Well when the Constitution was being written, it was always expected that the president would, to a large extent, carry out the will of the people who put him in power. It's just not clear that anyone expected "the people who put him in power" to be a handful of corporations.
Well AT&T would probably be right to argue that their average customers don't really understand what "3G" means and might be confused by the maps. Of course, such an argument would be undercut by the fact that AT&T refers to "3G" in their own ads without explaining it.
There are a couple things that I'm inclined to point out. First, the article is basically saying, "some people had trouble, some people were unimpressed." It's hardly a scientific study of the quality of the OS. Sometimes the complainers are the most vocal, and the people who are happy sit quietly.
But more important, just a bit of advice for anyone who got burned by the upgrade and are upset: if your computer is important to you, don't be an early adopter. Just because a new version of your OS comes out doesn't mean you need to upgrade right away. Sit and wait to hear what people say about it, and wait for some of the kinks to get ironed out.
I'm not making excuses. Yeah, sure, it'd be better if Canonical would make sure that every release was perfect right out of the gate, but still, exercise some common sense. If you've been doing this for any amount of time, you should know better by now, especially since it has happened with pretty much every single OS. When Vista was released, it was a buggy POS. Yes, I used it. They cleaned it up well enough, but it wasn't any good when it was released. I forget which release of OSX it was (maybe 10.3?), but one of them erased your external hard drives if they were connected when you installed the new OS. That made it really fun if you had just backed up your data to an external hard drive in preparation for the upgrade. And I think it was FreeBSD 5 where everyone was complaining about how crappy it was for months after release.
Whatever system it is, you just can't trust blindly that they'll have it in perfect working order on day 1. If you want to be an early adopter, great, you get to help work out the kinks. Otherwise, give it at least a month or two.
They already do that. See the ongoing cat-and-mouse game between Apple and OSx86, and the lawsuit against Psystar. Their war against running OS X on non-Apple hardware isn't much different from a war against pirates.
Well first, Psystar isn't really part of their customer base. They're competition who are arguably selling unauthorized copies of OSX. Second, Apple hasn't sued any OSx86 user as far as I know. Third, Apple still hasn't instituted the sort of draconian activation scheme that Microsoft and Adobe use.
Basically Apple can afford to ignore casual copyright violation (individuals installing multiple copies from a single purchase) because the software isn't their bread and butter. Dedicated software vendors aren't really as lucky.
Well that's not far off from what's already happening. Apple and Netflix will both list the director and producers and actors for a movie, and then you can click though to see what other movies they've done, and then click on those movies to see the list of actors/directors/producers, on down the chain. In Apple's case they charge per-movie, whereas in Netflix's case it's subscription, but it's the same idea.
Both of them do a pretty good job of making things convenient, but I still think they could both be improved. One issue with each is availability. With Netflix, not everything is available for streaming, and to my knowledge you can't opt to buy the movie. With iTunes, it's very random which movies can be rented, which can be bought, and which are available in HD. Plus, they don't offer any subscription models, which some people might prefer. Neither service is universally supported on all kinds of portable players and set-top boxes, either.
I just think the movie would do well to get all those things sorted out and make all their content available on all kinds of services with practically zero hassle for their customers.
No, this is a case of deliberately disabling a working feature for the express purpose of forcing you to buy their hardware over another's.
Is there evidence that it was deliberate? I'm not claiming it's not, but I don't see any real evidence that they intentionally blocked the atom processor from working.
From TFA, it sounds like a development build had a lot of changes in the kernel, and one of the effects is that Atom processors no longer work. It's at least possible that they made a change in the kernel which messed up code for Atom processors and didn't catch it because... well... they don't support a single model of computer that uses that code.
Or really, even if they stripped some Atom support out of the kernel on purpose, it might not have been a nefarious plan to keep you from running a hackintosh. It might have just been that they were stripping out code for unsupported hardware for the purpose of optimization or something. That wouldn't be very sinister given that... well... they don't support a single model of computer that uses that code.
People buy Apple hardware because of the software. This is not by accident, it's not a secret, and it's been going on three decades now. You would think it would sink in at some point.
It's true that some people only buy Apple hardware because of the software, but I think it's valid for Apple to argue that they aren't a hardware vendor or software vendor, but an integrated solution vendor. They make the hardware and the software and sell them together in a package. This has the advantage that so many people are pointing to when they say, "It just works."
Well yes, it does just work. It's not so much because Apple's engineers are better than Microsoft's or Dell's or whoever's (though they may be). The real reason things work so well is that they were designed to work well as a package. Apple sells you a laptop and they chose the LCD screen, the touchpad, the webcam, and all the other components for that laptop. In some cases the components are manufactured for that laptop. The drivers for those components are written not just for OSX, but for that notebook. In some cases, Apple rewrites parts of its OS for that notebook. If they include a new component that has a new feature, that feature is integrated on an OS level by the OS vendor, not by some 3rd party hack. Because everything is handled at the level of treating the notebook as a product instead of treating the various components and drivers and software packages as different (and sometimes competing) products, you end up with a notebook were everything is integrated and everything works pretty much as-advertised.
This works because Apple is selling a series of integrated products, and only sells a handful of models at a time. Even among the different models, the components and features and capabilities are fairly uniform. For Apple to sell a stand-alone OS would be more than the introduction of an additional product; it would mean a big change to their development philosophy. They would have to try to make their OS a widely supported vanilla software package with the ability to loosely take advantage of any mishmash of capabilities rather than a tightly integrated product. I'm sure that they could manage it, but it's not clear to me why they would want to.
So, in other words, Apple wasn't charging enough for MacOS license
I don't think those are other words. That's a totally different idea. The idea here is this: Let's say you have 10 people right now who want OSX and will buy an Apple computer, and 10 people who are going to buy Dell computers with Windows. Now Apple decides to license OSX to work on Dells, imagining that the 10 people who want to buy an Apple computer will still buy them, but some of purchasers of Dell computers will buy a Dell with OSX. Instead what happens is 5 people buy Apple computers with OSX, 5 people buy Dell computers with OSX, and 10 people buy Dells with Windows. The big change here is that Apple sold less hardware and gained nothing.
Now maybe it doesn't work out exactly that way, but that's the idea. What you're suggesting is that Apple should basically abandon their hardware business and just charge more for OSX to make up for the loss in profits. I guess that's a valid idea, and in the same way, I could advise Microsoft to get out of the operating system business and focus more on the Zune.
All that's fine, but it's not going to happen. It's not clear to me why they should abandon an existing and successful business model in favor of one that's pretty speculative and has failed in the past. If they charged a large enough amount to make OSX profitable on its own, how well would it even compete with Windows? And then they have to worry about piracy, and unfortunately they'd probably start treating their customers like criminals. Why should that be appealing to them?
Along with everything else, Apple is doing extremely well. What they're doing works.
It seems that instead of trying to build cheaper devices, they could partner with a company (like Panasonic) to provide this kind of technology on the cheap.
Wait, so instead of partnering with companies to produce a cheaper laptop, they should partner with companies to produce a laptop, but cheaper?
Yeah, they're already working with existing companies on designing these things. They have a variety of specific needs. They want them to be rugged but lightweight, since they'll be used by children. They need them to use very little power, since the idea is to use give them to children in areas where power infrastructure isn't good. On top of all their other engineering needs, they need them to be cheap.
Do you really think that they'd have bothered with all this if normal hardware manufacturers were providing lightweight, rugged $75 laptops that were readable in sunlight and powered by hand-crank? Do you think they would have received so much support?
Yeah, but that's not really the question, is it? The question is, do the police need a warrant to search my apartment if the landlord is willing to let them in?
you are PAYING for the privilege of having a private pad.
So what if I pay for my email hosting?
Your point about TOS is pretty good (I myself made the same point in another post), but what if your TOS doesn't say they can disclose the contents of your email to law enforcement? It sounds like the judge's argument was, "You email host can, as a matter of fact, access your email. Therefore it's all public and you have no expectation of privacy."
I'm not claiming to really know what I'm talking about, but it seems as though there are a lot of situations where other people have access to something private of yours, but it still seems like it should be private. Landlords often have keys to their tenant's apartments, and sometimes even their mailboxes. People sometimes give house keys to cleaning services who clean their houses. Companies that offer private storage space sometimes retain keys to the spaces they rent.
So I'm just wondering where the legal boundaries on these things are, and how far we want to go. I store backup keys to my apartment with one of my friends (in case I get locked out). In my apartment are keys to a storage unit. My friend therefore can easily get access to my storage unit. Does that mean the storage unit is public and I have no expectation of privacy?
The only problem with that idea is that lots of people are concerned about data mining. If TIVO says they're watching when their customers fast forward and rewind, a lot of their customers will probably feel that's an invasion of privacy and they won't like it.
"Paranormal Activity" was shot for $15k and, last I saw, had made $22M in its first weekend. It's not going to become difficult to make money from movies, and we're not going to stop making them.
And anyway, the movie studios may be into making movies for money, but they really would be made anyway. I know this will sound crazy, but there was music before there was a record industry. There were writers before copyright existed. Good stuff, too. Quality didn't really suffer.
You see, humans are a creative race, and we really really like doing this stuff. We like it so much that you could pass laws making it illegal to shoot a movie or record an album or write a book, and people would do those things anyway. People would go to jail in order to do them. I know people who are, right now, producing their own movies and albums, fully expecting to spend more money then they'll make, just because they want to make them.
So the question isn't whether this stuff will be made, and it's not whether someone will be able to make money from it. The better questions are: (a) What kinds of business models from these creative works do we, as a society, want to sanction? and (b) Can we arrange it so that the profit from these works is funneled to the people who deserve it?
I consider my time pretty valuable to me, so when a song pops in my head that I haven't heard in 10 years, and I want to listen to it, to me, it is more beneficial to me to just spend the.99 cents on a song than it is to waste a good hour hunting down a torrent or similar and wait for it to download, just to possibly find out it wasn't what I was looking for.
I've been saying for years that the content industry (movies, music, TV shows, etc.) needs to focus on making the whole thing really dead simple. Pirating isn't hard, but it's often not the most pleasant process. You have to have a method for finding stuff, which takes some effort to learn. Like even if you're using Pirate Bay and bittorrent, you still have to find the Pirate Bay in the first place, decide you like the site, and figure out how to find what you're looking for on it. Search for a movie title, and you might find a bunch of different copies. Which one do you want to try? Is one of them sabotaged by the MPAA? Does one of them contain a trojan? How good is the video quality on each one? What compression do you want? Or there might not be any copies available for what you're looking for. Where do you go from there? There are a bunch of questions and problems and issues.
So if they want people to pay money for their product, it might be smart to do better than that. Make everything available, and make it simple to find what you want. Have a really great recommendation engine to discover new things. Guarantee fast download speeds and good audio/video quality. Make your product widely compatible with all kinds of devices.
I really sincerely believe that these companies are undervaluing convenience. People are often willing to spend some money to get exactly what they want, when they want it, how they want it. It's really not hard. Give people a high-quality convenient product at a reasonable price, and it will sell.
Well it may mean something specific to you, but then if you give a nice clear little definition, someone will probably jump in and tell you you're wrong.
I just didn't want to argue about what it meant or whether it's different from "distributed computing" or "grid computing" or "a normal client/server system". My point is that pretty much whatever your definition is, it probably has a valid use and is saving someone a lot of money.
I think this is a good point. I'm not using a DVR these days, but when I was, I would often fast forward through ads, but not always. It was actually pretty common for an ad break to start and for me to not think very much of it. The ads would play and I'd watch them. Sometimes I was half zoned-out or working on my laptop, but sometimes I just wasn't thinking about the fact that I could fast forward. But I would more or less watch the ads until a particularly annoying one came on, and *then* I would snap out of it and think, "Why the hell am I watching this? I don't have to."
And then sometimes-- not often, but sometimes-- when I was fast forwarding, I'd catch sight of a commercial that caught my interest, and I'd actually rewind to watch it. Maybe it was for a product that looked interesting, or maybe just the ad itself looked like it might be entertaining, so I'd actually go back and watch it.
I don't think that either of those things are very strange, by which I mean other people probably do the same thing. In my mind, that lays out a fairly reasonable path for networks and advertisers to follow: stop airing commercials that annoy people, and instead air commercials that entertain that people want to see, for products people are interested in.
Yeah, I know, easier said than done. Different people are interested in and entertained by different things. Also, if they really knew how to put entertaining/interesting content on the air, there wouldn't be so many crappy shows on TV. On the other hand, if the someone skips a commercial because they find it annoying and aren't interested in the product, then making them watch that commercial anyway probably isn't doing anyone any good. You're probably just attaching a negative emotional association to the product and brand.
That's a very different thing. That's basically an agreement between two private individuals. Complaining that landlords can override your 2nd amendment rights because of that is like complaining that you don't have 1st amendment rights because you've signed an NDR.
The Bill of Rights was intended to protect citizens from the government trying to take away what the people at the time viewed as their inalienable human rights. Saying the government can't stop me from owning guns doesn't mean people can't choose not to own guns, and neither does it mean that private people can't disallow guns on their own private property. Given that, I don't see why it shouldn't allow for people to enter into an agreement which means that one won't bring guns onto other's private property.
Yeah, I don't think this stuff can simply be called "snake oil". ERP systems are in use. They're not a cure-all, but failing to fix every problem doesn't make a thing useless. The current usefulness of "artificial intelligence" depends on how you define it. There are some fairly complex statistical analysis systems that are already pretty useful. Full on AI just doesn't exist yet, and we can't even quite agree on what it would be, but it would likely have some use if we ever made it.
Virtualization is useful and has its place, as does "cloud computing" (which seems to mean different things to different people, but regardless it has its uses).
I guess a lot of these things are over-hyped and they ideas have been sold to people as being better and more trouble-free than they are in reality. But then, so is everything. For example, Windows 7, Karmic Koala, and Snow Leopard have all failed to solve all of my computing problems.
Yes, there are times when it is legal for the landlord to enter your apartment, but that's my whole point. For as much access as your landlord has, I don't believe it allows police to search your apartment without a warrant.
Now IANAL and I'm sure there are lots of complications an intricacies involved. Are there cases where a landlord can give police access to your apartment? I bet there are. Can a landlord put cameras in public areas of the building that record my coming to and going from the apartment? Certainly. But as far as I know, I still have an expectation of privacy and the police generally can't search my apartment without a warrant.
Maybe your confusion is due to the fact that you think the GPL zealot crowd actually cares about copyright. What we care about is freedom. In the GPL's case, it is guaranteeing everyone the freedom to take a program and modify it however they desire. In this case, the concern is about the freedom to use software one has purchased however one desires.
So let's say instead of the dispute being between Apple and Psystar, it was between Debian and Cisco. Let's imagine Cisco was selling routers which had been imaged with a modified version of Debian Linux. Cisco did not distribute the source code of their modifications, but for every copy of the modified Debian they distributed, they paid the full price ($0) for a copy of Debian.
Is that ok? Or should we be mad that Cisco is violating the GPL?
Do you have the legal right to install a book on your own hardware regardless of it being an Apple branded computer or not? If you do that, will it boot?
Yeah, I'm being snarky, but my point is just that they're not the same thing. Software is not the same as books. I say the same thing when someone tries to tell me that copying software is like stealing a book from Barnes and Noble: Software is not the same as books.
Slashdot Mirror
But it may be the end of the open wild west attitude on the net.
The open wild west attitude *is* the Internet. Take that away, and you just have a broadcast network.
Well when the Constitution was being written, it was always expected that the president would, to a large extent, carry out the will of the people who put him in power. It's just not clear that anyone expected "the people who put him in power" to be a handful of corporations.
Well AT&T would probably be right to argue that their average customers don't really understand what "3G" means and might be confused by the maps. Of course, such an argument would be undercut by the fact that AT&T refers to "3G" in their own ads without explaining it.
There are a couple things that I'm inclined to point out. First, the article is basically saying, "some people had trouble, some people were unimpressed." It's hardly a scientific study of the quality of the OS. Sometimes the complainers are the most vocal, and the people who are happy sit quietly.
But more important, just a bit of advice for anyone who got burned by the upgrade and are upset: if your computer is important to you, don't be an early adopter. Just because a new version of your OS comes out doesn't mean you need to upgrade right away. Sit and wait to hear what people say about it, and wait for some of the kinks to get ironed out.
I'm not making excuses. Yeah, sure, it'd be better if Canonical would make sure that every release was perfect right out of the gate, but still, exercise some common sense. If you've been doing this for any amount of time, you should know better by now, especially since it has happened with pretty much every single OS. When Vista was released, it was a buggy POS. Yes, I used it. They cleaned it up well enough, but it wasn't any good when it was released. I forget which release of OSX it was (maybe 10.3?), but one of them erased your external hard drives if they were connected when you installed the new OS. That made it really fun if you had just backed up your data to an external hard drive in preparation for the upgrade. And I think it was FreeBSD 5 where everyone was complaining about how crappy it was for months after release.
Whatever system it is, you just can't trust blindly that they'll have it in perfect working order on day 1. If you want to be an early adopter, great, you get to help work out the kinks. Otherwise, give it at least a month or two.
They already do that. See the ongoing cat-and-mouse game between Apple and OSx86, and the lawsuit against Psystar. Their war against running OS X on non-Apple hardware isn't much different from a war against pirates.
Well first, Psystar isn't really part of their customer base. They're competition who are arguably selling unauthorized copies of OSX. Second, Apple hasn't sued any OSx86 user as far as I know. Third, Apple still hasn't instituted the sort of draconian activation scheme that Microsoft and Adobe use.
Basically Apple can afford to ignore casual copyright violation (individuals installing multiple copies from a single purchase) because the software isn't their bread and butter. Dedicated software vendors aren't really as lucky.
Well that's not far off from what's already happening. Apple and Netflix will both list the director and producers and actors for a movie, and then you can click though to see what other movies they've done, and then click on those movies to see the list of actors/directors/producers, on down the chain. In Apple's case they charge per-movie, whereas in Netflix's case it's subscription, but it's the same idea.
Both of them do a pretty good job of making things convenient, but I still think they could both be improved. One issue with each is availability. With Netflix, not everything is available for streaming, and to my knowledge you can't opt to buy the movie. With iTunes, it's very random which movies can be rented, which can be bought, and which are available in HD. Plus, they don't offer any subscription models, which some people might prefer. Neither service is universally supported on all kinds of portable players and set-top boxes, either.
I just think the movie would do well to get all those things sorted out and make all their content available on all kinds of services with practically zero hassle for their customers.
Why can MS make profits that dwarf Apple's without profiting from hardware?
Vendor lock-in?
No, this is a case of deliberately disabling a working feature for the express purpose of forcing you to buy their hardware over another's.
Is there evidence that it was deliberate? I'm not claiming it's not, but I don't see any real evidence that they intentionally blocked the atom processor from working.
From TFA, it sounds like a development build had a lot of changes in the kernel, and one of the effects is that Atom processors no longer work. It's at least possible that they made a change in the kernel which messed up code for Atom processors and didn't catch it because... well... they don't support a single model of computer that uses that code.
Or really, even if they stripped some Atom support out of the kernel on purpose, it might not have been a nefarious plan to keep you from running a hackintosh. It might have just been that they were stripping out code for unsupported hardware for the purpose of optimization or something. That wouldn't be very sinister given that... well... they don't support a single model of computer that uses that code.
People buy Apple hardware because of the software. This is not by accident, it's not a secret, and it's been going on three decades now. You would think it would sink in at some point.
It's true that some people only buy Apple hardware because of the software, but I think it's valid for Apple to argue that they aren't a hardware vendor or software vendor, but an integrated solution vendor. They make the hardware and the software and sell them together in a package. This has the advantage that so many people are pointing to when they say, "It just works."
Well yes, it does just work. It's not so much because Apple's engineers are better than Microsoft's or Dell's or whoever's (though they may be). The real reason things work so well is that they were designed to work well as a package. Apple sells you a laptop and they chose the LCD screen, the touchpad, the webcam, and all the other components for that laptop. In some cases the components are manufactured for that laptop. The drivers for those components are written not just for OSX, but for that notebook. In some cases, Apple rewrites parts of its OS for that notebook. If they include a new component that has a new feature, that feature is integrated on an OS level by the OS vendor, not by some 3rd party hack. Because everything is handled at the level of treating the notebook as a product instead of treating the various components and drivers and software packages as different (and sometimes competing) products, you end up with a notebook were everything is integrated and everything works pretty much as-advertised.
This works because Apple is selling a series of integrated products, and only sells a handful of models at a time. Even among the different models, the components and features and capabilities are fairly uniform. For Apple to sell a stand-alone OS would be more than the introduction of an additional product; it would mean a big change to their development philosophy. They would have to try to make their OS a widely supported vanilla software package with the ability to loosely take advantage of any mishmash of capabilities rather than a tightly integrated product. I'm sure that they could manage it, but it's not clear to me why they would want to.
So, in other words, Apple wasn't charging enough for MacOS license
I don't think those are other words. That's a totally different idea. The idea here is this: Let's say you have 10 people right now who want OSX and will buy an Apple computer, and 10 people who are going to buy Dell computers with Windows. Now Apple decides to license OSX to work on Dells, imagining that the 10 people who want to buy an Apple computer will still buy them, but some of purchasers of Dell computers will buy a Dell with OSX. Instead what happens is 5 people buy Apple computers with OSX, 5 people buy Dell computers with OSX, and 10 people buy Dells with Windows. The big change here is that Apple sold less hardware and gained nothing.
Now maybe it doesn't work out exactly that way, but that's the idea. What you're suggesting is that Apple should basically abandon their hardware business and just charge more for OSX to make up for the loss in profits. I guess that's a valid idea, and in the same way, I could advise Microsoft to get out of the operating system business and focus more on the Zune.
All that's fine, but it's not going to happen. It's not clear to me why they should abandon an existing and successful business model in favor of one that's pretty speculative and has failed in the past. If they charged a large enough amount to make OSX profitable on its own, how well would it even compete with Windows? And then they have to worry about piracy, and unfortunately they'd probably start treating their customers like criminals. Why should that be appealing to them?
Along with everything else, Apple is doing extremely well. What they're doing works.
Can we start a "50Mbps for every child" right here in the US, and maybe get some decent internet?
I'm serious. It works.
It seems that instead of trying to build cheaper devices, they could partner with a company (like Panasonic) to provide this kind of technology on the cheap.
Wait, so instead of partnering with companies to produce a cheaper laptop, they should partner with companies to produce a laptop, but cheaper?
Yeah, they're already working with existing companies on designing these things. They have a variety of specific needs. They want them to be rugged but lightweight, since they'll be used by children. They need them to use very little power, since the idea is to use give them to children in areas where power infrastructure isn't good. On top of all their other engineering needs, they need them to be cheap.
Do you really think that they'd have bothered with all this if normal hardware manufacturers were providing lightweight, rugged $75 laptops that were readable in sunlight and powered by hand-crank? Do you think they would have received so much support?
Yeah, but that's not really the question, is it? The question is, do the police need a warrant to search my apartment if the landlord is willing to let them in?
you are PAYING for the privilege of having a private pad.
So what if I pay for my email hosting?
Your point about TOS is pretty good (I myself made the same point in another post), but what if your TOS doesn't say they can disclose the contents of your email to law enforcement? It sounds like the judge's argument was, "You email host can, as a matter of fact, access your email. Therefore it's all public and you have no expectation of privacy."
I'm not claiming to really know what I'm talking about, but it seems as though there are a lot of situations where other people have access to something private of yours, but it still seems like it should be private. Landlords often have keys to their tenant's apartments, and sometimes even their mailboxes. People sometimes give house keys to cleaning services who clean their houses. Companies that offer private storage space sometimes retain keys to the spaces they rent.
So I'm just wondering where the legal boundaries on these things are, and how far we want to go. I store backup keys to my apartment with one of my friends (in case I get locked out). In my apartment are keys to a storage unit. My friend therefore can easily get access to my storage unit. Does that mean the storage unit is public and I have no expectation of privacy?
The only problem with that idea is that lots of people are concerned about data mining. If TIVO says they're watching when their customers fast forward and rewind, a lot of their customers will probably feel that's an invasion of privacy and they won't like it.
"Paranormal Activity" was shot for $15k and, last I saw, had made $22M in its first weekend. It's not going to become difficult to make money from movies, and we're not going to stop making them.
And anyway, the movie studios may be into making movies for money, but they really would be made anyway. I know this will sound crazy, but there was music before there was a record industry. There were writers before copyright existed. Good stuff, too. Quality didn't really suffer.
You see, humans are a creative race, and we really really like doing this stuff. We like it so much that you could pass laws making it illegal to shoot a movie or record an album or write a book, and people would do those things anyway. People would go to jail in order to do them. I know people who are, right now, producing their own movies and albums, fully expecting to spend more money then they'll make, just because they want to make them.
So the question isn't whether this stuff will be made, and it's not whether someone will be able to make money from it. The better questions are: (a) What kinds of business models from these creative works do we, as a society, want to sanction? and (b) Can we arrange it so that the profit from these works is funneled to the people who deserve it?
I consider my time pretty valuable to me, so when a song pops in my head that I haven't heard in 10 years, and I want to listen to it, to me, it is more beneficial to me to just spend the .99 cents on a song than it is to waste a good hour hunting down a torrent or similar and wait for it to download, just to possibly find out it wasn't what I was looking for.
I've been saying for years that the content industry (movies, music, TV shows, etc.) needs to focus on making the whole thing really dead simple. Pirating isn't hard, but it's often not the most pleasant process. You have to have a method for finding stuff, which takes some effort to learn. Like even if you're using Pirate Bay and bittorrent, you still have to find the Pirate Bay in the first place, decide you like the site, and figure out how to find what you're looking for on it. Search for a movie title, and you might find a bunch of different copies. Which one do you want to try? Is one of them sabotaged by the MPAA? Does one of them contain a trojan? How good is the video quality on each one? What compression do you want? Or there might not be any copies available for what you're looking for. Where do you go from there? There are a bunch of questions and problems and issues.
So if they want people to pay money for their product, it might be smart to do better than that. Make everything available, and make it simple to find what you want. Have a really great recommendation engine to discover new things. Guarantee fast download speeds and good audio/video quality. Make your product widely compatible with all kinds of devices.
I really sincerely believe that these companies are undervaluing convenience. People are often willing to spend some money to get exactly what they want, when they want it, how they want it. It's really not hard. Give people a high-quality convenient product at a reasonable price, and it will sell.
Well it may mean something specific to you, but then if you give a nice clear little definition, someone will probably jump in and tell you you're wrong.
I just didn't want to argue about what it meant or whether it's different from "distributed computing" or "grid computing" or "a normal client/server system". My point is that pretty much whatever your definition is, it probably has a valid use and is saving someone a lot of money.
I think this is a good point. I'm not using a DVR these days, but when I was, I would often fast forward through ads, but not always. It was actually pretty common for an ad break to start and for me to not think very much of it. The ads would play and I'd watch them. Sometimes I was half zoned-out or working on my laptop, but sometimes I just wasn't thinking about the fact that I could fast forward. But I would more or less watch the ads until a particularly annoying one came on, and *then* I would snap out of it and think, "Why the hell am I watching this? I don't have to."
And then sometimes-- not often, but sometimes-- when I was fast forwarding, I'd catch sight of a commercial that caught my interest, and I'd actually rewind to watch it. Maybe it was for a product that looked interesting, or maybe just the ad itself looked like it might be entertaining, so I'd actually go back and watch it.
I don't think that either of those things are very strange, by which I mean other people probably do the same thing. In my mind, that lays out a fairly reasonable path for networks and advertisers to follow: stop airing commercials that annoy people, and instead air commercials that entertain that people want to see, for products people are interested in.
Yeah, I know, easier said than done. Different people are interested in and entertained by different things. Also, if they really knew how to put entertaining/interesting content on the air, there wouldn't be so many crappy shows on TV. On the other hand, if the someone skips a commercial because they find it annoying and aren't interested in the product, then making them watch that commercial anyway probably isn't doing anyone any good. You're probably just attaching a negative emotional association to the product and brand.
That's a very different thing. That's basically an agreement between two private individuals. Complaining that landlords can override your 2nd amendment rights because of that is like complaining that you don't have 1st amendment rights because you've signed an NDR.
The Bill of Rights was intended to protect citizens from the government trying to take away what the people at the time viewed as their inalienable human rights. Saying the government can't stop me from owning guns doesn't mean people can't choose not to own guns, and neither does it mean that private people can't disallow guns on their own private property. Given that, I don't see why it shouldn't allow for people to enter into an agreement which means that one won't bring guns onto other's private property.
Yeah, I don't think this stuff can simply be called "snake oil". ERP systems are in use. They're not a cure-all, but failing to fix every problem doesn't make a thing useless. The current usefulness of "artificial intelligence" depends on how you define it. There are some fairly complex statistical analysis systems that are already pretty useful. Full on AI just doesn't exist yet, and we can't even quite agree on what it would be, but it would likely have some use if we ever made it.
Virtualization is useful and has its place, as does "cloud computing" (which seems to mean different things to different people, but regardless it has its uses).
I guess a lot of these things are over-hyped and they ideas have been sold to people as being better and more trouble-free than they are in reality. But then, so is everything. For example, Windows 7, Karmic Koala, and Snow Leopard have all failed to solve all of my computing problems.
Yes, there are times when it is legal for the landlord to enter your apartment, but that's my whole point. For as much access as your landlord has, I don't believe it allows police to search your apartment without a warrant.
Now IANAL and I'm sure there are lots of complications an intricacies involved. Are there cases where a landlord can give police access to your apartment? I bet there are. Can a landlord put cameras in public areas of the building that record my coming to and going from the apartment? Certainly. But as far as I know, I still have an expectation of privacy and the police generally can't search my apartment without a warrant.
Maybe your confusion is due to the fact that you think the GPL zealot crowd actually cares about copyright. What we care about is freedom. In the GPL's case, it is guaranteeing everyone the freedom to take a program and modify it however they desire. In this case, the concern is about the freedom to use software one has purchased however one desires.
So let's say instead of the dispute being between Apple and Psystar, it was between Debian and Cisco. Let's imagine Cisco was selling routers which had been imaged with a modified version of Debian Linux. Cisco did not distribute the source code of their modifications, but for every copy of the modified Debian they distributed, they paid the full price ($0) for a copy of Debian.
Is that ok? Or should we be mad that Cisco is violating the GPL?
Do you have the legal right to install a book on your own hardware regardless of it being an Apple branded computer or not? If you do that, will it boot?
Yeah, I'm being snarky, but my point is just that they're not the same thing. Software is not the same as books. I say the same thing when someone tries to tell me that copying software is like stealing a book from Barnes and Noble: Software is not the same as books.
It says "...install, use and run..." It seems to me that booting would be included in "using and running" an OS.