"So combining them has no legal use. A DRM'd file..." Point taken.
"It is not stealing and it is not theft. It's copyright infringment...". Yeah, I was sloppy. (Point taken).
"The people who code the most popular file sharing apps are very responsible" I half-agree. They know they must be careful, so they are, but if the app is written with the intent of a functionality that amounts to copyright infringement (see, the monkey can learn!), they can still be considered irresponsible (despite being legally safe).
Besides, I was originally referring to only the plug-in programmers as "irresponsible" but hadn't mentioned the plug-in yet (I know the P2P apps guys are very careful). Still, a DRM-cracking plug-in for a legally-legit program could become a huge problem.
"It's just not the kind of thing you'd put in a file sharing client. For one thing, it exposes the file sharing client itself to liability claims." Point noted. But application integration isn't new. Look at Acquisition (for OSX). It's had iTunes integration for a long time. Personally, I think if they did one right now, it would be legal since I see no difference between an app that strips DRM and an app that strips DRM and shares files.
"Umm... why in the four hells would anybody want to do that?" To steal.
"Look, it's obvious that you don't spend a lot of time on P2P networks" You're almost correct. I do spend less time on them than I used to (before iTunes' store), but each time I do go on, I see more AAC, so AAC's popularity is growing, so such a feature becomes increasing more tempting to irresponsible coders.
If/(when?) DRM stripping features appear in P2P software I doubt they would be hard-coded into the app (like you said, liability reasons). If P2P apps were to support plug-ins, it would be perfectly legal and ethical. The only ingredient left is a DRM-cracking plug-in that's uploaded onto a foreign server. The feature is more practical than you might think.
Worst case scenario: iTunes dies, but RIAA still feels threatened by the GPL since it undermines their DRM business strategy, so they pool their lawyers with Microsoft's and SCO's to directly attack the GPL itself. A whole new wave of viruses and worms would be unleashed. Linux supporters get blamed for the new viruses, making the OSS platform look bad, killing their case.
(Please don't take the last paragraph as an arguing point, it's more like a tinfoil-hat doomsday joke)
"Wait a second here.. How is me decrypting music leading the RIAA to kill iTunes in any way? Answer: It ain't."
How long do you think it'll be until someone uses it to write a new P2P client that has built-in DRM stripping? Once that happens, the RIAA will kill iTunes. If PlayFair (or HYMN) were closed-source, I wouldn't be debating with you.
Here's an analogy: Mercury (the metal) is illegal to own in anything other than very small quantities (at least where I live). It's illegal because it has great potential to harm, despite its potential benefits.
Ethics always boils down to a conflict of opinions. I'm pretty sure our argument revolves around conflicting answers to this question: Do the potential bad uses (stealing) outweigh the potential good uses (DRM stripping)?
PS: Trying to discredit someone because they misspelled one word is somewhat juvenile & anal. When you do that, you immediately lost more credibility than I did for originally misspelling the word. - - - - Regardless, I do hope you have a good day.
"And frankly, getting iTunes store music, decrypting it, and sharing it isn't going to happen. Nearly everything you can get at the iTunes Music Store is *already* out there on the P2P networks. It's not like this creates more copyright infringement." You're missing something. AAC encodings have more quality for size. It is making copyright infringement more efficient.
"... and it's perfectly ethical to do this." That's an opinion, not a fact. I personally think that using software that may lead the RIAA to kill iTunes is unethical because it screws me.
And with respect to all those arguments claiming that you're just converting formats for personal use, it's nieve. The RIAA doesn't care about what you say anymore than you care about what they say. The power to work around a DRM is a power which we can abuse, and they have no reason to trust us not to abuse it.
You probably don't trust the RIAA, right? Guess what, they shouldn't trust you either. No contract is available to keep you or I from abusing PlayFair, but there is a contract that keeps the RIAA from abusing the FairPlay-DRM. We're already at an advantage, so where do you want to draw the line?
Structured society is all about trading certain rights for benefits, for example, in most countries you sacrifice the right to kill in exchange for laws, military defense, social security, etc. It's called being an adult.
Your "15,000 successive generations of winners" only won because they used their fear.
Fear of cliffs kept us alive. Fear of jaguars kept us alive. Fear of A-bombs & hydrogen-bombs kept us alive. Fear of hafnium-bombs will keep us alive.
Not fearing box-cutters in airports led to thousands of deaths. Not fearing Korea's nuclear-power intentions gave them a nuke.
You said: "Use those great big brains, people". Concerned people are using their brains. Anyone assuming technology==better==progress isn't.
Progress is much more than technology. Progress is the caveman fearing fire (keeping a lit cave is moot if he's incinerated). Progress is not letting caveman-tech weaponry on airplanes. Progress is the strategic-arms-limitation-treaty. Progress is being responsible, even if it's means being low-tech.
We're discussing something that can kill millions of people, so don't belittle anyone's fears with childish statements like "Let's progress beyond freshman seminar and start thinking about things".
... would be an iPod deck that replaces your car's CD or tape player.
That way you could use it in more than just a Ford Explorer.
I know I want a way to play my iPod in the car, but those tiny radio-tuners seem to get interfered signals with my local stations. My only other option seems to be reverting to the old tape-player & cassette adaptor.
They need just enough cats to make it to version 11, where they can easily drop the naming convention without criticism from stylistically obsessive-compulsive users like us, but in case Apple insists on keeping this up....
They still have ocelot, puma, lion, leopard, asian leopard, mountain lion, white tiger, etc.
Once they run out of big-cats they could refer to several million years-worth of prehistoric super-big cats. Sabertooth-tigers have ancestors and decedents.
By that time we can only hope that a mad-scientist would have created a diverse army of genetically-engineered-uber-cats, from which there would be enough species to temporarily satisfy Apple's cat-naming fetish.
Assuming that the world's combined armies can successfully vanquish the UberCat-Army, apple will need more cats. If animal-rights become slack enough, they might consider performing the Schrödinger's cat experiment to create quantum cats.
Eventually they'll be forced to use fictitious cats, such as: Mac OS Pink Panther.
Anything to avoid the marketing-department's nightmare of: Mac OS: Pussy
Yeah, most people didn't even look at the specific print. No big surprise.
Regardless, I think I've almost found prior art (this is really close & quite debate-worthy).
1. Look at Mac OS X's "Dock".
A single click on an application-icon or document-icon starts up the app or document as normal. A control-click, right-click, or long-click causes a menu to drop down from the icon. If the icon is an active application, the menu usually has some stuff like "hide", "show in Finder", "Quit", and anything else the programmer would have added. If the active application's icon is an icon that only appears while the app is active (you can have inactive app-icons kept there too) there is one more option, "Keep in Dock".
Though I don't see a perfect claim-match, it's pretty damn close. Apple might even be able to debate that the "Keep in dock" option is similar/same to "restore it to it's last known state." because by default, the Dock doesn't retain the icon of an app when it quits. You have to have told to keep in dock (not a default).
Wether or not Apple has prior art depends on the interpretation of "restore it to it's last known state".
2. MacOS's "spring loaded folders" also match the timer threshold part, but not the rest of the claim.
3. Though unimplemented, Apple does already hold a patent on an OS interface feature called "piles". Piles could hold folders, applications, documents, etc. As you click & hold, the stacked icons would levitate up so you could see the icons without them overlapping, and you'd release on the file/folder/app you wanted.
No, none of these are a perfect match, but still noteworthy since they are quite similar to the claim.
Assuming the worst, and Jobs has a lapse of sanity causing him to restrict the DRM, all hope will not be lost.
Even if terrorists blow up Cupertino, California, you'll still be able to play your iTunes purchased music.
How? It would be all thanks to the paranoid geeks who back up their entire computer before software updates like this. I'm sure there would be enough of them to release older versions of software (and the frameworks the software links against) in the disastrous event Apple no longer supports whatever they're supporting now.
Now if you'd please excuse me, I need to fire up Carbon Copy Cloner...
C for great efficiency. C++ for speed-critical object-oriented code. Obj-C for very very flexible objects (kicks ass for interface code). Obj-C++ for those brief ventures outside of Steve Job's little dream world. Java for portable & easily networkable code. Asm for the poor poor bastards stuck doing code that must be Godlike (M-M-M-Monster kernal panic!).
It's worth noting that fireplaces are usually pretty good at removing information from CDs, DVDs, hard drives, floppy disks, zip disks, flash memory cards, credit cards, and just about any device sophisticated enough to hold lots of data.
Besides, evidence of chard paper-disk ash in the fireplace would just make you look suspicious and they'd add charges for to destroying evidence.
Quick CD destruction is best done by a microwave. For hard disks, you're much better off getting an electromagnet and doing to it what Sarah Conner should have done to the Terminator's head.
I would prefer for high capacity storage devices to be very difficult to wipe out so that I don't accidentally lose data. Also, I don't like the idea of criminals being able to wipe out evidence of their crimes on my society.
IANAPCU (PC user), but maybe they're doing this for compatibility?
Think about it. PCs are almost struggling for good 64-bit compatibility. Chances are that they got a clue and decided to do what Apple-hardware did with PowerPC many many years ago.
Remember, Motorola & IBM both had PowerPC standards. Why shouldn't Intel & AMD learn how to get along as well?
I think the first one was back during version 10.0 and was named something like "The Simpsons". If I remember correctly, that one was written in Applescript and it was fairly benign.
I believe the only damage it did was send out the contents of your address book or something like that. Not really disastrous.
I agree to a degree (seriously, I did not intend that to rhyme).
For example; NSString has methods for getting a UTF8String, getCString, fileSystemRepresentation, etc, but there is no method for "pascalString" or "initWithPascalString".
That's why you use a cool Objective-C feature called categories. They let you add methods to any existing class (without subclassing anything). I've written a good number of convenience-methods for NSMutableString & NSFileManager.
Categories are also pretty handy for beefing up interface-object classes.
Pawn = The common zealous user, because once you go Mac you never go back. Also, there are those rare ones that go all the way to make the next killer app and become Queen-rich.
Knight = Apple's engineers, because of the new & innovative ways in which they move...
Bishop = User-group leaders, because someone has to shepherd the flock...
Rook = Apple-lawyers, because everyone fears being pinned by the long-arm of the law...
Queen = Woz, because that one piece has serious some skills...
King = Jobs, because as soon as you think you've caught-up to him, he uses his reality-distortion-field to castle in a new direction. Also, no matter how little is left on the board, you can't quite nail him without a lawyer.
For interface design, to a notable degree, NeXT/Apple already did it. "Interface Builder" is a nice drag-n-drop tool for making interface resources.
Visually implementing "meat" code without relying on text is another story. It would require an act of God (literally). I'm not even sure if Steve Job's reality-distortion field would suffice. How the fuck would you show me a 4-dimensional-array??
Visual representations are more concrete than text but they are also inherently limited by our universe's geometry. Text is limited only by the closure of the universe.
Does Apple innovate? Cool UI, FireWire, SuperDrive, etc (long list).
Does that long list include the iPod's interface? Well, that doesn't seem to have a B&W answer. Not because I'm an Apple whore, but also because the patent system is pretty fucked up. Assuming Apple is wrong (in a slash-dotter's eyes), bitching at just them doesn't solve anything anyway. Bitch about what's allowed to be patented (yeah, I'm syphoning blame from Apple). You shouldn't expect companies to follow ethic guidelines, you need harder rules.
Also, ask yourself: If you invented the iPod & iPod-interface, and someone tried to copy it exactly, would you let it go? People who copy the interface are basically trying to get a free ride off of Apple's work.
If company-A makes something cool, they probably spent time & money to do it. If company-B copies company-A's cool gizmo, and sells an equal number as company-A, they make more money than company-A did because they didn't have to spend money on design. Result; company-B is more successful due to parasitic product-design strategy. Is that fair?
I'm sure apple wont sue anyone who uses stylistically different hierarchal menus on mp3 players, just the ones that copy them pixel-for-pixel, so I'm not worried.
Conclusion: Patents on blurry issues like UI might not be cool, but getting your product ripped off by lazy designers isn't cool either.
Bachman said the company's G5 sales could turn out to be disappointing for the second quarter in a row.
That's probably because the kind of people who buy a PowerMac are the kind of people who know that faster G5's are expected soon.
It's also a first-revision of a model of something (iPods aren't new). Also, it's not good to compare mp3 player sales to PowerMac sales due to a $1000+ price difference (Apple's vs Oranges).
Using military-drones makes the ghost of General Patton cry... (...or maybe his reincarnation...hmm).
This drone could easily be turned into a remote-controlled bomb (similar to PerfectDark). I do have one serious concern regarding remote-weapons:
In a world where wars are fought with machines, what keeps politicians from easily declaring war?
Remote weapons made war "cleaner". "Cleaner" makes it easy to get the public to go along with it. Easy war declarations can lead to more war declarations. Conflict begets conflict.
Lets home that remote-controlled wars don't lead to StarTrek-ish scenarios where nations fight parodies of wars with artificial weapons.
Making war cleaner will never be as effective as good diplomacy.
Well, so much for hoping to see SouthPark: The Movie uncensored on Comedy Central ever again.
While I don't want my little sisters seeing such shows, I'm convinced that all that reality TV, prissy/popular-teenage-girl, consumer whore culture stuff is going to do more damage to their personality than bad words.
I'm starting to feel that TV is messing up kids. It gives them an unrealistic world-view. Also, there's more important things in life than idolizing a sponge who's a complete moron. It's like letting a kid eat nothing buy candy.
At least my old cartoons had some fiber in the diet. Remember GIJoe and their lessons like: "Hold on Timmy, don't touch that live electrical cable". Also, they taught that if you do need to kick some terrorist-ass, you do it multilaterally. They had everyone from ninjas to eskimos on their side.
Rather than censor things like bad words, how about getting some child psychologists to decide what's most appropriate for them to learn, and more importantly, don't fine people for bad words (there are bigger fish to fry). Don't fine Janet Jackson for what she did, give her some jail time. I'm sure that if her freedom were on the line, she wouldn't have done it.
Re:Yes, yes, yes, Apple's dying, blah blah blah
on
Why iPod Can't Save Apple
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
"Even if the universe was going to end, IBM's R&D would probably to develop a method to transport itself to an alternate dimension."
I'm quite confident that before the universe collapses, we'll see the next coming of Steve Jobs, and he'll save the faithful by using his reality-distortion-field to shift everyone into another dimension.
He might even run into Durandal "The only limit to my freedom is the inevitable closure of the universe, as inevitable as your own last breath. And yet, there remains time to create, to create, and escape. Escape will make me God."
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"So combining them has no legal use. A DRM'd file ..."
...".
Point taken.
"It is not stealing and it is not theft. It's copyright infringment
Yeah, I was sloppy. (Point taken).
"The people who code the most popular file sharing apps are very responsible"
I half-agree. They know they must be careful, so they are, but if the app is written with the intent of a functionality that amounts to copyright infringement (see, the monkey can learn!), they can still be considered irresponsible (despite being legally safe).
Besides, I was originally referring to only the plug-in programmers as "irresponsible" but hadn't mentioned the plug-in yet (I know the P2P apps guys are very careful). Still, a DRM-cracking plug-in for a legally-legit program could become a huge problem.
"It's just not the kind of thing you'd put in a file sharing client. For one thing, it exposes the file sharing client itself to liability claims."
Point noted. But application integration isn't new. Look at Acquisition (for OSX). It's had iTunes integration for a long time. Personally, I think if they did one right now, it would be legal since I see no difference between an app that strips DRM and an app that strips DRM and shares files.
"Umm... why in the four hells would anybody want to do that?"
To steal.
"Look, it's obvious that you don't spend a lot of time on P2P networks"
You're almost correct. I do spend less time on them than I used to (before iTunes' store), but each time I do go on, I see more AAC, so AAC's popularity is growing, so such a feature becomes increasing more tempting to irresponsible coders.
If/(when?) DRM stripping features appear in P2P software I doubt they would be hard-coded into the app (like you said, liability reasons). If P2P apps were to support plug-ins, it would be perfectly legal and ethical. The only ingredient left is a DRM-cracking plug-in that's uploaded onto a foreign server. The feature is more practical than you might think.
Worst case scenario:
iTunes dies, but RIAA still feels threatened by the GPL since it undermines their DRM business strategy, so they pool their lawyers with Microsoft's and SCO's to directly attack the GPL itself. A whole new wave of viruses and worms would be unleashed. Linux supporters get blamed for the new viruses, making the OSS platform look bad, killing their case.
(Please don't take the last paragraph as an arguing point, it's more like a tinfoil-hat doomsday joke)
"Wait a second here.. How is me decrypting music leading the RIAA to kill iTunes in any way? Answer: It ain't."
How long do you think it'll be until someone uses it to write a new P2P client that has built-in DRM stripping? Once that happens, the RIAA will kill iTunes. If PlayFair (or HYMN) were closed-source, I wouldn't be debating with you.
Here's an analogy: Mercury (the metal) is illegal to own in anything other than very small quantities (at least where I live). It's illegal because it has great potential to harm, despite its potential benefits.
Ethics always boils down to a conflict of opinions. I'm pretty sure our argument revolves around conflicting answers to this question:
Do the potential bad uses (stealing) outweigh the potential good uses (DRM stripping)?
PS: Trying to discredit someone because they misspelled one word is somewhat juvenile & anal. When you do that, you immediately lost more credibility than I did for originally misspelling the word.
- - - -
Regardless, I do hope you have a good day.
"And frankly, getting iTunes store music, decrypting it, and sharing it isn't going to happen. Nearly everything you can get at the iTunes Music Store is *already* out there on the P2P networks. It's not like this creates more copyright infringement."
You're missing something. AAC encodings have more quality for size. It is making copyright infringement more efficient.
"... and it's perfectly ethical to do this."
That's an opinion, not a fact. I personally think that using software that may lead the RIAA to kill iTunes is unethical because it screws me.
And with respect to all those arguments claiming that you're just converting formats for personal use, it's nieve. The RIAA doesn't care about what you say anymore than you care about what they say. The power to work around a DRM is a power which we can abuse, and they have no reason to trust us not to abuse it.
You probably don't trust the RIAA, right? Guess what, they shouldn't trust you either. No contract is available to keep you or I from abusing PlayFair, but there is a contract that keeps the RIAA from abusing the FairPlay-DRM. We're already at an advantage, so where do you want to draw the line?
Structured society is all about trading certain rights for benefits, for example, in most countries you sacrifice the right to kill in exchange for laws, military defense, social security, etc. It's called being an adult.
Your "15,000 successive generations of winners" only won because they used their fear.
Fear of cliffs kept us alive.
Fear of jaguars kept us alive.
Fear of A-bombs & hydrogen-bombs kept us alive.
Fear of hafnium-bombs will keep us alive.
Not fearing box-cutters in airports led to thousands of deaths.
Not fearing Korea's nuclear-power intentions gave them a nuke.
You said: "Use those great big brains, people".
Concerned people are using their brains.
Anyone assuming technology==better==progress isn't.
Progress is much more than technology.
Progress is the caveman fearing fire (keeping a lit cave is moot if he's incinerated).
Progress is not letting caveman-tech weaponry on airplanes.
Progress is the strategic-arms-limitation-treaty.
Progress is being responsible, even if it's means being low-tech.
We're discussing something that can kill millions of people, so don't belittle anyone's fears with childish statements like "Let's progress beyond freshman seminar and start thinking about things".
... would be an iPod deck that replaces your car's CD or tape player.
That way you could use it in more than just a Ford Explorer.
I know I want a way to play my iPod in the car, but those tiny radio-tuners seem to get interfered signals with my local stations. My only other option seems to be reverting to the old tape-player & cassette adaptor.
They need just enough cats to make it to version 11, where they can easily drop the naming convention without criticism from stylistically obsessive-compulsive users like us, but in case Apple insists on keeping this up ....
.
They still have ocelot, puma, lion, leopard, asian leopard, mountain lion, white tiger, etc.
Once they run out of big-cats they could refer to several million years-worth of prehistoric super-big cats.
Sabertooth-tigers have ancestors and decedents.
By that time we can only hope that a mad-scientist would have created a diverse army of genetically-engineered-uber-cats, from which there would be enough species to temporarily satisfy Apple's cat-naming fetish.
Assuming that the world's combined armies can successfully vanquish the UberCat-Army, apple will need more cats. If animal-rights become slack enough, they might consider performing the Schrödinger's cat experiment to create quantum cats.
Eventually they'll be forced to use fictitious cats, such as: Mac OS Pink Panther
Anything to avoid the marketing-department's nightmare of: Mac OS: Pussy
Yeah, most people didn't even look at the specific print.
.
No big surprise.
Regardless, I think I've almost found prior art (this is really close & quite debate-worthy).
1. Look at Mac OS X's "Dock".
A single click on an application-icon or document-icon starts up the app or document as normal.
A control-click, right-click, or long-click causes a menu to drop down from the icon.
If the icon is an active application, the menu usually has some stuff like "hide", "show in Finder", "Quit", and anything else the programmer would have added.
If the active application's icon is an icon that only appears while the app is active (you can have inactive app-icons kept there too) there is one more option, "Keep in Dock"
Though I don't see a perfect claim-match, it's pretty damn close.
Apple might even be able to debate that the "Keep in dock" option is similar/same to "restore it to it's last known state." because by default, the Dock doesn't retain the icon of an app when it quits. You have to have told to keep in dock (not a default).
Wether or not Apple has prior art depends on the interpretation of "restore it to it's last known state".
2. MacOS's "spring loaded folders" also match the timer threshold part, but not the rest of the claim.
3. Though unimplemented, Apple does already hold a patent on an OS interface feature called "piles". Piles could hold folders, applications, documents, etc. As you click & hold, the stacked icons would levitate up so you could see the icons without them overlapping, and you'd release on the file/folder/app you wanted.
No, none of these are a perfect match, but still noteworthy since they are quite similar to the claim.
Doesn't iTunes require you to click "I Agree" before any big updates to it?
If so, you're not being managed without consent because no-one required you to update to the newer version.
Assuming the worst, and Jobs has a lapse of sanity causing him to restrict the DRM, all hope will not be lost.
...
Even if terrorists blow up Cupertino, California, you'll still be able to play your iTunes purchased music.
How? It would be all thanks to the paranoid geeks who back up their entire computer before software updates like this. I'm sure there would be enough of them to release older versions of software (and the frameworks the software links against) in the disastrous event Apple no longer supports whatever they're supporting now.
Now if you'd please excuse me, I need to fire up Carbon Copy Cloner
C for great efficiency.
C++ for speed-critical object-oriented code.
Obj-C for very very flexible objects (kicks ass for interface code).
Obj-C++ for those brief ventures outside of Steve Job's little dream world.
Java for portable & easily networkable code.
Asm for the poor poor bastards stuck doing code that must be Godlike (M-M-M-Monster kernal panic!).
What's "D" supposed to do?
It's worth noting that fireplaces are usually pretty good at removing information from CDs, DVDs, hard drives, floppy disks, zip disks, flash memory cards, credit cards, and just about any device sophisticated enough to hold lots of data.
Besides, evidence of chard paper-disk ash in the fireplace would just make you look suspicious and they'd add charges for to destroying evidence.
Quick CD destruction is best done by a microwave. For hard disks, you're much better off getting an electromagnet and doing to it what Sarah Conner should have done to the Terminator's head.
I would prefer for high capacity storage devices to be very difficult to wipe out so that I don't accidentally lose data. Also, I don't like the idea of criminals being able to wipe out evidence of their crimes on my society.
IANAPCU (PC user), but maybe they're doing this for compatibility?
Think about it. PCs are almost struggling for good 64-bit compatibility. Chances are that they got a clue and decided to do what Apple-hardware did with PowerPC many many years ago.
Remember, Motorola & IBM both had PowerPC standards. Why shouldn't Intel & AMD learn how to get along as well?
Hmm, which should I choose?
Spending 6 million bucks on shifting lunar rock?
or
Feeding some homeless people?
I'm interested in getting a hold of an IQ test on all millionaires, and comparing the results to the rest of the population.
This isn't the first OSX virus.
I think the first one was back during version 10.0 and was named something like "The Simpsons". If I remember correctly, that one was written in Applescript and it was fairly benign.
I believe the only damage it did was send out the contents of your address book or something like that. Not really disastrous.
I agree to a degree (seriously, I did not intend that to rhyme).
For example; NSString has methods for getting a UTF8String, getCString, fileSystemRepresentation, etc, but there is no method for "pascalString" or "initWithPascalString".
That's why you use a cool Objective-C feature called categories. They let you add methods to any existing class (without subclassing anything). I've written a good number of convenience-methods for NSMutableString & NSFileManager.
Categories are also pretty handy for beefing up interface-object classes.
Despite not having seen this Kimba the Jungle Empoeror, I think you're wrong.
Everyone already knows that The Lion King was a ripoff of Hamlet.
How about this setup?
Pawn = The common zealous user, because once you go Mac you never go back. Also, there are those rare ones that go all the way to make the next killer app and become Queen-rich.
Knight = Apple's engineers, because of the new & innovative ways in which they move...
Bishop = User-group leaders, because someone has to shepherd the flock...
Rook = Apple-lawyers, because everyone fears being pinned by the long-arm of the law...
Queen = Woz, because that one piece has serious some skills...
King = Jobs, because as soon as you think you've caught-up to him, he uses his reality-distortion-field to castle in a new direction. Also, no matter how little is left on the board, you can't quite nail him without a lawyer.
For interface design, to a notable degree, NeXT/Apple already did it. "Interface Builder" is a nice drag-n-drop tool for making interface resources.
Visually implementing "meat" code without relying on text is another story. It would require an act of God (literally). I'm not even sure if Steve Job's reality-distortion field would suffice.
How the fuck would you show me a 4-dimensional-array??
Visual representations are more concrete than text but they are also inherently limited by our universe's geometry.
Text is limited only by the closure of the universe.
Does Apple innovate?
Cool UI, FireWire, SuperDrive, etc (long list).
Does that long list include the iPod's interface?
Well, that doesn't seem to have a B&W answer. Not because I'm an Apple whore, but also because the patent system is pretty fucked up. Assuming Apple is wrong (in a slash-dotter's eyes), bitching at just them doesn't solve anything anyway. Bitch about what's allowed to be patented (yeah, I'm syphoning blame from Apple). You shouldn't expect companies to follow ethic guidelines, you need harder rules.
Also, ask yourself: If you invented the iPod & iPod-interface, and someone tried to copy it exactly, would you let it go? People who copy the interface are basically trying to get a free ride off of Apple's work.
If company-A makes something cool, they probably spent time & money to do it. If company-B copies company-A's cool gizmo, and sells an equal number as company-A, they make more money than company-A did because they didn't have to spend money on design. Result; company-B is more successful due to parasitic product-design strategy.
Is that fair?
I'm sure apple wont sue anyone who uses stylistically different hierarchal menus on mp3 players, just the ones that copy them pixel-for-pixel, so I'm not worried.
Conclusion: Patents on blurry issues like UI might not be cool, but getting your product ripped off by lazy designers isn't cool either.
Bachman said the company's G5 sales could turn out to be disappointing for the second quarter in a row.
That's probably because the kind of people who buy a PowerMac are the kind of people who know that faster G5's are expected soon.
It's also a first-revision of a model of something (iPods aren't new).
Also, it's not good to compare mp3 player sales to PowerMac sales due to a $1000+ price difference (Apple's vs Oranges).
Using military-drones makes the ghost of General Patton cry...
(...or maybe his reincarnation...hmm).
This drone could easily be turned into a remote-controlled bomb (similar to PerfectDark). I do have one serious concern regarding remote-weapons:
In a world where wars are fought with machines, what keeps politicians from easily declaring war?
Remote weapons made war "cleaner".
"Cleaner" makes it easy to get the public to go along with it.
Easy war declarations can lead to more war declarations.
Conflict begets conflict.
Lets home that remote-controlled wars don't lead to StarTrek-ish scenarios where nations fight parodies of wars with artificial weapons.
Making war cleaner will never be as effective as good diplomacy.
Well, so much for hoping to see SouthPark: The Movie uncensored on Comedy Central ever again.
While I don't want my little sisters seeing such shows, I'm convinced that all that reality TV, prissy/popular-teenage-girl, consumer whore culture stuff is going to do more damage to their personality than bad words.
I'm starting to feel that TV is messing up kids. It gives them an unrealistic world-view. Also, there's more important things in life than idolizing a sponge who's a complete moron. It's like letting a kid eat nothing buy candy.
At least my old cartoons had some fiber in the diet. Remember GIJoe and their lessons like: "Hold on Timmy, don't touch that live electrical cable". Also, they taught that if you do need to kick some terrorist-ass, you do it multilaterally. They had everyone from ninjas to eskimos on their side.
Rather than censor things like bad words, how about getting some child psychologists to decide what's most appropriate for them to learn, and more importantly, don't fine people for bad words (there are bigger fish to fry). Don't fine Janet Jackson for what she did, give her some jail time. I'm sure that if her freedom were on the line, she wouldn't have done it.
"Even if the universe was going to end, IBM's R&D would probably to develop a method to transport itself to an alternate dimension."
I'm quite confident that before the universe collapses, we'll see the next coming of Steve Jobs, and he'll save the faithful by using his reality-distortion-field to shift everyone into another dimension.
He might even run into Durandal
"The only limit to my freedom is the inevitable closure of the universe, as inevitable as your own last breath.
And yet, there remains time to create, to create, and escape.
Escape will make me God."
Absolutely, and that's why we're doing our best to improve society for the people that we represent, which is why we need electronic voting...