That is not a property the death penalty. The jury didn't really write, "We sentence you and the state to endure a lengthy and expensive legal process, followed by possible death." Someone else tacked on most of that.
That is a property of independent laws, and maybe those laws are for the best, but they could just as easily be repealed, or more broadly applied to other forms of punishment.
If you were sentenced to life in prison, why should you be denied lawyers and appeals?
You may have some excellent arguments against death penalty (I can think of some great ones) but this isn't one. The high expenses involved with this form of punishment are merely an indictment of the legal system (or perhaps praise for our extravagant wealth which allows us that luxury), not the chosen punishment itself.
Even Stalin could do it cheaply, and he was one of those damned inefficient communists!;-)
My that line of reasoning, imprisonment is wrong too. Pretty much the only form of punishment which might not be immoral, would be fines, since interest was invented as a way of formally "undoing" past transfers of money. But even that requires some faith that interest (and some arbitrary rate) correctly models the equivalent of retroactively un-transferring money.
It's guaranteed to probably get closer to the answer you want in the opinion of some optimization hacker. It does that nebulous thing, which may or may not help, every time.
If you're not happy with that way of looking at algorithms, then I bet you don't think simulated annealing, soundex, minimax, whatever-Google-search-engine-does, or a host of other classical partial-solutions are algorithms either. Now that I think of it, that's all the "fun stuff," though I realize we're all into different things. I bet you're a "math guy.";-)
Why are we [allowing] MORE PEOPLE that will take jobs away from US CITIZENS???
FTFY.
The answer: because this is America, and freedom is more important than whatever it is that the Central Committee is telling today, you about their economic plan.
If you don't like American ideals, then go back to Cuba or North Korea. I don't know why you ever applied for your green card at all.
So when you recruit the best and brightest the world has to offer, the technologies and companies these people found will make the economy stronger, and that will increase the number and quality of jobs
You free-market conservatives make a strong case for growth economies, but my mommy and daddy said that if I do as you say and start voting against the Republicans, baby Jesus will cry.
Tell us, Apple: what does the ideal bookshelf or phone or calendar look like, so that I can most quickly recognize it? What's the physical real-world object that my brain should immediately recognize? What's the best metaphor?
Prior to the sale, you say the answer to that question was your product! When I want to read a book, my eyes should be searching the room for an iPad.
But once you get my money, you say it's something else, and I shouldn't think of an iPad when I want to read a book. I'm so confused.
;-)
If you take this argument to its conclusion then all the icons on Apple products, should be pictures of Apple products. Click on the picture of an iPad to read a book. OTOH, click on the picture of an iPhone, to initiate interactive voice communication with another person. Click on the picture of an iPod, to listen to music. Click on the picture of faces within the frame of a Macintosh screen to launch a Finder window.
That would actually be quite a hilarious prank. If anyone wants to steal this idea for their malware, you have my consent.
So, Intel's tie-up with Google â" which also makes the Android system â" is widely seen as its most significant effort to crack the market to date.
Uhhhh.. except Intel has also been announcing processors that they're saying (if you can believe it, which I don't) won't work with Android. IF you believe Intel, then this phone is a dead end and will have no market which provides binary-compatible software.
The release of this phone is analogous to an MPAA member releasing a movie. If anyone buys it, they promise (in advance! they're telling you now) they will punish the customer by doing everything they can, to frustrate them.
No, only the ones you've heard of. For every religion which was a commercial success, I bet there are a hundred which died out, penniless. If religions were always profitable, then everyone would form their own religion. I would be a pope and so would you.
Blocking it worldwide would be doing humanity a favour.
No, giving it a bad review would be doing humanity a favor. Blocking it (or perhaps, as what happened in this case, abstaining from hosting it (Google did not block it)), is a way of implicitly giving it a titillating review (as opposed to bad one), as per the Streisand Effect which you mentioned.
The worst you think it is, then the more blocking it is the opposite of going humanity a favor.
Wanna know some shitty content which is both disrespected and ignored by humanity, and ignored all the more, the less it is blocked? Spam. If you want to do humanity a favor, help humanity see this movie as Spam.
You haven't even read a review of the product yet. Furthermore, you're about to get it and then be able to review it yourself.
There are many tradeoffs in mobile personal computer tech, mostly pitting battery life versus countless considerations, with the most debatable being screen resolution and GPU, but also including CPU. The result is that any particular phone model is very likely to not happen to match your own personal preferences. i.e. there probably does exist the perfect phone for you, but if you you pick one at random (and since you chose a not-yet-reviewed model, it really sounds like that's exactly what you did), the chance that phone is going to be the phone you want, are pretty small.
What I'm getting at, is the odds heavily favor that you're not going to like your unreviewed phone, even if it turns out to be outstanding quality. Every phone is aimed at a very specific niche, each of which happens to include only a few people. Five years ago there wasn't as much smartphone variety, so even if a particular phone wasn't aimed at you, it might have been the closest match you could get, to what you wanted. In 2012 that is never the case, except by random chance.
Wait for your phone and then play with it first, because there's a 98% chance you're going to resell it and get something else. i.e. There's a 98% chance that whatever you spend on insurance or extended warranty, will end up being wasted. IF by some miracle you're one of the 2% of the people whose battery/screen/GPU/locked-vs-free/OS/CPU combination taste this particular phone happens to be optimized for, then start worrying about whether insurance makes sense or not, and if so, which insurance company to use.
Whether a tech site (Slashdot) is the best place to ask questions about who has the best insurance policies, is hard to say. But I guess it doesn't hurt. You're just asking way too early, is all. IMHO the parts that make this stuff up are getting so commoditized and cheap (even for mobiles), that it doesn't make sense to insure this kind of thing anymore. As a general rule, within two or three years you will have spent as much on insurance as it takes to replace the device with something quite a bit better. i.e. $200 (total cost; no subsidies) in late 2014 is going to get you an awesome phone compared to which, the very best 2012 stuff is junk.
Now let's say you put DRM in your video game, and 50% of the people who would have bought your game don't. Now you only make $30,000. But you set up a spy on bittorrent, and you record 30 addreses downloading your game, DRM free. You get a subpoena for those addresses and send settlement letters to those people for $3400. Let's say 30% of those people settle without a fight, netting you $60,000.
Agreed.
Let's say you sell a video game for $60. You don't put any DRM in it and 1000 people buy it. You make $60,000
No, I say it's $90,000. In this case, you can also get a subpoena for 30 addresses and send settlement letters, with about 30% of the people paying $3400 each.
That's what I meant by the suing division of the company not having to interfere with sales.
Nobody is going to bother to try to track down the users. Technically, though, those users really would be violating the patent every time they scroll, and there's no other party to indemnify them. Theoretically, should one of them ever anger a Power, the power could point them out to Apple and get sued.
I honestly believe Apple would not follow through, though: the PR hit would be too damaging. Even Apple's evil has practical limits. Threatening users is for companies that have no other business plan (e.g. SCO), and Apple makes serious money in legitimate (if distasteful) sales.
But why settle for $3000 when they can get $3030? The DRM still cost them a sale, no matter how you slice it. The suing-people-for-profit part of the business has no reason to interfere with the traditional sales part. Something still doesn't add up.
Fine, why don't you talk about Amazon or Google then - they have the same licensing limitations as Apple.
I would be happy to. You can help. Let's do this.
As I mentioned, I buy CDs, and I never license music. Over the last 15-16 years, I've bought hundreds of them from Amazon, and not a single one of them required I agree to a license before they would mail it, and not a single one of those CDs magically breaks whenever I hand it to someone else. I think you are either mistaken about Amazon licensing, or that's some weird "let the customer fuck himself" option that I've never bothered to explore. (I must regrettably admit: I tend to be a selfish bastard, and rarely go out of my way to cause harm to myself in order to increase someone else's profits.) If you did, PLEASE DO share your Amazon licensing story.
I haven't even heard of a single person ever getting music from Google, but I'll take your word that that offer music under some kind of license, somewhere. Tell your story.
Bruce Willis used iTunes and got screwed. We're hearing his story.
So:
Apple: We know it's a bad idea to use Apple. If someone "bought"(licensed) music from them in 2008 we can chalk it up to inexperience and ignorance, but if someone does it today or later, it's time to blame the victim because the "secret"(?) of Apple is out. No one is compelled to opt into this crap. The next time you want some music, Just Say No to Apple, and you won't have the Apple problem. I think this company's case is solved.
Amazon: I dispute that it's a bad idea to use Amazon. (I bought some CDs from them as recently as April 2012 and the CDs work great. Anyone have a more recent report?) But I think your gossip that an Amazon customer could screw themselves as bad as an Apple customer, has a ring of truth to it, even if I haven't actually witnessed it. Anyone have any stories to tell?
Google: this is a big mystery but there's at least some gossip (from you) that they might be as bad as Apple. That, also, is believable, if unwitnessed.
Sound like an accurate summary so far? Can anyone fill in the gaps?
I totally agree with the idea that he should just go ahead and do it, but
Most decent load balancers support hardware-SSL these days.
That's gotta at least increase the wattage. Nothing is ever really free though in 2012 you'd think crypto would be dirt cheap. If your 20 year old computer can do it...
Apart from adding copy protection to them - how soon we forget (when we want to blame Apple).
You're right, I forgot. You don't need to want to blame Apple, though. All it takes are some facts:
Literally less than 0.1% of my CDs have so-called "copy protection."
The copy protection required Windows in order to make the CD malfunction. If you didn't run Windows, you could read the CDs normally because you didn't have a way to install the malware.
Even if you ran Windows, you had to install some extra malware in order to enable the disability. If you didn't run the malware, the CDs read normally. (To be fair to you, though, Windows came out-of-the-box with a hilarious behavior where it would automatically load and install that malware without the user needing to remember to do it.)
It happened nearly a decade ago, infected a tiny subset of the CDs sold at that time, and ended as quickly as it began. Good luck finding one of these CDs, except in used CD stores.
Wait, did I say "used CD stores?" Oh right! The supposedly-broken CDs were still re-sellable! Even if you enabled the disability so that you ended up with something resembling DRM (on that one computer), it still didn't interfere with transferring ownership of the CD to anyone else. If you wanted to sell the CD, or die and let an heir take it, the CD was still there to be handed to another person. Whomever the CD was handed to, would be able to use the CD normally unless they went out of their way to enable the problems.
But yeah, other than all the facts, owning CDs has all the same problems as licensing music from iTunes, so therefore a person could only see them as different, if they want to blame Apple.
Do you really own a car if it's illegal for you to remove the catalytic converter, or if it's illegal for you to fraudulently alter the odometer? Do you own your body if you're not allowed to smoke pot or walk around in public while nude? Do you own a bottle of Lysol which bears a label saying "It is a violation of federal law to use this product in a manner inconsistent with its labeling."?
Do you own anything at all?
We have to define ownership in some kind of way that, even if it offends our sense of justice, somehow retains some sort of meaning in a society which loves to create laws.
If you take too idealistic of an approach to ownership, you may end up being "right" yet also purely theoretical, since by your standard, here in the real world no person will ever own anything.
So yes, I say I own a CD even if there are laws that say I'm not allowed to sell copies of it, or if there are laws that I'm not allowed to break it and stab someone else in the neck with the shards. I can even own a Blu-Ray disc even if there are laws saying I'm not allowed to play it on my computer using Free Software.
Don't mistake me: I'm furious about some of these laws. Laws can be unfair and senseless and even counter-productive to their ostensible purpose (DMCA being a shining example). But if we let the fact that stupid laws exist, to taint our idea of ownership, then we're merely going to lose the concept of ownership -- we're not going to create justice or get rid of stupid laws.
My main point within all this context, though, is that at least it is law that we're talking about. And even unfair laws can have a (sort of) consistency and levelling effect, they're well-known, have been picked apart and exposed, and they're common to a shitload of people (Apple's marketshare is insignificant compared to the size of this base) who know what they are or think they know what they are. So when I say I own a CD, you have this one (albeit immense and complicated-by-case-law and possibly even evil) set of rules, so that we all know what rights a person who owns a CD has, and does not have. You don't have to go look up any terms in some specific contract, because there's just this one big canonical version, copyright law. You have some sense of copyright law and people have been talking about it for centuries, and even the radical transformations that happened to it in the last two decades, are glacial compared to this week's iTunes contract changes.
That's ownership, or as close to ownership as we can ever have.
Licensing is a whole different thing. When you say that you've licensed something from the iTunes store, since I've never read that contract, I have no clue what your rights are. Neither does Congress or their aids or lobbyists, since they didn't write it. And since that contract is a relatively new thing compared to the world you've grown up in, you probably don't have any sense of it, either. And it was never publicly debated, even in a corrupted sense. All the case law that you might be familiar with, all the subtleties of copyright, first sale doctrine, etc -- all that knowledge is irrelevant! Because you overrode the law, threw away the rights you have, and the limitations imposed upon you, that would exist under copyright law. Instead, you went with a contract. You customized.
It's like you rolled your own cipher instead of using AES. Your cipher may be better than AES, but you know what Schneier would say. More importantly, it simply isn't AES, so all the lore you've gathered about AES and your experience with that cipher, are inapplicable.
That's what Bruce Willis did. He acquired music through licensing, throwing away literally hundreds of years of precedent, custom, even folklore and false prejudices. If you're happy with that, because you think you're happier licensing from Apple rather than buying copies, ok. Be happy, like the g
Take that CD and play it through a PA system to a crowd at a beach and you have violated your license and may be subject to civil action. [other examples]
I will have violated copyright law, not a license. Congress, not the band or their label, wrote that I'm not allowed to do what you describe, and it's the copyright holder who gets to amend that by saying that I may do it after all. That's where licenses come in.
I own the copy of the music. Then government imposed a bunch of restrictions on what I'm allowed to do with the thing I own. Just like how they get touchy if I propel bullets which I own toward other people. My state government has all kinds of rules for what I'm allowed to do with a car that I own, involving everything from how fast I drive it and where, to what kind of fuel I put into it (!) and how much pollution I'm allowed to blow out of it into the atmospheric commons. None of these restrictions imply that I don't own the bullets or the car, though. I can own bullets, a car, and a music CD, because for all 3 of those things, I didn't agree to anything at the time I obtained it.
But an iTunes file.. there's some kind of weird contract I have to agree to before I get that file. It is very different from cars or CDs or bullets.
All of these examples relate to the fact that you do not have a license for public performance of any of the music or movies that you buy.
Exactly. I don't have a license. Congress says I'm not allowed to do those things with a copy of music/movie (even if I own that copy) unless I get the copyright holder's permission. I can get a license, which I currently do not have, to do those things. Should I decide to do that, then I may cease owning my CD. (though actually that won't happen; AFAIK performance licensing contracts haven't gotten that nasty, yet. But they theoretically could.)
The key difference between licensing and ownership, is what controls what you're allowed to do with this thing that you.. uh.. have.;-) If a contract controls it, then your ownership is murky or even non-existent. If the law controls it, then you may very well own it, but happen to own it within an authoritarian society (of at least some varying degree).
iTunes customers use Apple contracts.
CD buyers use Congress' statutes.
Congress is a bunch of evil motherfuckers whom I don't trust, but this is Apple we're comparing them to, so I happen to have an easy time deciding between iTunes and CDs.
Let's say the heirs who are sitting on their asses, are, instead of collecting copyright royalties, are collecting interest on an investment their granddaddy made 50 years ago. Or let's say they're living in a house that granddaddy bought 50 years ago. Or let's say they live on a reservation that the Feds agreed the Sioux would be allowed to self-govern.
Is it fair for them to get this free thing, even thought they're doing nothing for it?
If you have the balls to say NO, and that government policy should be set to deny them these kinds of assets to people who haven't merited them, then I'll say you're a badass consistent motherfucker.
But if you're going to make some kind of weird exception for copyright alone, where granddaddy's decision to publish and get a 50^H^H70^H^H90 year copyright can be retroactively changed, then you need to think harder about what's fair.
No wonder I have ZERO sympathy as you sit in your gold-lined palaces at Sony Records or Warner records or whereeever the hell you work.
You don't know WTF you're talking about; I don't work at a place like that. Like anyone else, I sometimes have to make decisions about the future which involve weighing one thing against another. If government passes a law that something will be a certain way for 50 years (e.g. my heirs will own a house, or for that matter, that any contract law will be upheld at all) then either give me what's promised, or don't make the promise in the first place.
Right now, the policy that 99% of voters support, is that the government tells people they will have decades of monopoly. If you want to make it 14 years or want it to automatically expire at death for works published tomorrow or later then that's cool and what I mean when I said your idea was fair. But that's not what you told JRRT his estate would get, when he was planning and deciding to publish. Get it? That's all I'm saying: Don't break your word. If JRRT's son or grandson gets something you think is unfair, suck it up, because your ancestors decided to give JRRT an unfair deal. Maybe you should dig them out of their graves and ask them why they did that.
Just like the unfair things they may have given you, if you ever inherited anything you didn't personally work for. Changing policies for the future is just fine, but doing things retroactively is lame.
But yeah, changing JRRT's copyrights back to the duration that they were when he published, is just fine. 50 years, not 90, is what he was promised. But it is too late to offer JRRT a 14 year copyright or a copyright that expires the day after he dies. He can't hear your new offer.
I said when an author like JRR Tolkien dies, his heirs should no longer get paid, because the kids are not the ones who did the work. Only the original laborer should receive money. ..
The other slashdotter said the Author's kids should be paid.
You've actually got two different things going on there: how copyright should be, and how it was. Your position is fine and fair, as a basis for a new copyright law. But as soon as you name a specific real person (JRR Tolkien) who has already created the works, I think there's a problem.
JRRT took advantage of the government's offer ("if you will agree to publish your works, then we will give you a 50 years monopoly") as stated, and a person may very well make plans based on that offer being honored. If the governent "breaks its word" to JRRT, can he un--publish what he previously published? He doesn't have any way of rejecting your new offer. It's even harder since he's dead, but even if he were alive, it would be a problem.
You might build or buy a house, or agree to a government's offer, in the hopes that you're creating an asset for your heirs to use. Whether you think the offer it right or ideal or best serves society or not, isn't as important as the fact that it was made, and accepted, and now there's a promise to be kept. Revoking JRRTs copyrights doesn't make any more sense than the 20-year copyright retroactive extension created in 1998.
I've found authors/artists often expect their work should continue receiving money for 110 years (almost six generations), but they want to terminate the customer's use of the work as soon as possible... It's an unfair and double standard.
It would be unfair, except in this particularly instance, the customer agreed to it. Their rights were not "terminated" ; they initially opted into an agreement that is vastly inferior to what copyright offers. Why they did this, when it's so easy to not do so, I can't say. But nobody twisted their arms and made them stupidly license music through the iTunes store. They could have rubbed a few brain cells together and bought a CD instead, and then they wouldn't be having any problem, because no artist has the capacity to terminate that customer's rights except by lobbying Congress. But they decided that buying a copy of a work and owning that copy forever, was not appealing. Who are you, to tell them they don't have the right to be stupid?
Bruce Willis made his bed, let him lay in it. I think the guy can probably afford to go buy CDs if this is really important to him. He should be handing Apple's ass to them in the court of information and public opinion, not in the court of law.
Don't "buy" things in the iTunes store. Don't buy anything associated with iOS at all. It's easier to avoid this trap than it is to fall into it. But if you do fall into it, tell everyone you regret your mistake and will think harder about how you throw around your money, in the future. That's how we'll all get ahead, long-term.
The problem here is that Willis has purchased songs digitally (probably a lot of them) and now in his mind this is equivalent to him buying vinyl records and compact discs
No. You seem to understand the problem at some level, but you are presenting it very sloppily and inaccurately.
The problem is that he didn't purchase at all. Whether it was digital or not, is completely irrelevant.
The public thinks they are purchasing the same thing they did when they bought a CD but now it's digital
CDs are digital too. When you inaccurately present the difference as "digital" then you miss what is really happening: lack of a sale. "Digital" is not the word you're looking for; "buy" is.
Buy physical media, extract it to your computer and then shelve it.
I agree, but only because non-physical media is not yet for sale, or only rarely. If they ever start selling (as opposed to licensing) files, that will be just as good (except for the lack of a "free backup included").
No, it's iTunes. When I buy music through means other than iTunes (CDs), some of those labels are RIAA members too, but they have done nothing to prevent me from transferring the CDs. Thus, it's an iTunes problem, not a publisher problem.
It sounds like the mistake Willis made, is that he's licensing music instead of buying it. I have never licensed any music and never will. I'll switch to piracy if they ever stop selling. The good news is that even as late as 2012, music is still for sale. They aren't telling paying customers to fuck off, yet.
But they do offer the "fuck yourself" option to foolish customers, and it looks like Willis took the bait. Avoid iTunes and similar services, buy music like you always have, and you'll avoid this problem.
You're assuming input comes from a browser using a page you made yourself... . If you aren't validating input in your server code, what is?
No he's not. If you do things right, then hostile input, honestly mistaken input, and perfectly valid input all get handled the same way. Instead of getting "validated," they get escaped for whatever context they're used within, as they get written to that context.
If you're building a string for use in a SQL statement, then the string gets escaped for SQL, regardless of whether you trust it or not. You just always do it (unless some other part of the system is guaranteed to be doing it for you, later than your own handling of the data). So it's ok if the data has a single-quote character, because you're always going to be sending that to the database as '' or \'. If you're outputting it to be part of a text node in HTML, then the string gets escaped for HTML text -- always, regardless of whether you trust it or not. So it's ok if it has a < character, because you're always going to send that to web browsers as <.
Validation would impose needless restrictions (you can't have a quotation mark or a less-than sign) that are going to turn out to be useless anyway. You won't ever think of all the characters that might break something else that the data some day gets used for. I currently maintain a system where there's a rule that some data can't contain "weird characters" (it actually tells that to people as they enter it) and it's a decade too late to fix that, so it merely validates the strings and there's a shitload of code that trusts that validation to have happened, and because of that, there's an upper bound to how diversely this data can ever be used. All because someone back in the mists of time thought that input validation was the answer, rather than output escaping.
OTOH, escaping at the last moment always fixes the problem, every time and in every context, whether we're talking about SQL, HTML, or something that hasn't been invented yet. Every format will always have some mechanism for escaping strings. Use it, as you're outputting to that format, not prematurely as you're storing the value somewhere. Do this, and you'll have no security problems related to data values, and there's nowhere your data can't go.
BTW, I'm not totally anti-validation. Sometimes the actual value of a string matters, although usually when it does, it means some other part of the system is mis-designed. (But we all sometimes have to maintain mis-designed systems.) An invalid input should usually be expressed as a failed lookup (e.g. since I'm trying to store the foreign key for a car manufacturer named "Ferd", rather than validate that "Ferd" is the name of manufacturer before I store that string) or a failed conversion (e.g. I wasn't able to translate 2012-08-32 into a Julian date) or something like that. If it's really raw text with no systemic meaning ("I L1ke ur b00bies in yer v1d30 and want to date u") then there's no reason it needs any sort of validation at all, regardless of whether a stupid human or a malicious robot wrote it. There is no conceivable Unicode character that you shouldn't allow in a string like that, no matter how it's going to be used, as long as you're escaping it for each context right as you use it.
Most of the time, though, validation should be semantic. It's not that you entered an invalid name for something, it's that you entered that your movie will be in theaters in 3012 or that your thing which turned out to be a book had a blank author (whereas it would have been ok for a teacup to lack an author), or something like that.
Slashdot Mirror
That is not a property the death penalty. The jury didn't really write, "We sentence you and the state to endure a lengthy and expensive legal process, followed by possible death." Someone else tacked on most of that.
That is a property of independent laws, and maybe those laws are for the best, but they could just as easily be repealed, or more broadly applied to other forms of punishment.
If you were sentenced to life in prison, why should you be denied lawyers and appeals?
You may have some excellent arguments against death penalty (I can think of some great ones) but this isn't one. The high expenses involved with this form of punishment are merely an indictment of the legal system (or perhaps praise for our extravagant wealth which allows us that luxury), not the chosen punishment itself.
Even Stalin could do it cheaply, and he was one of those damned inefficient communists! ;-)
My that line of reasoning, imprisonment is wrong too. Pretty much the only form of punishment which might not be immoral, would be fines, since interest was invented as a way of formally "undoing" past transfers of money. But even that requires some faith that interest (and some arbitrary rate) correctly models the equivalent of retroactively un-transferring money.
It's guaranteed to probably get closer to the answer you want in the opinion of some optimization hacker. It does that nebulous thing, which may or may not help, every time.
If you're not happy with that way of looking at algorithms, then I bet you don't think simulated annealing, soundex, minimax, whatever-Google-search-engine-does, or a host of other classical partial-solutions are algorithms either. Now that I think of it, that's all the "fun stuff," though I realize we're all into different things. I bet you're a "math guy." ;-)
FTFY.
The answer: because this is America, and freedom is more important than whatever it is that the Central Committee is telling today, you about their economic plan.
If you don't like American ideals, then go back to Cuba or North Korea. I don't know why you ever applied for your green card at all.
You free-market conservatives make a strong case for growth economies, but my mommy and daddy said that if I do as you say and start voting against the Republicans, baby Jesus will cry.
Tell us, Apple: what does the ideal bookshelf or phone or calendar look like, so that I can most quickly recognize it? What's the physical real-world object that my brain should immediately recognize? What's the best metaphor?
Prior to the sale, you say the answer to that question was your product! When I want to read a book, my eyes should be searching the room for an iPad.
But once you get my money, you say it's something else, and I shouldn't think of an iPad when I want to read a book. I'm so confused.
If you take this argument to its conclusion then all the icons on Apple products, should be pictures of Apple products. Click on the picture of an iPad to read a book. OTOH, click on the picture of an iPhone, to initiate interactive voice communication with another person. Click on the picture of an iPod, to listen to music. Click on the picture of faces within the frame of a Macintosh screen to launch a Finder window.
That would actually be quite a hilarious prank. If anyone wants to steal this idea for their malware, you have my consent.
Uhhhh.. except Intel has also been announcing processors that they're saying (if you can believe it, which I don't) won't work with Android. IF you believe Intel, then this phone is a dead end and will have no market which provides binary-compatible software.
The release of this phone is analogous to an MPAA member releasing a movie. If anyone buys it, they promise (in advance! they're telling you now) they will punish the customer by doing everything they can, to frustrate them.
"We assure you: your money will be wasted."
No, only the ones you've heard of. For every religion which was a commercial success, I bet there are a hundred which died out, penniless. If religions were always profitable, then everyone would form their own religion. I would be a pope and so would you.
That may be a reason for a tech company to give developers (particularly big-fingered ones) keyboardless smartphones.
"Here, have a difficult constraint. Figure out a way to make it work anyway."
No, giving it a bad review would be doing humanity a favor. Blocking it (or perhaps, as what happened in this case, abstaining from hosting it (Google did not block it)), is a way of implicitly giving it a titillating review (as opposed to bad one), as per the Streisand Effect which you mentioned.
The worst you think it is, then the more blocking it is the opposite of going humanity a favor.
Wanna know some shitty content which is both disrespected and ignored by humanity, and ignored all the more, the less it is blocked? Spam. If you want to do humanity a favor, help humanity see this movie as Spam.
You haven't even read a review of the product yet. Furthermore, you're about to get it and then be able to review it yourself.
There are many tradeoffs in mobile personal computer tech, mostly pitting battery life versus countless considerations, with the most debatable being screen resolution and GPU, but also including CPU. The result is that any particular phone model is very likely to not happen to match your own personal preferences. i.e. there probably does exist the perfect phone for you, but if you you pick one at random (and since you chose a not-yet-reviewed model, it really sounds like that's exactly what you did), the chance that phone is going to be the phone you want, are pretty small.
What I'm getting at, is the odds heavily favor that you're not going to like your unreviewed phone, even if it turns out to be outstanding quality. Every phone is aimed at a very specific niche, each of which happens to include only a few people. Five years ago there wasn't as much smartphone variety, so even if a particular phone wasn't aimed at you, it might have been the closest match you could get, to what you wanted. In 2012 that is never the case, except by random chance.
Wait for your phone and then play with it first, because there's a 98% chance you're going to resell it and get something else. i.e. There's a 98% chance that whatever you spend on insurance or extended warranty, will end up being wasted. IF by some miracle you're one of the 2% of the people whose battery/screen/GPU/locked-vs-free/OS/CPU combination taste this particular phone happens to be optimized for, then start worrying about whether insurance makes sense or not, and if so, which insurance company to use.
Whether a tech site (Slashdot) is the best place to ask questions about who has the best insurance policies, is hard to say. But I guess it doesn't hurt. You're just asking way too early, is all. IMHO the parts that make this stuff up are getting so commoditized and cheap (even for mobiles), that it doesn't make sense to insure this kind of thing anymore. As a general rule, within two or three years you will have spent as much on insurance as it takes to replace the device with something quite a bit better. i.e. $200 (total cost; no subsidies) in late 2014 is going to get you an awesome phone compared to which, the very best 2012 stuff is junk.
Agreed.
No, I say it's $90,000. In this case, you can also get a subpoena for 30 addresses and send settlement letters, with about 30% of the people paying $3400 each.
That's what I meant by the suing division of the company not having to interfere with sales.
Nobody is going to bother to try to track down the users. Technically, though, those users really would be violating the patent every time they scroll, and there's no other party to indemnify them. Theoretically, should one of them ever anger a Power, the power could point them out to Apple and get sued.
I honestly believe Apple would not follow through, though: the PR hit would be too damaging. Even Apple's evil has practical limits. Threatening users is for companies that have no other business plan (e.g. SCO), and Apple makes serious money in legitimate (if distasteful) sales.
But why settle for $3000 when they can get $3030? The DRM still cost them a sale, no matter how you slice it. The suing-people-for-profit part of the business has no reason to interfere with the traditional sales part. Something still doesn't add up.
I would be happy to. You can help. Let's do this.
As I mentioned, I buy CDs, and I never license music. Over the last 15-16 years, I've bought hundreds of them from Amazon, and not a single one of them required I agree to a license before they would mail it, and not a single one of those CDs magically breaks whenever I hand it to someone else. I think you are either mistaken about Amazon licensing, or that's some weird "let the customer fuck himself" option that I've never bothered to explore. (I must regrettably admit: I tend to be a selfish bastard, and rarely go out of my way to cause harm to myself in order to increase someone else's profits.) If you did, PLEASE DO share your Amazon licensing story.
I haven't even heard of a single person ever getting music from Google, but I'll take your word that that offer music under some kind of license, somewhere. Tell your story.
Bruce Willis used iTunes and got screwed. We're hearing his story.
So:
Sound like an accurate summary so far? Can anyone fill in the gaps?
That's gotta at least increase the wattage. Nothing is ever really free though in 2012 you'd think crypto would be dirt cheap. If your 20 year old computer can do it...
You're right, I forgot. You don't need to want to blame Apple, though. All it takes are some facts:
But yeah, other than all the facts, owning CDs has all the same problems as licensing music from iTunes, so therefore a person could only see them as different, if they want to blame Apple.
Do you really own a car if it's illegal for you to remove the catalytic converter, or if it's illegal for you to fraudulently alter the odometer? Do you own your body if you're not allowed to smoke pot or walk around in public while nude? Do you own a bottle of Lysol which bears a label saying "It is a violation of federal law to use this product in a manner inconsistent with its labeling."?
Do you own anything at all?
We have to define ownership in some kind of way that, even if it offends our sense of justice, somehow retains some sort of meaning in a society which loves to create laws.
If you take too idealistic of an approach to ownership, you may end up being "right" yet also purely theoretical, since by your standard, here in the real world no person will ever own anything.
So yes, I say I own a CD even if there are laws that say I'm not allowed to sell copies of it, or if there are laws that I'm not allowed to break it and stab someone else in the neck with the shards. I can even own a Blu-Ray disc even if there are laws saying I'm not allowed to play it on my computer using Free Software.
Don't mistake me: I'm furious about some of these laws. Laws can be unfair and senseless and even counter-productive to their ostensible purpose (DMCA being a shining example). But if we let the fact that stupid laws exist, to taint our idea of ownership, then we're merely going to lose the concept of ownership -- we're not going to create justice or get rid of stupid laws.
My main point within all this context, though, is that at least it is law that we're talking about. And even unfair laws can have a (sort of) consistency and levelling effect, they're well-known, have been picked apart and exposed, and they're common to a shitload of people (Apple's marketshare is insignificant compared to the size of this base) who know what they are or think they know what they are. So when I say I own a CD, you have this one (albeit immense and complicated-by-case-law and possibly even evil) set of rules, so that we all know what rights a person who owns a CD has, and does not have. You don't have to go look up any terms in some specific contract, because there's just this one big canonical version, copyright law. You have some sense of copyright law and people have been talking about it for centuries, and even the radical transformations that happened to it in the last two decades, are glacial compared to this week's iTunes contract changes.
That's ownership, or as close to ownership as we can ever have.
Licensing is a whole different thing. When you say that you've licensed something from the iTunes store, since I've never read that contract, I have no clue what your rights are. Neither does Congress or their aids or lobbyists, since they didn't write it. And since that contract is a relatively new thing compared to the world you've grown up in, you probably don't have any sense of it, either. And it was never publicly debated, even in a corrupted sense. All the case law that you might be familiar with, all the subtleties of copyright, first sale doctrine, etc -- all that knowledge is irrelevant! Because you overrode the law, threw away the rights you have, and the limitations imposed upon you, that would exist under copyright law. Instead, you went with a contract. You customized.
It's like you rolled your own cipher instead of using AES. Your cipher may be better than AES, but you know what Schneier would say. More importantly, it simply isn't AES, so all the lore you've gathered about AES and your experience with that cipher, are inapplicable.
That's what Bruce Willis did. He acquired music through licensing, throwing away literally hundreds of years of precedent, custom, even folklore and false prejudices. If you're happy with that, because you think you're happier licensing from Apple rather than buying copies, ok. Be happy, like the g
I will have violated copyright law, not a license. Congress, not the band or their label, wrote that I'm not allowed to do what you describe, and it's the copyright holder who gets to amend that by saying that I may do it after all. That's where licenses come in.
I own the copy of the music. Then government imposed a bunch of restrictions on what I'm allowed to do with the thing I own. Just like how they get touchy if I propel bullets which I own toward other people. My state government has all kinds of rules for what I'm allowed to do with a car that I own, involving everything from how fast I drive it and where, to what kind of fuel I put into it (!) and how much pollution I'm allowed to blow out of it into the atmospheric commons. None of these restrictions imply that I don't own the bullets or the car, though. I can own bullets, a car, and a music CD, because for all 3 of those things, I didn't agree to anything at the time I obtained it.
But an iTunes file .. there's some kind of weird contract I have to agree to before I get that file. It is very different from cars or CDs or bullets.
Exactly. I don't have a license. Congress says I'm not allowed to do those things with a copy of music/movie (even if I own that copy) unless I get the copyright holder's permission. I can get a license, which I currently do not have, to do those things. Should I decide to do that, then I may cease owning my CD. (though actually that won't happen; AFAIK performance licensing contracts haven't gotten that nasty, yet. But they theoretically could.)
The key difference between licensing and ownership, is what controls what you're allowed to do with this thing that you .. uh .. have. ;-) If a contract controls it, then your ownership is murky or even non-existent. If the law controls it, then you may very well own it, but happen to own it within an authoritarian society (of at least some varying degree).
iTunes customers use Apple contracts.
CD buyers use Congress' statutes.
Congress is a bunch of evil motherfuckers whom I don't trust, but this is Apple we're comparing them to, so I happen to have an easy time deciding between iTunes and CDs.
Let's say the heirs who are sitting on their asses, are, instead of collecting copyright royalties, are collecting interest on an investment their granddaddy made 50 years ago. Or let's say they're living in a house that granddaddy bought 50 years ago. Or let's say they live on a reservation that the Feds agreed the Sioux would be allowed to self-govern.
Is it fair for them to get this free thing, even thought they're doing nothing for it?
If you have the balls to say NO, and that government policy should be set to deny them these kinds of assets to people who haven't merited them, then I'll say you're a badass consistent motherfucker.
But if you're going to make some kind of weird exception for copyright alone, where granddaddy's decision to publish and get a 50^H^H70^H^H90 year copyright can be retroactively changed, then you need to think harder about what's fair.
You don't know WTF you're talking about; I don't work at a place like that. Like anyone else, I sometimes have to make decisions about the future which involve weighing one thing against another. If government passes a law that something will be a certain way for 50 years (e.g. my heirs will own a house, or for that matter, that any contract law will be upheld at all) then either give me what's promised, or don't make the promise in the first place.
Right now, the policy that 99% of voters support, is that the government tells people they will have decades of monopoly. If you want to make it 14 years or want it to automatically expire at death for works published tomorrow or later then that's cool and what I mean when I said your idea was fair. But that's not what you told JRRT his estate would get, when he was planning and deciding to publish. Get it? That's all I'm saying: Don't break your word. If JRRT's son or grandson gets something you think is unfair, suck it up, because your ancestors decided to give JRRT an unfair deal. Maybe you should dig them out of their graves and ask them why they did that.
Just like the unfair things they may have given you, if you ever inherited anything you didn't personally work for. Changing policies for the future is just fine, but doing things retroactively is lame.
But yeah, changing JRRT's copyrights back to the duration that they were when he published, is just fine. 50 years, not 90, is what he was promised. But it is too late to offer JRRT a 14 year copyright or a copyright that expires the day after he dies. He can't hear your new offer.
You've actually got two different things going on there: how copyright should be, and how it was. Your position is fine and fair, as a basis for a new copyright law. But as soon as you name a specific real person (JRR Tolkien) who has already created the works, I think there's a problem.
JRRT took advantage of the government's offer ("if you will agree to publish your works, then we will give you a 50 years monopoly") as stated, and a person may very well make plans based on that offer being honored. If the governent "breaks its word" to JRRT, can he un--publish what he previously published? He doesn't have any way of rejecting your new offer. It's even harder since he's dead, but even if he were alive, it would be a problem.
You might build or buy a house, or agree to a government's offer, in the hopes that you're creating an asset for your heirs to use. Whether you think the offer it right or ideal or best serves society or not, isn't as important as the fact that it was made, and accepted, and now there's a promise to be kept. Revoking JRRTs copyrights doesn't make any more sense than the 20-year copyright retroactive extension created in 1998.
It would be unfair, except in this particularly instance, the customer agreed to it. Their rights were not "terminated" ; they initially opted into an agreement that is vastly inferior to what copyright offers. Why they did this, when it's so easy to not do so, I can't say. But nobody twisted their arms and made them stupidly license music through the iTunes store. They could have rubbed a few brain cells together and bought a CD instead, and then they wouldn't be having any problem, because no artist has the capacity to terminate that customer's rights except by lobbying Congress. But they decided that buying a copy of a work and owning that copy forever, was not appealing. Who are you, to tell them they don't have the right to be stupid?
Bruce Willis made his bed, let him lay in it. I think the guy can probably afford to go buy CDs if this is really important to him. He should be handing Apple's ass to them in the court of information and public opinion, not in the court of law.
Don't "buy" things in the iTunes store. Don't buy anything associated with iOS at all. It's easier to avoid this trap than it is to fall into it. But if you do fall into it, tell everyone you regret your mistake and will think harder about how you throw around your money, in the future. That's how we'll all get ahead, long-term.
No. You seem to understand the problem at some level, but you are presenting it very sloppily and inaccurately.
The problem is that he didn't purchase at all. Whether it was digital or not, is completely irrelevant.
CDs are digital too. When you inaccurately present the difference as "digital" then you miss what is really happening: lack of a sale. "Digital" is not the word you're looking for; "buy" is.
I agree, but only because non-physical media is not yet for sale, or only rarely. If they ever start selling (as opposed to licensing) files, that will be just as good (except for the lack of a "free backup included").
No, it's iTunes. When I buy music through means other than iTunes (CDs), some of those labels are RIAA members too, but they have done nothing to prevent me from transferring the CDs. Thus, it's an iTunes problem, not a publisher problem.
It sounds like the mistake Willis made, is that he's licensing music instead of buying it. I have never licensed any music and never will. I'll switch to piracy if they ever stop selling. The good news is that even as late as 2012, music is still for sale. They aren't telling paying customers to fuck off, yet.
But they do offer the "fuck yourself" option to foolish customers, and it looks like Willis took the bait. Avoid iTunes and similar services, buy music like you always have, and you'll avoid this problem.
No he's not. If you do things right, then hostile input, honestly mistaken input, and perfectly valid input all get handled the same way. Instead of getting "validated," they get escaped for whatever context they're used within, as they get written to that context.
If you're building a string for use in a SQL statement, then the string gets escaped for SQL, regardless of whether you trust it or not. You just always do it (unless some other part of the system is guaranteed to be doing it for you, later than your own handling of the data). So it's ok if the data has a single-quote character, because you're always going to be sending that to the database as '' or \'. If you're outputting it to be part of a text node in HTML, then the string gets escaped for HTML text -- always, regardless of whether you trust it or not. So it's ok if it has a < character, because you're always going to send that to web browsers as <.
Validation would impose needless restrictions (you can't have a quotation mark or a less-than sign) that are going to turn out to be useless anyway. You won't ever think of all the characters that might break something else that the data some day gets used for. I currently maintain a system where there's a rule that some data can't contain "weird characters" (it actually tells that to people as they enter it) and it's a decade too late to fix that, so it merely validates the strings and there's a shitload of code that trusts that validation to have happened, and because of that, there's an upper bound to how diversely this data can ever be used. All because someone back in the mists of time thought that input validation was the answer, rather than output escaping.
OTOH, escaping at the last moment always fixes the problem, every time and in every context, whether we're talking about SQL, HTML, or something that hasn't been invented yet. Every format will always have some mechanism for escaping strings. Use it, as you're outputting to that format, not prematurely as you're storing the value somewhere. Do this, and you'll have no security problems related to data values, and there's nowhere your data can't go.
BTW, I'm not totally anti-validation. Sometimes the actual value of a string matters, although usually when it does, it means some other part of the system is mis-designed. (But we all sometimes have to maintain mis-designed systems.) An invalid input should usually be expressed as a failed lookup (e.g. since I'm trying to store the foreign key for a car manufacturer named "Ferd", rather than validate that "Ferd" is the name of manufacturer before I store that string) or a failed conversion (e.g. I wasn't able to translate 2012-08-32 into a Julian date) or something like that. If it's really raw text with no systemic meaning ("I L1ke ur b00bies in yer v1d30 and want to date u") then there's no reason it needs any sort of validation at all, regardless of whether a stupid human or a malicious robot wrote it. There is no conceivable Unicode character that you shouldn't allow in a string like that, no matter how it's going to be used, as long as you're escaping it for each context right as you use it.
Most of the time, though, validation should be semantic. It's not that you entered an invalid name for something, it's that you entered that your movie will be in theaters in 3012 or that your thing which turned out to be a book had a blank author (whereas it would have been ok for a teacup to lack an author), or something like that.
Either nothing, or nothing significant, or something-but-it-fixed-a-bug-which-was-definitely-there.