Okay. So simply have them stop when a year has passed from the non-moving ship's perspective instead.
Ok, that... gets pretty difficult to deal with. When you're dealing with these kinds of speeds and these distances, events don't happen in a specific order. You and I sitting next to each other can drop a penny "at the same time" and agree that it happens at the same time. If I'm traveling close to the speed of light though, I can drop a penny "at the same time" that you do, and you might totally disagree and believe that I dropped it much earlier or later.
So the issue of stopping your ship when the "at rest" ship has experience 1 year becomes a bit complicated, because when "a year has passed from the non-moving ship's perspective" depends on your frame of reference, which changes as you accelerate and decelerate. I suppose you could work out a flight plan so that, when you come to rest relative to the stationary ship, a year has passed for that stationary ship. However, funny things would happen to the passage of time for both you and the other ship accelerating in the opposite direction, and you all wouldn't agree on what happened in what order, or how long it all took.
That still has its uses—especially if, say, there are no living passengers aboard either of the moving ships who would complain, and we're just delivering ore to an automated factory, or storing cargo in a designated bay.
I'm not saying that super-fast space travel wouldn't be useful, I'm saying that faster-than-light travel would enable time travel. And the issue isn't that anyone would necessarily need to "sit around waiting". The issue is that people simply wouldn't agree on what happened first, and what happened at the same time.
But there is no frame of reference in which anyone is traveling 2c. The potential problem is your use of the word's "relative" and "perspective". If someone sitting in the stationary does the math according to Newtonian physics, he'll find that they are traveling 2c relative to one another.
So when you say, "...their relative speed was 2c, from the perspective of the third ship," what you're saying is, "From one observer's frame of reference, trying to do calculations for another observer's frame of reference, using Newtonian physics, the speed will be 2c." The problem is the notion of "relative speed" becomes non-Newtonian at such high speeds, so that doesn't really work, strictly speaking.
Thanks. I thought it was helpful for illustrative purposes, though it means that the math won't quite work right if you wanted to really talk about what would happen. Because of the acceleration, I believe what would happen from the point of view of one of the accelerating ships is that both of the ships it leaves behind would begin moving very slowly, which is why after a year, the other moving ship would appear not to have moved very far.
However, once you showed your ship to return to rest, it would begin traveling away from you very very quickly. Still under the speed of light, but considerably faster than it would appear to be traveling relative to ship that is at rest.
But I don't remember exactly how it all works out. It's been years since I had to actually do math related to general relativity.
Yeah, as I said elsewhere, I kind of wish I'd modified the example not to use acceleration. Acceleration screws everything up a bit. The "twin paradox" requires the acceleration to work, but the time dilation happens even if everyone is at rest in their own frame of reference.
Though, honestly I don't like this example, because the issue of acceleration screws it up and makes it too complicated, and so as a result what I said is not quite right. It'd be better to explain it with the ships already in motion, but when I started to write that example, it was going to be too complicated.
So I gave you an explanation that simplifies things quite a bit, at the cost of some accuracy.
Two ships travel at c in opposite directions for a period of time. When they decelerate and return to the same frame of reference that they started from, the distance between them will be equivalent to one ship having travelled at 2c for the same period. It doesn't matter what the people in each ship perceive from within their reference frames while they're moving.
No, they won't.
Let's say that three ships are stationary relative to each other, sitting right next to each other, and two of them accelerate very quickly to just under the speed of light in opposite directions. Each ship travels for what their clock says is one year, and the third stays where it is. After a year, they stop very quickly, and measure the distance that they are from each other. How far away from each other will they be?
The correct answer is 1 light-year. Only 1, not 2.
From each ship's point of view, when it took off going almost the speed of light, the other ship travelled very slowly in the opposite direction. The third ship that didn't move saw each ship travel away at almost the speed of light. However, from the third ship's point of view, only half a year passed, which explains why they're only 1 light-year apart. That's what we call "time dilation".
Our current understanding (i.e. General Relativity) specifies that faster than light travel would permit time travel into the past. It's hard to explain, but it helps to look at a light cone. Anything that is in the top "future light cone" is definitely in the future. Anything in the "past light cone" at the bottom is definitely in the past. Anything outside the light cone could be happening at the same time. It's not necessarily happening at the same time, but it could be, depending on your frame of reference.
Confused yet?
So you see the plane called "hypersurface of the present"? Well every point along that plane is the present, but the slope of the line changes depending on your frame of reference. Is that clearer or less clear?
Well anyway, if you can travel fast enough to get outside of the "future light cone" (i.e. faster than light), then you could pick some slope of the plane labelled "hyper surface of the present" where you would be below the plane. In other words, according to some frame of reference, you would arrive at your destination before you left. If you turn around and return to your original point in space, you can arrive in the "past light cone" and get there before you left.
the relative motion would be FTL, but so is the relative motion of two beams of light going in opposite directions when measured from an absolute frame of reference.
Nope. First, there's no such thing as an "absolute frame of reference". That's the really cool thing that Einstein proved, which gets referred to as "relativity". When two beams of light going in opposite directions are measured from any frame of reference, both are going c, neither are going 2c. Even if you were traveling along behind one of the beams of light going at 99% c, each would still only be going c.
In fairness, the claim that it "might be less impossible than previously thought" may be accurate. It could be less impossible and still be pretty much impossible. And I don't think anyone believed that a warp drive could be built without violating some of our current laws of physics.
The act of incorporation is directly analogous to the unionisation of the workforce -- several individuals band together and use their collective bargaining power to derive more benefit for themselves from the market.
Yes, this was something I meant to imply: Unions are as much a part of the "free market" as corporations are. Both are empowered by the government, and both are capable of subverting fair competition. When people band together to increase their power in some kind of union or corporation, they are, to some degree, subverting the "invisible hand" that is supposed to be fixing everything.
But that's just something that needs to happen. Completely free markets are going to be subverted by whoever is the first person to gain some power.
Yeah, sort of. They're a way to promote workers rights without direct government action, which makes it more "free market" than some alternatives.
But it's a way for workers to exert control over the market in a way that they would otherwise not be able to, which subverts some of the "free market" forces. You know when people claim that free markets drive prices down through competition? Same goes for labor markets. Unions remove some of the competition.
On the other hand, this kind of control over a market isn't much different from what larger businesses do all the time. Companies like AT&T and Verizon don't really compete. They compete, sure, but not *really*. There's a high barrier to entry, they have phone exclusivity deals, government-enforced control of the wireless spectrum. Also, the way they keep their prices in lock-step, I'd be surprised if there were no collusion. That's a relatively extreme case, but the "free market" is usually not completely free. Someone is pulling the strings.
But really, the issue is that a lot of pro-free-market people really just believe that rich people should be able to do whatever they want without consequences.
You also unionise when labor laws which don't yet exist (but should) are being violated.
Also, you unionize to combat unfair treatment that can't be addressed very well by laws. Like maybe you don't want to make it illegal for anyone to work 60 hour weeks, but maybe in this case, with this company, given the kind of working being done and the amount being paid, 60-hour work weeks aren't really fair.
It's funny to me how you get free-market types who argue that the free-market is better because it's more flexible and able to deal with context, but then they don't think it's appropriate to complain about legal behavior. So the argument might be, "We shouldn't have laws restricting the numbers of hours that a person can work in a week, because it's too hard to measure what's fair, and not all jobs are equal, and maybe some people *want* to work 60 hours per week. If people don't like working 60 hours per week, then they won't take jobs that require it." Or whatever, something along those lines.
But then the employees get together and say, "We don't want to work 60 hours per week. We're going to unionize and renegotiate."
Then suddenly the argument becomes, "Whoa whoa! You have no right to complain to renegotiate! I'm not doing anything illegal. I should be able to exploit everyone as much as I can until I do something illegal."
Then if you suggest that you create a new law to restrict the number of hours a person can work in a week, it drops back to, "Oh, you communists! This stuff should be handled by the market. If people don't want to work 60 hours, they can just quit their jobs."
Yeah, the whole screen size thing is a bit misleading. The 3GS is pretty much deprecated at this point, so that leaves you with iPhone/iPod touch resolutions of either 960x640 or 1136x640. Apple has added functionality to their development tools to support the stretched interface of the higher resolution, but for most apps it just means a bigger scrolling area. And then with the iPad it's either 1024x768 or 2048x1536, which is exactly double the resolution of 1024x768. All in all, it's not too hard to deal with.
Older models lack some features, but mostly it shouldn't make it hard to develop for. If your app requires Siri, then it won't work on the models that don't have Siri. Most developers won't encounter that problem, though.
It seems to me that the there's a potential problem with these kinds of studies, which makes me want to ask what are they really proving vs. what conclusions are people drawing from it. People seem to want to look at a study like this and say, "See! There's no point in all this 'organic' nonsense. We should just use every pesticide and hormone and GMO technique we can without worrying!" And that seems like it's probably a few steps too far.
"Organic" is just a technical classification. You can have two apples farmed almost exactly the same way, and one may not be considered "organic" because of some relatively minor distinction. Those apples may taste the same and have the same nutritional value, but that's because they were farmed in almost the same way. You can't extrapolate from that and say, "therefore it doesn't matter how you grow your food."
And as you say, it's not just about "nutritional content" in terms of "these have the same amount of vitamins". It's also about making sure there are no harmful things in your food, and even if you say, "studies indicate this particular hormone isn't dangerous" that doesn't mean that there aren't some side effects that haven't been discovered yet. It doesn't mean that there are no environmental issues with using those hormones. It certainly doesn't mean that all hormones are safe.
The complaints against using pesticides are not only that they might be bad for people to eat, but that they might run off into the water supply and cause environmental damage. The complaints about antibiotics are not only about whether the meat is healthy to eat, but whether we're overusing antibiotics and creating resistant strains of bacteria.
Essentially what the whole "organic" thing is about is that people want food that's healthy, safe, environmentally friendly, and sustainable. The standard of "organic" might not be the best measurement of that, but that's what people are seeking. This study does not say, "It doesn't matter how you grow things, what farming techniques you use, what pesticides you use, what you feed animals, or what you inject the animals with. The food will always be equally safe and nutritious and environmentally friendly no matter what." If it did say that, I simply wouldn't believe it.
For me, Adobe Creative Suite is the main thing stopping me from making the switch to Linux permanently, and I imagine I'm not alone. Sorry, GIMP is just not a replacement for Photoshop/Fireworks/Illustrator/Acrobat/Flash and the other dozen programs of varying usefulness.
This has been my basic argument for years now. Essentially, I've supported loads of businesses where the applications they need at Adobe CS and Microsoft Office, including Outlook/Exchange. If you can get a Linux distro to replicate all of that functionality as smoothly and easily as Adobe CS and Microsoft Office in Windows, then you can grab a big chunk of the SMB office market.
Add in support for games on top of that, and you have the home market. Hit a critical mass on home/SMB, and you'll see enterprise support.
I do see a lot of common non-geeks complaining about Facebook-- about the privacy issues, the ads, seemingly arbitrary changes to the UI/UX. It's not as though non-geeks are all completely stupid and unconcerned about anything.
Plus, insofar as people don't care, that doesn't mean that an alternative couldn't be successful. People who don't care go wherever everyone else goes, because they *don't care*. If all the geeks and concerned non-geeks decide there needs to be a change, there will be a change. Right now, the problem seems to be that, for all of its problems, Facebook is providing the best value for the investment of time required. A lot of that is because Facebook has so many people on it, but realistically it's also because Facebook has done certain things well.
Look, it's not an issue of Apple-bashing. Just legally, when you buy a track from Apple, you are purchasing a license from Apple. Yes, obviously they have constraints on what kind of licensing agreements they can offer, but that's not the point. They're the ones offering the license agreement, so I believe that they're the ones you'd have to sue.
If you need an analogy, the point is that it's not like buying a Ford from a dealer and suing the dealer when the car breaks down. It's more like paying for cable service, and then suing the movie studio for the right to use your own DVR to record their movies instead of the provided cable box.
But you're not buying a product when you buy a song from iTunes. You're buying a license, and that license is with Apple. If you were buying a product and not a license, then it might make sense to sue the manufacturer, but depending on your perspective, that might still be Apple.
Pragmatically, Bruce could afford to set a fund aside to re-purchase his library in one of his daughter's names, but I'm sure it's the principle of the thing, and in that respect he's right.
Yeah, it really doesn't make a lot of sense unless he's trying to make a point. Obviously he doesn't like the way digital licensing works, and he's willing to pay some lawyers in order to raise awareness of the issue.
Well first, there are some tracks that Apple never made DRM-free, but I suppose that's a minor issue. Also, while being DRM-free allows you more freedom on a practical level, leaving those tracks to your family members may still violate the license, and therefore be illegal. You might say, "who cares?" but maybe Mr. Willis wants to make a point, and has the money to do so.
Personally, I feel like digital content occupies a very murky area of "property" that needs to be cleared up and fixed. I'll be glad if this forces some kind of a legal resolution on whether you really own these things, or whether the media companies will have to come out and explicitly say that their marketing is deceptive, and you aren't really buying anything when you "buy" digital content.
But as a consumer, you're not dealing with the RIAA directly. Your licensing agreement is with Apple, so I believe they're the people you would need to sue. If Apple is forced to change the terms of their licensing, then it falls back to them to negotiate terms with the record labels and deal with the fallout.
Personally, I'd like to see an overhaul of copyright law to deal with the realities of digital content, instead of hacking through it piecemeal on a case-by-case basis. I guess that won't happen, though.
I also had problems with MacPorts, though I don't remember what they all were. I think the packages were too frequently out of date, or I'd find that compiling a tool with MacPorts would result in something that didn't support resource forks, even though I could get a binary which did.
Yeah, I don't know that I understand the legal technicalities of these different licenses, but it seems to me obvious that there's good reason to have a copyright license that allows people to make limited use of the material freely without compromising the author too much. So in the example of a novel, I could see a novelist saying, "I'd like people to read my book, so I don't mind if you post my entire novel on a website and let people download it and read it for free. However, I don't want you to change the book without my permission, and I don't want you to sell it without my permission. I'm making it free so that you can enjoy it, but I want the book to stay true to how I wrote it, and if anyone is going to make money off of my work, I want a cut."
In fact, it seems to me that this is the whole reason to have copyrights, and in fact it was the original intent of copyrights. Until computers became commonplace, any non-commercial copying would have been on such a small scale that it would be unlikely to raise any issues.
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Okay. So simply have them stop when a year has passed from the non-moving ship's perspective instead.
Ok, that... gets pretty difficult to deal with. When you're dealing with these kinds of speeds and these distances, events don't happen in a specific order. You and I sitting next to each other can drop a penny "at the same time" and agree that it happens at the same time. If I'm traveling close to the speed of light though, I can drop a penny "at the same time" that you do, and you might totally disagree and believe that I dropped it much earlier or later.
So the issue of stopping your ship when the "at rest" ship has experience 1 year becomes a bit complicated, because when "a year has passed from the non-moving ship's perspective" depends on your frame of reference, which changes as you accelerate and decelerate. I suppose you could work out a flight plan so that, when you come to rest relative to the stationary ship, a year has passed for that stationary ship. However, funny things would happen to the passage of time for both you and the other ship accelerating in the opposite direction, and you all wouldn't agree on what happened in what order, or how long it all took.
That still has its uses—especially if, say, there are no living passengers aboard either of the moving ships who would complain, and we're just delivering ore to an automated factory, or storing cargo in a designated bay.
I'm not saying that super-fast space travel wouldn't be useful, I'm saying that faster-than-light travel would enable time travel. And the issue isn't that anyone would necessarily need to "sit around waiting". The issue is that people simply wouldn't agree on what happened first, and what happened at the same time.
But there is no frame of reference in which anyone is traveling 2c. The potential problem is your use of the word's "relative" and "perspective". If someone sitting in the stationary does the math according to Newtonian physics, he'll find that they are traveling 2c relative to one another.
So when you say, "...their relative speed was 2c, from the perspective of the third ship," what you're saying is, "From one observer's frame of reference, trying to do calculations for another observer's frame of reference, using Newtonian physics, the speed will be 2c." The problem is the notion of "relative speed" becomes non-Newtonian at such high speeds, so that doesn't really work, strictly speaking.
Thanks. I thought it was helpful for illustrative purposes, though it means that the math won't quite work right if you wanted to really talk about what would happen. Because of the acceleration, I believe what would happen from the point of view of one of the accelerating ships is that both of the ships it leaves behind would begin moving very slowly, which is why after a year, the other moving ship would appear not to have moved very far.
However, once you showed your ship to return to rest, it would begin traveling away from you very very quickly. Still under the speed of light, but considerably faster than it would appear to be traveling relative to ship that is at rest.
But I don't remember exactly how it all works out. It's been years since I had to actually do math related to general relativity.
Yeah, as I said elsewhere, I kind of wish I'd modified the example not to use acceleration. Acceleration screws everything up a bit. The "twin paradox" requires the acceleration to work, but the time dilation happens even if everyone is at rest in their own frame of reference.
Though, honestly I don't like this example, because the issue of acceleration screws it up and makes it too complicated, and so as a result what I said is not quite right. It'd be better to explain it with the ships already in motion, but when I started to write that example, it was going to be too complicated.
So I gave you an explanation that simplifies things quite a bit, at the cost of some accuracy.
Two ships travel at c in opposite directions for a period of time. When they decelerate and return to the same frame of reference that they started from, the distance between them will be equivalent to one ship having travelled at 2c for the same period. It doesn't matter what the people in each ship perceive from within their reference frames while they're moving.
No, they won't.
Let's say that three ships are stationary relative to each other, sitting right next to each other, and two of them accelerate very quickly to just under the speed of light in opposite directions. Each ship travels for what their clock says is one year, and the third stays where it is. After a year, they stop very quickly, and measure the distance that they are from each other. How far away from each other will they be?
The correct answer is 1 light-year. Only 1, not 2.
From each ship's point of view, when it took off going almost the speed of light, the other ship travelled very slowly in the opposite direction. The third ship that didn't move saw each ship travel away at almost the speed of light. However, from the third ship's point of view, only half a year passed, which explains why they're only 1 light-year apart. That's what we call "time dilation".
Our current understanding (i.e. General Relativity) specifies that faster than light travel would permit time travel into the past. It's hard to explain, but it helps to look at a light cone. Anything that is in the top "future light cone" is definitely in the future. Anything in the "past light cone" at the bottom is definitely in the past. Anything outside the light cone could be happening at the same time. It's not necessarily happening at the same time, but it could be, depending on your frame of reference.
Confused yet?
So you see the plane called "hypersurface of the present"? Well every point along that plane is the present, but the slope of the line changes depending on your frame of reference. Is that clearer or less clear?
Well anyway, if you can travel fast enough to get outside of the "future light cone" (i.e. faster than light), then you could pick some slope of the plane labelled "hyper surface of the present" where you would be below the plane. In other words, according to some frame of reference, you would arrive at your destination before you left. If you turn around and return to your original point in space, you can arrive in the "past light cone" and get there before you left.
the relative motion would be FTL, but so is the relative motion of two beams of light going in opposite directions when measured from an absolute frame of reference.
Nope. First, there's no such thing as an "absolute frame of reference". That's the really cool thing that Einstein proved, which gets referred to as "relativity". When two beams of light going in opposite directions are measured from any frame of reference, both are going c, neither are going 2c. Even if you were traveling along behind one of the beams of light going at 99% c, each would still only be going c.
In fairness, the claim that it "might be less impossible than previously thought" may be accurate. It could be less impossible and still be pretty much impossible. And I don't think anyone believed that a warp drive could be built without violating some of our current laws of physics.
The act of incorporation is directly analogous to the unionisation of the workforce -- several individuals band together and use their collective bargaining power to derive more benefit for themselves from the market.
Yes, this was something I meant to imply: Unions are as much a part of the "free market" as corporations are. Both are empowered by the government, and both are capable of subverting fair competition. When people band together to increase their power in some kind of union or corporation, they are, to some degree, subverting the "invisible hand" that is supposed to be fixing everything.
But that's just something that needs to happen. Completely free markets are going to be subverted by whoever is the first person to gain some power.
Unions are a *function* of the free market.
Yeah, sort of. They're a way to promote workers rights without direct government action, which makes it more "free market" than some alternatives.
But it's a way for workers to exert control over the market in a way that they would otherwise not be able to, which subverts some of the "free market" forces. You know when people claim that free markets drive prices down through competition? Same goes for labor markets. Unions remove some of the competition.
On the other hand, this kind of control over a market isn't much different from what larger businesses do all the time. Companies like AT&T and Verizon don't really compete. They compete, sure, but not *really*. There's a high barrier to entry, they have phone exclusivity deals, government-enforced control of the wireless spectrum. Also, the way they keep their prices in lock-step, I'd be surprised if there were no collusion. That's a relatively extreme case, but the "free market" is usually not completely free. Someone is pulling the strings.
But really, the issue is that a lot of pro-free-market people really just believe that rich people should be able to do whatever they want without consequences.
You also unionise when labor laws which don't yet exist (but should) are being violated.
Also, you unionize to combat unfair treatment that can't be addressed very well by laws. Like maybe you don't want to make it illegal for anyone to work 60 hour weeks, but maybe in this case, with this company, given the kind of working being done and the amount being paid, 60-hour work weeks aren't really fair.
It's funny to me how you get free-market types who argue that the free-market is better because it's more flexible and able to deal with context, but then they don't think it's appropriate to complain about legal behavior. So the argument might be, "We shouldn't have laws restricting the numbers of hours that a person can work in a week, because it's too hard to measure what's fair, and not all jobs are equal, and maybe some people *want* to work 60 hours per week. If people don't like working 60 hours per week, then they won't take jobs that require it." Or whatever, something along those lines.
But then the employees get together and say, "We don't want to work 60 hours per week. We're going to unionize and renegotiate."
Then suddenly the argument becomes, "Whoa whoa! You have no right to complain to renegotiate! I'm not doing anything illegal. I should be able to exploit everyone as much as I can until I do something illegal."
Then if you suggest that you create a new law to restrict the number of hours a person can work in a week, it drops back to, "Oh, you communists! This stuff should be handled by the market. If people don't want to work 60 hours, they can just quit their jobs."
Yeah, the whole screen size thing is a bit misleading. The 3GS is pretty much deprecated at this point, so that leaves you with iPhone/iPod touch resolutions of either 960x640 or 1136x640. Apple has added functionality to their development tools to support the stretched interface of the higher resolution, but for most apps it just means a bigger scrolling area. And then with the iPad it's either 1024x768 or 2048x1536, which is exactly double the resolution of 1024x768. All in all, it's not too hard to deal with.
Older models lack some features, but mostly it shouldn't make it hard to develop for. If your app requires Siri, then it won't work on the models that don't have Siri. Most developers won't encounter that problem, though.
It seems to me that the there's a potential problem with these kinds of studies, which makes me want to ask what are they really proving vs. what conclusions are people drawing from it. People seem to want to look at a study like this and say, "See! There's no point in all this 'organic' nonsense. We should just use every pesticide and hormone and GMO technique we can without worrying!" And that seems like it's probably a few steps too far.
"Organic" is just a technical classification. You can have two apples farmed almost exactly the same way, and one may not be considered "organic" because of some relatively minor distinction. Those apples may taste the same and have the same nutritional value, but that's because they were farmed in almost the same way. You can't extrapolate from that and say, "therefore it doesn't matter how you grow your food."
And as you say, it's not just about "nutritional content" in terms of "these have the same amount of vitamins". It's also about making sure there are no harmful things in your food, and even if you say, "studies indicate this particular hormone isn't dangerous" that doesn't mean that there aren't some side effects that haven't been discovered yet. It doesn't mean that there are no environmental issues with using those hormones. It certainly doesn't mean that all hormones are safe.
The complaints against using pesticides are not only that they might be bad for people to eat, but that they might run off into the water supply and cause environmental damage. The complaints about antibiotics are not only about whether the meat is healthy to eat, but whether we're overusing antibiotics and creating resistant strains of bacteria.
Essentially what the whole "organic" thing is about is that people want food that's healthy, safe, environmentally friendly, and sustainable. The standard of "organic" might not be the best measurement of that, but that's what people are seeking. This study does not say, "It doesn't matter how you grow things, what farming techniques you use, what pesticides you use, what you feed animals, or what you inject the animals with. The food will always be equally safe and nutritious and environmentally friendly no matter what." If it did say that, I simply wouldn't believe it.
For me, Adobe Creative Suite is the main thing stopping me from making the switch to Linux permanently, and I imagine I'm not alone. Sorry, GIMP is just not a replacement for Photoshop/Fireworks/Illustrator/Acrobat/Flash and the other dozen programs of varying usefulness.
This has been my basic argument for years now. Essentially, I've supported loads of businesses where the applications they need at Adobe CS and Microsoft Office, including Outlook/Exchange. If you can get a Linux distro to replicate all of that functionality as smoothly and easily as Adobe CS and Microsoft Office in Windows, then you can grab a big chunk of the SMB office market.
Add in support for games on top of that, and you have the home market. Hit a critical mass on home/SMB, and you'll see enterprise support.
Well I do try to avoid associating with complete morons, for whatever that means. Still, my point is that there are non-geeks who care.
I do see a lot of common non-geeks complaining about Facebook-- about the privacy issues, the ads, seemingly arbitrary changes to the UI/UX. It's not as though non-geeks are all completely stupid and unconcerned about anything.
Plus, insofar as people don't care, that doesn't mean that an alternative couldn't be successful. People who don't care go wherever everyone else goes, because they *don't care*. If all the geeks and concerned non-geeks decide there needs to be a change, there will be a change. Right now, the problem seems to be that, for all of its problems, Facebook is providing the best value for the investment of time required. A lot of that is because Facebook has so many people on it, but realistically it's also because Facebook has done certain things well.
Yes. Similarly, you have the freedom to smash your thumb with a hammer, or the freedom to die of starvation.
Look, it's not an issue of Apple-bashing. Just legally, when you buy a track from Apple, you are purchasing a license from Apple. Yes, obviously they have constraints on what kind of licensing agreements they can offer, but that's not the point. They're the ones offering the license agreement, so I believe that they're the ones you'd have to sue.
If you need an analogy, the point is that it's not like buying a Ford from a dealer and suing the dealer when the car breaks down. It's more like paying for cable service, and then suing the movie studio for the right to use your own DVR to record their movies instead of the provided cable box.
But you're not buying a product when you buy a song from iTunes. You're buying a license, and that license is with Apple. If you were buying a product and not a license, then it might make sense to sue the manufacturer, but depending on your perspective, that might still be Apple.
Pragmatically, Bruce could afford to set a fund aside to re-purchase his library in one of his daughter's names, but I'm sure it's the principle of the thing, and in that respect he's right.
Yeah, it really doesn't make a lot of sense unless he's trying to make a point. Obviously he doesn't like the way digital licensing works, and he's willing to pay some lawyers in order to raise awareness of the issue.
Well first, there are some tracks that Apple never made DRM-free, but I suppose that's a minor issue. Also, while being DRM-free allows you more freedom on a practical level, leaving those tracks to your family members may still violate the license, and therefore be illegal. You might say, "who cares?" but maybe Mr. Willis wants to make a point, and has the money to do so.
Personally, I feel like digital content occupies a very murky area of "property" that needs to be cleared up and fixed. I'll be glad if this forces some kind of a legal resolution on whether you really own these things, or whether the media companies will have to come out and explicitly say that their marketing is deceptive, and you aren't really buying anything when you "buy" digital content.
But as a consumer, you're not dealing with the RIAA directly. Your licensing agreement is with Apple, so I believe they're the people you would need to sue. If Apple is forced to change the terms of their licensing, then it falls back to them to negotiate terms with the record labels and deal with the fallout.
Personally, I'd like to see an overhaul of copyright law to deal with the realities of digital content, instead of hacking through it piecemeal on a case-by-case basis. I guess that won't happen, though.
I also had problems with MacPorts, though I don't remember what they all were. I think the packages were too frequently out of date, or I'd find that compiling a tool with MacPorts would result in something that didn't support resource forks, even though I could get a binary which did.
Yeah, I don't know that I understand the legal technicalities of these different licenses, but it seems to me obvious that there's good reason to have a copyright license that allows people to make limited use of the material freely without compromising the author too much. So in the example of a novel, I could see a novelist saying, "I'd like people to read my book, so I don't mind if you post my entire novel on a website and let people download it and read it for free. However, I don't want you to change the book without my permission, and I don't want you to sell it without my permission. I'm making it free so that you can enjoy it, but I want the book to stay true to how I wrote it, and if anyone is going to make money off of my work, I want a cut."
In fact, it seems to me that this is the whole reason to have copyrights, and in fact it was the original intent of copyrights. Until computers became commonplace, any non-commercial copying would have been on such a small scale that it would be unlikely to raise any issues.