inside envelopes. They get paid to help get the messages, whatever they may be, from point A to point B and nothing more.
....In a perfect world, ISP would be content unaware......
Is that not how it used to be in the days we only had the plain old telephones? The phone company was a common carrier who just made sure the electronic waves got from call source to destination? The phone companies were immune to legal challenge over whatever content went over their wires. Someone plotting a crime on the phone did not concern them at all. Why is this principle not applied to the bits that travel over todays wires and fibers? Why should the ISP's police what anybody sends over their wires, by looking what's inside the packets, anymore than the postal service looks inside mail envelopes to see if there are illegal messages or pictures therein? The technical solution would be to force or at least strongly encourage everybody to use secure encryption (security envelopes).
.....If an OS tells an average user they're secure..........
How about if almost all articles everywhere, tell people that malware exploit xxxxx works only on computers running Windows? Would users not eventually conclude from that to make their next computer one that runs something OTHER than Windows? Maybe that is why Mac and Linux users rightly feel pretty secure. Has anyone here ever read an article in a reputable computer rag reporting the actual infection of millions, thousands or even hundreds of computers that were NOT running Windows?
Oh of course, someone will invariably bring up the stupid old "market share" or installed base argument. OK then, get a Linux or Mac system and stop floating down the river like so many dead fish and swim upstream and get away from all the scavengers. You WILL be more secure in your computing life.
I tell Windows users that asks me for advice on their next computer: If you have little money and lots of time to learn, get Linux. It will run well on your present hardware If you have more money and little time, get a new Mac. Either way your computer is much more secure than staying with Windows.
....can your grandmother take the DVD you bought her for Christmas throw it in her iMac and hit a button or two to transfer it to her iPod?........
Such software exists, but isn't legal in the same way that alcohol was not legal when prohibition was in effect. Just as people still got their drinks then, so they can get their content onto their iPods or whatever. It's just that going to the local moonshine seller was a little more trouble than going to the corner tavern or liquor store. Internet sites in other countries and torrents are the digital equivalents of the moonshine sellers and "speakeasy" joints in a dark alley.
....and actually transcoding it into something mobile-friendly MPEG-4/H.264 (similar to ripping a CD to MP3) literally takes hours......
Indeed it does, but that isn't all THAT terrible. There is software available that will unscramble and recode a DVD, the DMCA notwithstanding. Just set the computer up in the evening and by morning the job is done, while you sleep.
The DMCA is the prohibition of the 21st century. Just like in the 1920s, people could get their booze, so today, people can get their entertainment on whatever devices and formats they want. When enough of the population clamored for the end of prohibition, it was ended. So too it will eventually be with the digital prohibition. Meanwhile, you will just have to go to the digital equivalent of a "speakeasy" somewhere out in the dark alleys of the internet and get the digital "stuff" you desire.
Digital prohibition is even more futile than forbidding alcohol, even drugs and guns. It is impossible to keep people from getting what they REALLY want. Rather than buying useless laws from politicians, content providers should use that cash to develop ways to provide their goods in a convenient, economical manner for their customers. Meanwhile it is making a lot of money for the "pirates". This money could be going to the legitimate producers if these had even half a brain.
....."if Apple doesn't want people fucking with the hardware they sell, then they should stop selling it to people.".....
You can do *anything* you want with your Apple phone. Run it over with a truck, throw it off a 12 story building, or install some hack to use it as it was not intended. Apple couldn't care less. Just don't ask them to honor the warranty or support it if you do any of the above. The hacked phones may work fine, as long as you don't ask Apple to maintain or improve it by downloading their updates.
....The complaint involves U.S. patent 5,572,576.......
I looked up that patent and the claims they make. It sounds pretty much like a device I first used, attached to my SE/30 Mac in 1989. I still have this gadget and the Color Classic Mac I last used it with. The little box and its included software, enabled the Mac to receive voice, send/receive faxes and data and recorded these on the HD. Callers could be identified by name and calls could be listened to randomly from the on screen list. The little gadget also came with a microphone for recording various messages to be played back to the caller, depending who it was, time, day of the week etc. I could also call the Mac from any phone and after entering a PIN, listen to the messages. The main reason we switched to phone company provided voice mail is that it also answers when the phone is in use.
.....What the company is claiming is a method of linking several voice messages to certain caller identities.......
That is exactly what my SE/30 Mac did in 1989. It used a plug in modem type device together with some software to record voice calls and display caller info on the screen. It also sent and received faxes and data. It was smart enough to differentiate automatically between voice calls, faxes and data.
......They had a working "visual voicemail" application at the time......
I had a visual voice mail on our SE/30 Mac in 1989. It was called DoveFax+ and it did faxes and voice mail. The callers were listed on the screen and could be randomly listened to. The system could also respond to various touch tones and give the caller specific recorded messages to these. It could also give specified recorded messages based on time, dates and days of the week. Callers could route calls to various voice mail boxes and we could listen to these remotely from any telephone. The system also could send and receive faxes.
So maybe Apple could show that that their computers could do this sort of thing quite a while ago, with the help of a third party interface between the phone and the computer.
....narcotics are powerful drugs that don't belong in the hands of the general population.........
What drugs are "legal" and what are not is pretty much arbitrary. Is marijuana really worse that tobacco or alcohol? Is it not also a natural derived substance? It's different, sure, but would it really matter if it were treated the same as these two legal drugs? They even made a constitutional amendment some time ago, to get rid of alcohol. All it succeeded doing was a dramatic increase in crime statistics.
Isn't the vast majority of the prison population is there because of the illegal possession of something or other or because of dealing with illegal substances or objects? Would it not be better to declare the ABUSE of things illegal and determine WHY someone gets drunk or uses crack? Maybe then, the underlying cause could be eliminated or at least mitigated.
One problem is that the medical profession is good at "treatments", but not much interested in prevention and cures. If you cure somebody, there is no further income, but of you "treat" someone's symptoms, that brings a recurring income to those that dispense the treatments. Those that deal with computer sicknesses are no different. They would not profit any more once they had "cured" spam, viruses, spyware etc., but can make ongoing income, year-in-yearout by just treating the symptoms.
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....they are actually providing me with the courtesy of not destroying my container to access the contents........
Your analogy breaks down, because with a properly encrypted computer they cannot open the container, no matter what. If they could, they would take your computer, just like the safe, and brute force it open. You KNOW they can open your safe, so you might as well give them the combination. Also they and you both know that they cannot open the encrypted files, so you don't give them the key. So now they will try to get around the Constitution in some way. In the UK they can put you in prison for not giving them the key, but in the US, that inconvenient document called the Constitution still stands in the way, at least for now.
....But in getting that "key to the safe" i.......
The key itself may be a physical object, but the information as to where that key is hidden is only in the defendant's brain. Why should he be forced to divulge THAT particular information as to the secret hiding place and not be forced to provide the information out of his brain of the secret pass code? Why is a difference made in secrets? Are some secrets more secret that others? It seems to me that all secrets are protected if the release thereof would incriminate the possessor of the secret.
....A physical key that opens a physical object (safe, lockbox, closet, etc.).......
What if the information as to the whereabouts of the physical key is only in the mind of the defendant? Does that now also qualify alternative #3 for protection? It seems to me that a securely encrypted computer file is equivalent to a safe that cannot be opened even with all the resources of the government applied. No such physical safe exists, but it seems that at present, a properly encrypted computer is equivalent to such an uncrackable safe, even to the government.
There is nothing that all governments hate more that the loss of power. In the case of an encrypted file, even the most powerful government is powerless. That is really at the center of this matter. The framers of the constitution did NOT want or government to have godlike powers over individuals.
.....To become effective, the proposed amendment must then be "ratified" or approved by the legislatures of three-fourths of the states........
In todays political climate, is it likely or even possible that 75% of politicians can agree on anything? Probably not.
Who cares about limestone? We are NOT burning limestone are we? Limestone will stay where it is for the next million years or so.
...... The problem is that we have a lot of hard-to-move infrastructure.......
Don't you think in two or three centuries all that stuff will be worn out or hopelessly obsolete? What infrastructure from 1707 are we still dependent on? How about in other parts of the world?
Maybe we better work at not blowing ourselves off the planet with WMDs or exterminating all living things by some fancy military biological means. Keeping and bringing freedom, health and dignity NOW to large segments of humanity might a better way to expend our efforts, rather than worrying about what might happen to the climate centuries or even millennia from today. If we don't solve of the much more pressing problems facing the human race TODAY, the hot or cold of the climate, centuries, or even decades from now, won't matter one bit.
.......ruin the lives of a hundred million people or two......
The process of warming is very slow, compared to human civilizations. Even the worst case global warming models take centuries at least. Warming is also far from uniform. The coldest places will and have been experiencing the most warming. The already warm areas have changed barely and will not change all that much. Most of the northern polar ice is already displacing water, thus not raising the seas even a millimeter if it ALL melts. The ice on land that melts will raise the oceans some. How much is unknown, because it is unknown how much of the land ice will melt.
Even if ALL the land ice melts, the possible loss of a bit of coastal land is greatly offset by the vast areas of land unproductive and uninhabitable now, becoming useful then, because it is just to darn cold there right now. In addition, as the whole atmosphere warms it can hold a tremendous quantity of water in suspension. The huge amounts of water that dumps when warm, tropical air dumps, as from a hurricane is powerful evidence of this. This effect may be enough to more than offset the melting ice. There is evidence that the continental shelves were once dry. Where did all that extra water originate? Did it precipitate out of a formerly MUCH warmer, more humid atmosphere? Would a warm, humid atmosphere result in rainfall, even in areas now desert?
You see, the scenario of the warming alarmists may be grossly overstated or even dead wrong. There are other possibilities and scenarios as well.
.....Sure, if we start planting gardens on our roofs, driveways, and airports.....
One look at a globe would tell you that the earth's climate and weather as a whole is determined by the oceans, not the land mass. In the same way, it is the plant life in the oceans that is removing most of the CO2 from the air.
...Because warmer conditions promote desertification.....
Not necessarily, it depends on a number of other factors. A warming ocean makes for more evaporation. That extra water has to come back down SOMEWHERE. Where that might be is hard to predict. The Sahara, as well as the Arabian desert used to be a fruitful and well watered. How else could there be such great quantities of fossil fuels under now desert places of the earth? Even human records show that the Sahara was one fruitful land.
We are talking about fossil fuels, not lime stone. Don't obfuscate the topic. Being polite and not insulting might increase you credibility.
......our climate has been pretty stable for about ten thousand years......
That isn't really true. There have been rather large, much larger temperature swings in recorded human history, than anything we have observed since we began using fossil fuels stored within the earth from long ago. Greenland was not always a mass of ice, even in human history. That's why it is still called GREENland, a land of forests, similar to the eastern USA. There is very strong evidence of that, not only from human records, but also from present day research. There is also evidence that most of the parts of the oceans we call the continental shelves were once habitable land. Where did all that extra water come from, even though some of it is now locked up as ice on land?
The climate back when the fossil fuels were formed was conducive to all life forms back then. There were more species of all kinds of plants and animals alive back then, than we have today. Even before modern fossil fuel use came along, species were going extinct every day. Life was FAR more prolific all over the ENTIRE planet, than it is today. How did all that oil get underneath the now desert landscape of Arabia and other deserts? Could it be that those places once teemed with abundant life?
As the earth warms, it is not a given that the now hot places will become that much hotter. If fact even measurements today show that most of the warming is taking place in the up to now cold places. The tropical sea and atmosphere temperature increases are barely measurable. In 2006 warming alarmists have blamed monster hurricanes on global warming. In 2007, with just as much warming or more, there were few such monster storms.
To restore the earth to former conditions or warmth would not be an unmitigated catastrophe because it would happen slowly, at most, over many centuries. Few, if any civilizations have lasted that long. What arrogance makes us, the present one, think we will be any different? Life, including human life is incredibly adaptable. If our descendants 500 years from now are able to grow Oranges in Manitoba, I don't think they would mind.
.... fossil fuels are so fabulous because you only need to expend the energy necessary to go dig them up to be able to use them.......
The US has enough coal to last for centuries. Where did all that carbon in coal come from originally? We call coal, oil and natural gas "fossil fuels" because they were produced by living things, mostly plants. These plants needed sunshine and therefore were on the surface of the earth using up the carbon in the atmosphere. These living things were then buried, leaving the earth with much less carbon in the air. Without the activity of man, the a balance between carbon production and carbon removal was reached long ago.
Now if we liberate this carbon from the past, the plants will grow better because they have more CO2 to use. Also, plants grow better in warmer conditions. At some point there should be a new equilibrium where the amount of carbon the plants remove equals the amount we put back by burning them and/or their ancestors. This would likely happens long before we have liberated all of the carbon now stored underground. All that carbon used to be in the air, making the globe warmer than it is today. So global warming might not be such a cataclysmic thing it is made out to be. As the earth gets warmer, less energy is needed for heating. Solar absorption panels can be used for cooling. Global warming could even be beneficial in the long term!
.... that argument truly respects the difficulties in transporting "base loads"..........
Transporting large amounts of electricity long distances is lossy and therefore expensive. It is also difficult to build huge power lines because of NIMBY from a large number of property owners. There are places where it is cheaper to build certain kinds of power plants, but getting that power to the population centers where it it most needed is expensive to construct. Nuclear power stations can be built much closer to the places where the power is needed.
......Is that too much to ask for? Can it be that hard to do?.....
I have heard that these kinds of gadgets are available in lots of places. They are called laptop or notebook computers. There are cheap versions of these, not much more expensive than this Kindle toy.
......So, Kindle was a miss for me......
Any kind of electronic "book" that doesn't allow the lending, selling or giving thereof to friend, relative or used book store, they way it is possible to do with a real book, is a show stopper out the gate. Any DRM that is supposed to prevent copying, will also prevent these ordinary things that are done every day with a normal, old fashioned printed book. This is especially true if the electronic book costs more than the cheapest paperback available.
.....Presumably, for a certain subsection of the population internet access is a basic requirement - email, web-browsing, instant-messenger, online-banking, etc..........
For all those activities, the vastly cheaper dial up access will do just fine. Our ISP advertises the fact that content can be downloaded FAST over their broadband service. If that service gets throttled, then what's the point of paying so much extra than basic dial up service costs? A computer that is only connected to the Internet when it owner is actively using it, is MUCH less likely to be infected with malware or become part of a botnet. If our ISP would throttle the speed for *any* traffic whatsoever, I'd just go back to dial up and confine my Internet activity to just those services you mentioned above. Dial up is plenty fast enough for email, finding out my bank balance and an occasional Google search..
......The bandwidth savings would be in effect all the time.......
Yes, and if they filter too many bits, there won't be enough bits left that most people will want to pay for and the ISP will go bankrupt. Is the bill for a high speed connection worth it if all that can be gotten over it is a few web pages and lots of spam? What's the point of paying for a relatively expensive high speed connection if most of the content can be also be gotten over a dirt cheap dial up line?
ISPs should not concern themselves about what's inside the packets, any more than the post office reads the messages inside envelopes. They get paid to help get the messages, whatever they may be, from point A to point B and nothing more.
....In a perfect world, ISP would be content unaware......
Is that not how it used to be in the days we only had the plain old telephones? The phone company was a common carrier who just made sure the electronic waves got from call source to destination? The phone companies were immune to legal challenge over whatever content went over their wires. Someone plotting a crime on the phone did not concern them at all. Why is this principle not applied to the bits that travel over todays wires and fibers? Why should the ISP's police what anybody sends over their wires, by looking what's inside the packets, anymore than the postal service looks inside mail envelopes to see if there are illegal messages or pictures therein? The technical solution would be to force or at least strongly encourage everybody to use secure encryption (security envelopes).
.....If an OS tells an average user they're secure..........
How about if almost all articles everywhere, tell people that malware exploit xxxxx works only on computers running Windows? Would users not eventually conclude from that to make their next computer one that runs something OTHER than Windows? Maybe that is why Mac and Linux users rightly feel pretty secure. Has anyone here ever read an article in a reputable computer rag reporting the actual infection of millions, thousands or even hundreds of computers that were NOT running Windows?
Oh of course, someone will invariably bring up the stupid old "market share" or installed base argument. OK then, get a Linux or Mac system and stop floating down the river like so many dead fish and swim upstream and get away from all the scavengers. You WILL be more secure in your computing life.
I tell Windows users that asks me for advice on their next computer: If you have little money and lots of time to learn, get Linux. It will run well on your present hardware If you have more money and little time, get a new Mac. Either way your computer is much more secure than staying with Windows.
....can your grandmother take the DVD you bought her for Christmas throw it in her iMac and hit a button or two to transfer it to her iPod?........
Such software exists, but isn't legal in the same way that alcohol was not legal when prohibition was in effect. Just as people still got their drinks then, so they can get their content onto their iPods or whatever. It's just that going to the local moonshine seller was a little more trouble than going to the corner tavern or liquor store. Internet sites in other countries and torrents are the digital equivalents of the moonshine sellers and "speakeasy" joints in a dark alley.
....and actually transcoding it into something mobile-friendly MPEG-4/H.264 (similar to ripping a CD to MP3) literally takes hours......
Indeed it does, but that isn't all THAT terrible. There is software available that will unscramble and recode a DVD, the DMCA notwithstanding. Just set the computer up in the evening and by morning the job is done, while you sleep.
The DMCA is the prohibition of the 21st century. Just like in the 1920s, people could get their booze, so today, people can get their entertainment on whatever devices and formats they want. When enough of the population clamored for the end of prohibition, it was ended. So too it will eventually be with the digital prohibition. Meanwhile, you will just have to go to the digital equivalent of a "speakeasy" somewhere out in the dark alleys of the internet and get the digital "stuff" you desire.
Digital prohibition is even more futile than forbidding alcohol, even drugs and guns. It is impossible to keep people from getting what they REALLY want. Rather than buying useless laws from politicians, content providers should use that cash to develop ways to provide their goods in a convenient, economical manner for their customers. Meanwhile it is making a lot of money for the "pirates". This money could be going to the legitimate producers if these had even half a brain.
....."if Apple doesn't want people fucking with the hardware they sell, then they should stop selling it to people.".....
You can do *anything* you want with your Apple phone. Run it over with a truck, throw it off a 12 story building, or install some hack to use it as it was not intended. Apple couldn't care less. Just don't ask them to honor the warranty or support it if you do any of the above. The hacked phones may work fine, as long as you don't ask Apple to maintain or improve it by downloading their updates.
....The complaint involves U.S. patent 5,572,576.......
I looked up that patent and the claims they make. It sounds pretty much like a device I first used, attached to my SE/30 Mac in 1989. I still have this gadget and the Color Classic Mac I last used it with. The little box and its included software, enabled the Mac to receive voice, send/receive faxes and data and recorded these on the HD. Callers could be identified by name and calls could be listened to randomly from the on screen list. The little gadget also came with a microphone for recording various messages to be played back to the caller, depending who it was, time, day of the week etc. I could also call the Mac from any phone and after entering a PIN, listen to the messages. The main reason we switched to phone company provided voice mail is that it also answers when the phone is in use.
.....What the company is claiming is a method of linking several voice messages to certain caller identities.......
That is exactly what my SE/30 Mac did in 1989. It used a plug in modem type device together with some software to record voice calls and display caller info on the screen. It also sent and received faxes and data. It was smart enough to differentiate automatically between voice calls, faxes and data.
......They had a working "visual voicemail" application at the time......
I had a visual voice mail on our SE/30 Mac in 1989. It was called DoveFax+ and it did faxes and voice mail. The callers were listed on the screen and could be randomly listened to. The system could also respond to various touch tones and give the caller specific recorded messages to these. It could also give specified recorded messages based on time, dates and days of the week. Callers could route calls to various voice mail boxes and we could listen to these remotely from any telephone. The system also could send and receive faxes.
So maybe Apple could show that that their computers could do this sort of thing quite a while ago, with the help of a third party interface between the phone and the computer.
....narcotics are powerful drugs that don't belong in the hands of the general population .........
What drugs are "legal" and what are not is pretty much arbitrary. Is marijuana really worse that tobacco or alcohol? Is it not also a natural derived substance? It's different, sure, but would it really matter if it were treated the same as these two legal drugs? They even made a constitutional amendment some time ago, to get rid of alcohol. All it succeeded doing was a dramatic increase in crime statistics.
Isn't the vast majority of the prison population is there because of the illegal possession of something or other or because of dealing with illegal substances or objects? Would it not be better to declare the ABUSE of things illegal and determine WHY someone gets drunk or uses crack? Maybe then, the underlying cause could be eliminated or at least mitigated.
One problem is that the medical profession is good at "treatments", but not much interested in prevention and cures. If you cure somebody, there is no further income, but of you "treat" someone's symptoms, that brings a recurring income to those that dispense the treatments. Those that deal with computer sicknesses are no different. They would not profit any more once they had "cured" spam, viruses, spyware etc., but can make ongoing income, year-in-yearout by just treating the symptoms.