Google-Motorola should not have gotten their patents included in a standard if they intended to use them to beat other competitors over the heads with.
FRAND standards are about interoperability. If you can't implement the 3G standard, you cannot make a smartphone, and the market breaks down.
If you can't use slide to unlock, you can do something different. Annoying as it might be, the very fact that people think slide to unlock is trivial means it shouldn't matter. You could use a combination of the physical button and a soft button to unlock the screen, or may ask the user to touch four points in order. There are way to work around that patent.
However, you cannot work around a patent essential for 3G, therefore it is right that limitations (FRAND) be put if you want a guaranteed return on your investment, which is what being in a standard gives you.
And prosecutors, with the power and budget of the state behind them, fight tooth and nail to prevent that new evidence from ever being considered in court. On the other side, you have an (often uneducated) inmate with a prison library.
In my opinion, prosecutors should never be allowed to stop evidence being presented in court, unless the evidence has been pre-evaluated to be ridiculously unreliable. Even then, I would prefer that happens in court.
In fact, I would go as far as saying, prosecutors should be mandated to bring all evidence in court, including evidence that might exonerate the accused. Prosecutors should only have the objective of finding the guilty party, and not convicting at all costs.
I quite like Airbus' philosophy. Most plane crashes are caused by pilot error, so having system in place to reduce the number of decisions they have to make in the cockpit can only be a good thing. I want pilots to do what computers cannot do, which is to reason out difficult situations.
Some pilot aids can be potentially dangerous, but only because at times pilots are not trained well enough to know their equipment. One involved an MD plane where the aircraft were fitted with automatic thrust restoration, which was a really bad idea once an engine started surging during takeoff, and you really needed to reduce thrust to save the engine.
So basically, Stallman doesn't want copyright, he wants something rather more draconian. To be allowed to write software, you have to be forced to give up the source. Where have we seen this before?
The GPL needs copyright even more than proprietary licenses do. In the absence of copyright, Stallman could not insist that binaries be accompanied by source code, and he could not insist that companies who managed to get access to his software would make their improvements available. With proprietary software, you can just hide the source code and not make it available, or only make it available under NDA, with contracts in place to punish misbehaviour.
Without copyright, I could make changes to emacs (if I got hold of the source), distribute the binaries and keep the source completely hidden. And Stallman would have a right heart attack, but would not have any club to beat me over the head with, legally speaking.
Copyright giving a distribution monopoly to the original author made sense in a world where reproduction and distribution were expensive. (It was frequently the most expensive part of bringing a creative idea to the masses, meaning you were getting paid for doing work - the work was partly creative, and partly the logistics of reproducing and distributing). It makes no sense in a world where reproduction and distribution are essentially free.
That is patently ridiculous. Copyright only ever makes sense in a world in which reproduction and redistribution are very easy and cheap. It's no coincidence that copyright came about after the invention of the printing press, which made reproduction much cheaper compared to the previous (people physically rewriting books). Of course, those methods are now very expensive compared to digital duplication, but when copyright was created, authors and publishers would suffer because their works could be reproduced by someone who hadn't gone through the trouble of actually creating the work, and didn't need to pay the creator. Much like the internet has done.
And the wedding photographer is a very different proposition. Wedding photographs are not a mass market product. They are produced for essentially a single customer, and the method by which one pays their photographer is not terribly important. It essentially comes down to the price that you negotiate with the photographer. With music, you don't want to have to negotiate with every potential customers. You specify your terms (which in the case of music is generally an amount of money per song or per album, and additional terms - do no create and distribute further copies).
The replication cost argument is pretty much the reason we have patents and copyrights. And it doesn't just apply to digitally produced goods, but to many physical goods, such as drugs.
The "virtual zero cost" is a red herring. What matters is that society has agreed to give control over distribution of works to the artist who creates them, and to allow them to reap the economic benefits. The whole point of copyright was that it became very cheap to produce copies, and the fact that it is now even cheaper would actually be an argument to strengthen, rather than weaken copyright (if you agree with the initial reasoning on copyright).
Admittedly, it would be hilarious if the Chinese went to the moon and took down the flag that the Americans left on the moon, and presented it as proof that they were on the moon. That would certainly arouse Americans' appetite for space exploration.
The price doesn't trend to zero. There is one price, that which the artist sets.
I agree that the artist shouldn't go after people who _download_ his songs illegally. But if you do happen to upload it, then you deserve what's coming. By uploading the song for other's to download, you are depriving the artist of a market, and that is injurious to the artist.
If you disagree with an artist's price, then don't buy their record. If you do go to look for illegally provided copies of their songs, then you are getting off on a technicality, and fair enough, but the person who has provided those songs to you for free has broken the law.
You still don't get a right to redistribute the songs though. Unless the song is public domain, the fact that you got it off a torrent does not change the fact that you stil do not have the right to redistribute it.
That is besides the point. The deal is, and has been for a few centuries, that artists are allowed to control the duplication of their work in order to make a living from it. The simple idea being that if you wanted to listen to "Oops, I DId It Again", the only legal way to do that would be to buy the song from Ms Spears, or from someone she has authorised to sell the song on her behalf, and for an appropriate fee.
By distributing her songs, someone is depriving her of her sole right to do so, and hence undermining her ability to make a living by selling her song. The fact that you do not charge for doing so does not change the fact that you have taken something away from her.
The person doing the stealing is not the downloader as such, but the uploader. The uploader has, for all intents and purposes, deprived Britney of the ability to sel to the downloader.
Wedding photos are a very specific and peculiar example. They are not mass market (unless you are Kim Kardashian) and therefore the actual way in which the photographer gets paid is not very important.
I come from ZImbabwe, and when people paid a wedding photographer, they paid for his time, the film, the development of the negatives and printing. And they got everything from him, so they could do their own prints. This was, obviously, before digital. The bottom line is photographers are probably being paid as much as they were prior to digital.
By analogy, I could make the same argument for why any new car should cost $100m (or more), because that is what a car company has to spend to put a new model on the road. Therefore by selling the new car for $20,000, they are essentially giving it away for free.
A musician spending $60,000 to create a work is making the bet that they can sell the "listening rights" to their work for more than the $60,000 they spent, and they are taking the risk that their work might not be as popular, and they could take an overall loss. It's risk and reward all over again.
What is the cost of a roll-your-own cloud solution? Most discussions about the cloud miss out on the most important element, which is the cost. People use Google because it is essentially free, and gives you very decent reliability. I know you can make your own home server super reliable, but in aggregate, if 1 million people were running their own servers, compared to 1 million on google, I would bet that the 1 million on Google's cloud would do better on uptime in aggregate. The cost of trying to get to Google levels of reliability is quite steep, and fairly prohibitive for all but the few hardcore geeks who are comfortable managing their own servers, and even then, only if they pretend their time is worthless.
You could say the same thing about property in general. Before people decided they were going to be civil, property wasn't owned. You merely took care of it until someone stronger than you forcibly took it away. There was no innate right to it. However, the concept of property also exists as an incentive to produce. If you have nothing, maybe you can do work in exchange for some property (or money, which allows you to acquire property). Even though property rights may not have evolved for that specific reason initially, it is recognised as an intrinsic part of capitalism.
By allowing someone to own the product of their imagination, we can encourage the creation of more ideas. That is why copyrights make sense, as does the concept of intellectual property in general.
desktop search is a crutch for a shitty UI design.. if you are using desktop search on osx and windows, that suggests those interfaces aren't exactly optimal either.
This is such a rubbish statement. For computers, search is nearly always superior to navigating to a specific folder or menu. It is nearly always quicker. For example, if I want to launch VLC on my mac, I hit cmd+spacebar, type "vlc", and I am presented with a list to choose from. Far superior to having to launch a menu (which, by the way, on a Mac is easily done too).
Apple is currently making out size profits. They shouldn't pay outsize wages. They may pay bonuses instead, but you don't out yourself on the hook for high wages because you are currently making lots of money. That is a bad way to run a business.
I say fortunately. I do not like aggressive sales staff. Let me play around with said gadgets, and answerf my questions when I ask, otherwise leave me alone to it. Apple stores are really good at that. I do not want used car salesmen in an Apple store.
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And why has he been modded down? No, the GP's argument does not make sense. Apple is not a monopoly, not even a de facto one.
Apple sells very expensive smartphone (I know, I own one) and if competitors are finding it hard to compete, they should lower their prices.
Google can't complain that it's unfair that they can't create a complete iPhone work-a-like.
Google-Motorola should not have gotten their patents included in a standard if they intended to use them to beat other competitors over the heads with.
FRAND standards are about interoperability. If you can't implement the 3G standard, you cannot make a smartphone, and the market breaks down.
If you can't use slide to unlock, you can do something different. Annoying as it might be, the very fact that people think slide to unlock is trivial means it shouldn't matter. You could use a combination of the physical button and a soft button to unlock the screen, or may ask the user to touch four points in order. There are way to work around that patent.
However, you cannot work around a patent essential for 3G, therefore it is right that limitations (FRAND) be put if you want a guaranteed return on your investment, which is what being in a standard gives you.
And prosecutors, with the power and budget of the state behind them, fight tooth and nail to prevent that new evidence from ever being considered in court. On the other side, you have an (often uneducated) inmate with a prison library.
In my opinion, prosecutors should never be allowed to stop evidence being presented in court, unless the evidence has been pre-evaluated to be ridiculously unreliable. Even then, I would prefer that happens in court.
In fact, I would go as far as saying, prosecutors should be mandated to bring all evidence in court, including evidence that might exonerate the accused. Prosecutors should only have the objective of finding the guilty party, and not convicting at all costs.
I quite like Airbus' philosophy. Most plane crashes are caused by pilot error, so having system in place to reduce the number of decisions they have to make in the cockpit can only be a good thing. I want pilots to do what computers cannot do, which is to reason out difficult situations.
Some pilot aids can be potentially dangerous, but only because at times pilots are not trained well enough to know their equipment. One involved an MD plane where the aircraft were fitted with automatic thrust restoration, which was a really bad idea once an engine started surging during takeoff, and you really needed to reduce thrust to save the engine.
So basically, Stallman doesn't want copyright, he wants something rather more draconian. To be allowed to write software, you have to be forced to give up the source. Where have we seen this before?
The GPL needs copyright even more than proprietary licenses do. In the absence of copyright, Stallman could not insist that binaries be accompanied by source code, and he could not insist that companies who managed to get access to his software would make their improvements available. With proprietary software, you can just hide the source code and not make it available, or only make it available under NDA, with contracts in place to punish misbehaviour.
Without copyright, I could make changes to emacs (if I got hold of the source), distribute the binaries and keep the source completely hidden. And Stallman would have a right heart attack, but would not have any club to beat me over the head with, legally speaking.
Copyright giving a distribution monopoly to the original author made sense in a world where reproduction and distribution were expensive. (It was frequently the most expensive part of bringing a creative idea to the masses, meaning you were getting paid for doing work - the work was partly creative, and partly the logistics of reproducing and distributing). It makes no sense in a world where reproduction and distribution are essentially free.
That is patently ridiculous. Copyright only ever makes sense in a world in which reproduction and redistribution are very easy and cheap. It's no coincidence that copyright came about after the invention of the printing press, which made reproduction much cheaper compared to the previous (people physically rewriting books). Of course, those methods are now very expensive compared to digital duplication, but when copyright was created, authors and publishers would suffer because their works could be reproduced by someone who hadn't gone through the trouble of actually creating the work, and didn't need to pay the creator. Much like the internet has done.
And the wedding photographer is a very different proposition. Wedding photographs are not a mass market product. They are produced for essentially a single customer, and the method by which one pays their photographer is not terribly important. It essentially comes down to the price that you negotiate with the photographer. With music, you don't want to have to negotiate with every potential customers. You specify your terms (which in the case of music is generally an amount of money per song or per album, and additional terms - do no create and distribute further copies).
The replication cost argument is pretty much the reason we have patents and copyrights. And it doesn't just apply to digitally produced goods, but to many physical goods, such as drugs.
The "virtual zero cost" is a red herring. What matters is that society has agreed to give control over distribution of works to the artist who creates them, and to allow them to reap the economic benefits. The whole point of copyright was that it became very cheap to produce copies, and the fact that it is now even cheaper would actually be an argument to strengthen, rather than weaken copyright (if you agree with the initial reasoning on copyright).
Dude, stop taking everything so seriously!
Admittedly, it would be hilarious if the Chinese went to the moon and took down the flag that the Americans left on the moon, and presented it as proof that they were on the moon. That would certainly arouse Americans' appetite for space exploration.
The price doesn't trend to zero. There is one price, that which the artist sets.
I agree that the artist shouldn't go after people who _download_ his songs illegally. But if you do happen to upload it, then you deserve what's coming. By uploading the song for other's to download, you are depriving the artist of a market, and that is injurious to the artist.
If you disagree with an artist's price, then don't buy their record. If you do go to look for illegally provided copies of their songs, then you are getting off on a technicality, and fair enough, but the person who has provided those songs to you for free has broken the law.
You still don't get a right to redistribute the songs though. Unless the song is public domain, the fact that you got it off a torrent does not change the fact that you stil do not have the right to redistribute it.
That is besides the point. The deal is, and has been for a few centuries, that artists are allowed to control the duplication of their work in order to make a living from it. The simple idea being that if you wanted to listen to "Oops, I DId It Again", the only legal way to do that would be to buy the song from Ms Spears, or from someone she has authorised to sell the song on her behalf, and for an appropriate fee.
By distributing her songs, someone is depriving her of her sole right to do so, and hence undermining her ability to make a living by selling her song. The fact that you do not charge for doing so does not change the fact that you have taken something away from her.
The person doing the stealing is not the downloader as such, but the uploader. The uploader has, for all intents and purposes, deprived Britney of the ability to sel to the downloader.
Wedding photos are a very specific and peculiar example. They are not mass market (unless you are Kim Kardashian) and therefore the actual way in which the photographer gets paid is not very important.
I come from ZImbabwe, and when people paid a wedding photographer, they paid for his time, the film, the development of the negatives and printing. And they got everything from him, so they could do their own prints. This was, obviously, before digital. The bottom line is photographers are probably being paid as much as they were prior to digital.
This doesn't make sense on so many levels.
By analogy, I could make the same argument for why any new car should cost $100m (or more), because that is what a car company has to spend to put a new model on the road. Therefore by selling the new car for $20,000, they are essentially giving it away for free.
A musician spending $60,000 to create a work is making the bet that they can sell the "listening rights" to their work for more than the $60,000 they spent, and they are taking the risk that their work might not be as popular, and they could take an overall loss. It's risk and reward all over again.
What is the cost of a roll-your-own cloud solution? Most discussions about the cloud miss out on the most important element, which is the cost. People use Google because it is essentially free, and gives you very decent reliability. I know you can make your own home server super reliable, but in aggregate, if 1 million people were running their own servers, compared to 1 million on google, I would bet that the 1 million on Google's cloud would do better on uptime in aggregate. The cost of trying to get to Google levels of reliability is quite steep, and fairly prohibitive for all but the few hardcore geeks who are comfortable managing their own servers, and even then, only if they pretend their time is worthless.
So, when the high temperatures happen, change the asphalt! Why worry about it now?
I hear that temperatures there can be like 50 degrees celsius (or 120 fahrenheit).
Correlation does not equal causality!
You could say the same thing about property in general. Before people decided they were going to be civil, property wasn't owned. You merely took care of it until someone stronger than you forcibly took it away. There was no innate right to it. However, the concept of property also exists as an incentive to produce. If you have nothing, maybe you can do work in exchange for some property (or money, which allows you to acquire property). Even though property rights may not have evolved for that specific reason initially, it is recognised as an intrinsic part of capitalism.
By allowing someone to own the product of their imagination, we can encourage the creation of more ideas. That is why copyrights make sense, as does the concept of intellectual property in general.
Enterprises don't typically upgrade their hardware. They fix their hardware when it breaks, but hardly ever upgrade.
35 millions phones a quarter is not a volume business?
At that rate, they would sell an iPhone to half the population in the USA in 5 months!
desktop search is a crutch for a shitty UI design.. if you are using desktop search on osx and windows, that suggests those interfaces aren't exactly optimal either.
This is such a rubbish statement. For computers, search is nearly always superior to navigating to a specific folder or menu. It is nearly always quicker. For example, if I want to launch VLC on my mac, I hit cmd+spacebar, type "vlc", and I am presented with a list to choose from. Far superior to having to launch a menu (which, by the way, on a Mac is easily done too).
You can't modify Cocoa on Linux too!
But you can modify KDE on a Mac.
Apple is currently making out size profits. They shouldn't pay outsize wages. They may pay bonuses instead, but you don't out yourself on the hook for high wages because you are currently making lots of money. That is a bad way to run a business.
I say fortunately. I do not like aggressive sales staff. Let me play around with said gadgets, and answerf my questions when I ask, otherwise leave me alone to it. Apple stores are really good at that. I do not want used car salesmen in an Apple store.