This clearly underscores the RIAA's hypocrisy in that their thesis includes the tenet they are out to protect the artists, but if more exposure, and ultimately more happy consumers and sellers all around doesn't fit the definition of "protection", I'm at a loss.
It isn't hypocritical at all... the best way to protect YOUR artists is to put all the competing artists in jail.
Theoretically, a Creative Commons-licensed podcast could be broadcast by a cable station, and then the creator would lose rights to rebroadcast the material on their own!
Not quite... it's more along MS's "Embrace & Extend" platform... the station would hold all the rights to re-air THEIR broadcast. That means that you couldn't copy their broadcast, but if you got the public film from somewhere else, that copy would still be in the public domain.
The change would basically make a broadcast into a performance of the work. The broadcaster owns the rights to the performance, not the work itself.
What you call "behaving like a dick" others call "giving the populace the chance to vote", "allowing women to go to school" and "preventing children from being killed or starved to death because their parents are part of the wrong religious sect".
Funny... GP was talking about foreign policy. I don't know about anyone else, but if the US was telling MY country how to vote, who can go to school, and whether children are allowed to stay with their parents based on religious belief, I'd call it "behaving like a dick" too. What the US does inside its own borders is its own business, however.
The problem here is that the mainstream parties have both shown that they will do anything to stay in power, including disenfranchising party supporters. If people vote for a third party, even if only one candidate makes it, that candidate will know that the only chance they have to survive the next vote is to push their platform the best way they can. It helps that they won't be in a majority position, because they won't need to concern themselves with actually running the country; just opposing short-sighted programs and promoting their party's ideas.
Along with the re-aac suggestion in this thread, I have another one:
Shouldn't it be possible to create a virtual cd-r? Then it can burn at 500x, and be deleted when it's done. There are a number of times I've wanted to virtualize burning a CD or DVD. Anyone up for the challenge?
I hate Fox news. I've rarely seen such a wretched hive of scum and villainy outside of the Rush Limbaugh show. They elevate bad ideas and squash clear thinking on a regular basis. Politics takes the place of science and dogma takes the place of thought.
The problem here is that in this analogy, Tape == DVD. HD DVD == DAT masters. Or, to look at it another way, you can use a HD projector to project a HD DVD in a movie theatre, and the resulting image and sound will in some cases be better than what the theatre traditionally uses. This goes beyond getting noticed.
Add to this the fact that tape-based recordings degrade over time. HD DVD is production quality, and will not degrade (unless people continue to compress it). Why buy a DVD when you can download a higher quality version of the movie for "free"?
Of course, the filesizes put a crimp in this logic; it is cheaper to buy the movie on DVD than it is to download it in HD-DVD. Again, falling short of the Tape analogy.
No issues are being confused... MP3 is a patented audio codec that is owned by a standards group and patented by a company that both support DRM. Just like iPods are created by a company that supports DRM. I'm applying the same point you made, but to other products (yes, MP3 is a standard, but it's also a product). Also, people knowing you're running Linux is beside the point, as we both mentioned -- the issue is that people see your hardware, and assume you support the policies of the vendor whose logo you are displaying. The problem is that DRM doesn't even show up on most people's brand-aware radar, and (almost) every computer-related company has their finger in the DRM pot one way or the other.
I buy Apple products. I don't buy DRM-laden Apple products. I don't buy Sony branded products, but I do buy products with Sony components.
If you're not going to use the iStore, don't buy an iPod. There are other alternatives out there.
Yes... there's... let's see... what device plays digital audio, but doesn't support MP3 (owned by the group that's heavily into Patents and DRM) and either FairPlay or PlaysForSure DRM?
Come to think of it, even my Palm doesn't fall into that category. Neither does any current generation computer-related hardware I can think of. I sure hope you don't own anything created by Sony (music, movies, dvd players, computer components, circuit board components).... If you respond "Every consumer electronics device I own runs Linux!" then I have this to say: Sure... but when the Clueless User looks at those devices, do they see Linux, or do they see the hardware manufacturer, who, one way or another, supports DRM?
You can do all the legalese mumbojumbo you want, but you are still depriving someone of their rightful income.
Where I live, people don't get assigned rightful incomes. You create something, you trade it for an income. You have no right to the same income the next time you create something, nor the right to continue getting that income once you've given the creation away. "Deprivation of income" is not a crime, and it is not even immoral.
However, taking the other side of the argument, reneging on agreements/contracts IS often a crime, and is also immoral. If you have entered into a contract whereby you pay someone for the limited rights to use their idea, on the condition that you promise not to blab that idea, and then you blab it anyway, you have broken your contract. They can return your money, but you can never return their idea, like you could if you stole a physical object.
No, you just have to give up 600 megabytes of disk space per album.
And this is different than getting audio from a CD... how?
If you rip audio from a CD, you lose audio quality. Now, you might argue that Apple's AAC files are a lower quality than Redbook Audio from the get-go, but then so is FM Radio. That didn't stop people from recording it to audiocassette in the 80's. The lower audio quality is the same lower audio quality you purchased (after being able to listen to a sample) from Apple.
Also: both RedBook Audio and AAC are lesser audio quality than the original performance. In fact, RedBook Audio is closer to AAC in quality than it is to the original performance. Apple's AAC files have not been ripped from RedBook CDs; they have been mastered from the same original DATs as the RedBook Audio. So, you should think of them as alternative recording media, NOT as devolving recording media as many are in the habit of doing (and as would be the case if you made an AAC transcoding of your RedBook audio CD). I still listen to old grammaphone LPs transcoded to AAC. They'd sound identical to me whether I ripped them to RedBook Audio and burned that to a CD, or ripped them to 160kbps AAC and played that from wherever. My audio equipment injects more variance than I can spot between the digital waveforms.
As an disclaimer:
I'm a musician. I have composed music. I have performed music live. I have recorded and mastered music. I have distributed music. I have made money off of music. However, I have never sold a recording of my music. I might at some point in the future, but that doesn't suddenly make it illegal to copy the recordings of my music that I haven't set such copy restrictions upon.
I am also a software developer. I have designed software. I have written throwaway scripts to solve immediate problems. I have compiled and packaged software. I have distributed software. I have made money off of software. However, even though I have released shareware, I have never made money off of it. I do, however, have my name in the credits of a number of open source software packages.
I am also a writer. Many of the above statements apply here too. The point is that individuals can still produce original content and hold the rights to it; they can also make a living doing this. At no point are they required to make their profit off of restricting distribution of their original content and selling each instance as if it were the first sale. Enough can be made off of the first sale, and the understanding and skill behind that first sale.
I've been able to re-use IP I have created in subsequent contracts; the customer could already have got some of it for free, but they would rather pay for it and get something with the same quality but customized for them. Sort of like a potter making custom pottery. Anyone can buy clay. Anyone can buy cheap clay knockoffs of already made objects. Not everybody can make custom pottery. If someone makes a mug with a before-unthought-of lip design that is easier to drink from, and I copy this design, I could be guilty of copyright and/or patent infringement. I would not be stealing the person's mug, however; no matter how many of them I made and distributed myself.
Ok, maybe "copyright infringement" isn't the same as "stealing", but I think we can all agree that "downloading music/movies/series/etc... for free from the net" has the same negative effect on the 'manufacturer/(ex-)owner', and it's that idea the poster is trying to convey IMHO !
I think you'll find we won't all agree. For one, look at YouTube. I can download original content movies for free from there (with the permission of the copyright holders) with NO negative impact on the manufacturer/(ex-)owner. As a matter of fact, suddenly a person who before had no mindshare now has publicity, which can help them sell OTHER products and services they might have on the market.
When something is stolen, it is stolen from the person who currently holds it. When copyright is infringed, only the market of the original manufacturer is diluted; nothing is stolen from the person who currently holds it. Were the two conflatable, I would be stealing from my friend when I copied an audio track from his CD. As it is, I am legally copying an audio track; he has lost nothing. Of course, in some backward countries like the US, that copying is not legal. Instead, they have made it against civil law to dilute the manufacturer's (not the owner's) market. This doesn't mean it is suddenly stealing.
The Audio Cartel would like this to be treated as theft instead of dilution. Why? Because if you sell a used CD, it doesn't dilute the market, even though it can cut into the New Sales market through the Cartel's sales channels. Thus, selling a used CD is legal. However, if transfer was theft and not dilution, selling a used CD would be theft. That's why these semantics are so important.
The worst part about the iTMS DRM is that it locks you into Apple products forever unless you want to abandon your "purchase."
Or, do what the iTMS FAQ says to do, and burn a backup audio CD of all music you buy from iTMS. It backs it up as RedBook Audio, which is DRM-Free. You can even burn DVDs of RedBook Audio. A single-layer DVD-R will store just over 8.5 hours of RedBook Audio. If the statistics cited above are true, and most people don't have more than 50 songs purchased through iTMS, that means (assuming 3.5 minutes per song) that all iTMS purchases can be stored in a DRM free format on a single DVD-R, which will take less than an hour to burn. The end result is no DRM, no loss in data quality (re-import in a lossless format if you want to preserve the quality), and a backup of your music (which you DO do, right?).
From what I understood, under Vista, you need to sign drivers that do anything with video. If the driver handles an HDMI signal, the content also has to be signed, and the user of the computer has to hold the certificate, or else the OS will not let the software running on top of it talk to the hardware device importing the HD Video feed. Vista won't let any unsigned drivers run, and for a driver to be signed, it has to comply with the playback rules.
The end result is that the easiest way to do such things might soon be to run your app inside Linux in VMWare (for instance, run the MythTV LiveCD inside VMWare). That is, of course, assuming that VMWare is allowed access to that hardware by Vista, which seems questionable to me.
Wah, wah, wah. Babble away, nerds. The law is what lawmakers decide, and if they decides copyright infringement == theft then there's nothing you can do. And your kindergarten-grade reasons aren't going to stand up in court, so shut up and remember your importance in the scheme of things - that's to say ZERO.
You are 50% correct. Thankfully, not one group of lawmakers (yet) has decided that copyright infringement == theft. If they did, there are a number of things people can do: 1) civil disobedience, and 2) lobby to have the law overturned, for starters. The other things people can do longer-term in the US are: 1) run for office so that eventually you ARE one of the people deciding this stuff, and 2) become an activist on issues you feel strongly about. If you don't feel strongly about them, then don't complain too loudly when decisions don't go the way you'd like.
I don't quite follow you here, although I agree about the DRM.
it started with "user friendliness" back in the 80s
This seems different than locking down a product to prevent modification... did you mean to link this to the fact that their products used to be expensive, and value form over features?
when the Mac floppy drives had no eject button,
4 ways to eject: Special->Eject Disk, drag to trash (I know, horrible metaphor), press the Eject Disk button in dialog boxes, or use a paper clip to press the recessed eject button.
the monitor was built into the case,
In 1984, Apple provided a choice between the Macintosh, and the Apple ][ series computer. The Mac was all-in-one, the ][ was modular, and booted into ProDOS. When Apple eventually discontinued the//GS, they were already selling modular Macintoshes in the LC series.
etc.
Normally there's a logical series of examples before an "etc" but I have no idea what your next example would be, based on what you've said so far. Is it that Apple released a free Resource editor that let you modify almost any applications that ran on the Macintosh OS to your heart's content? Was it the fact that each Mac included a programmer's switch so that if you wanted to do something outside the GUI, you pressed a button, and you had direct access to all the hardware, the kernel message parsing, poweful memory manipulation tools, real-time ASM tools and control of the OS primitives?
Now it's gotten more insidious with DRM all over the place and vendor lock-in with the iPhone.
Would you like to explain that? I know of DRM in two places: 1) iTunes DRM'd AAC files, and 2) CSS decoding in the DVD Player. The DVD Player also has other annoying restrictions: it is region aware, and it is feature lockdown aware. Both instances are explained up front, and are neither insiduous, nor "all over the place."
The iPhone is truely annoying, although I'd argue that it isn't because of the vendor lock-in -- that's par for the course. It's the OS lockdown that they've paired with that. EVERY other Apple device has allowed me to, with a small amount of research, modify EVERYTHING to my heart's content. Now suddenly Apple is making me agree to a contract that forbids me from modifying anything, and at the same time has locked down the software artificially to "protect Cingular." That IS both insiduous and, as far as I can see, AGAINST everything Apple has stood for in the past. I, for one, am not amused.
I'm expecting the iPhone to flop given its high price, lock-in, and open alternatives based on Qt and GTK hitting the market around the same time.
Why? Apple is obviously not selling to the people that would buy a Qt or GTK-based device. They've scoped out 1% of the cellular market, and they're gunning for that focused demographic with all they've got. I think they'll do very well in that market space. However, that space only overlaps with the iPod and Macintosh userspace; it does not encompass them. For one, it does not encompass me (neither does the iPod; I prefer a more customizable Palm device, even if the interface is worse. After all, I normally play in shuffle mode anyway).
The iPhone would need at least three more things before I would buy it: SDIO, third party app support (even if run in a sandbox), and tactile feedback of some sort. However, Apple's entry into the market has done a few things: 1) it has shown that some of these features (WiFi) can be put in a phone that a carrier will carry, 2) it has introduced a new interface device that is MUCH better than old touchscreen technology, 3) it has introduced the idea of a consumer acceptable fullscreen phone (OK, LG really did that, but hey...), and 4) it has added a shiny, "just works" user interface to the phone market. All of these things will help push the competition to come up with something at least on-par, and possibly innovate somethi
I think what we're seeing is some countries redefining ideas as property. Anyone who accepts this pairing will argue that copyright infringement is theft. Anyone who disagrees will say it isn't. The courts decide one way or another based on other factors (such as willfulness).
Here's another thought: people bandy about "fair use" all the time -- fair use is generally reporting about some concept, including enough of the actual idea so that the spin-off concept is actually relevant. This is seen in parody, education and research. How would we apply "fair use" to physical property? Fundamentally, we say that whoever possesses an object has the right to use it as they see fit -- as long as they acquired the object in a legal manner, and are not endangering anyone else (or themselves in some jurisdictions) with its use. The War on Drugs added another condition: use of the object must not promote other illegal activities.
Any further reflections on these two paragraphs will show that there *has* to be distinction between physical objects and ideas in how we claim ownership. Otherwise, ownership eventually becomes meaningless, as both everybody and nobody own everything.
One last thought: If I sold you a house my dead grandfather had built 68 years ago, how would you feel if that house reverted to being public property 2 years later?
In our culture, only ideas enter the public domain. And yes, each year some do, despite the efforts of corporations trying to preserve their moneymaking cultural icons of the previous century. Not allowing this would eventually mean that someday, all ideas would be owned by a limited few. MUCH more of a problem than how things have turned out with physical property.
It's a LOT easier now than it was when the alternative was Netscape 4, friend. Don't "lock it down tight", just don't use it at all until you actually need to for something that matters (that would be 'you can't get to your bank account without it'... not 'Youtube is screwing up with Firefox').
The problem with not using it at all is that third party malware can still use it, as the core runtime library is ALWAYS LOADED IN MEMORY as long as you have Windows Explorer running. If you only use Norton Commander or something similar, and kill the start bar and desktop and Explorer windows, IE is truely gone. Otherwise, all you have to do is have the wrong file sitting on your computer and it can auto-inject itself into IE whenever a number of routine OS functions are performed.
One solution, I guess, would be to dump Explorer for LiteStep, which works quite nicely on XP. It also has the bonus that anything compiled specifically for Windows OpenStep can usually run on x86 OS X without much hassle.
Kind of, except it would be more like using some third party using a third party created kernel hacking tool to fix patches, only to discover that the kernel hacking tool was insecure.
APE has been known to be an attack vector for years... it's a third party piece of software that lets other third parties make untrusted changes to the OS X kernel using a simple API. There are some really neat things done with it, and there have also been a few really buggy plugins made for it that can mess up the OS. Using APE to apply bugfixes was just asking for trouble.
The problem here is that it's almost impossible to avoid using Internet Explorer. I had mine locked down tight, and eventually found that I needed to allow ActiveX components to get anything done; some third party software depends on the vulnrable parts of IE being exposed, or it won't function correctly.
Personally, I think the solution to this is for MS to break compatibility with those apps -- after all, they've been breaking compatibility with other apps ever since Windows 2000... Vista kills even more legacy support. Why not just patch the COM handling, and tell the TPDs they have to fix THEIR software?
Right now, I'm in a situation where I have to find and create workarounds and patches for both MS apps and third party apps in order to for my computers to stay both secure and functional. On OS X, I just have to avoid using dangerous apps, like you suggested. Of course, as soon as someone finds an attack vector usable with Apple Events, OS X will be the Emperor's new OS.
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The change would basically make a broadcast into a performance of the work. The broadcaster owns the rights to the performance, not the work itself.
Funny... GP was talking about foreign policy. I don't know about anyone else, but if the US was telling MY country how to vote, who can go to school, and whether children are allowed to stay with their parents based on religious belief, I'd call it "behaving like a dick" too. What the US does inside its own borders is its own business, however.
The problem here is that the mainstream parties have both shown that they will do anything to stay in power, including disenfranchising party supporters. If people vote for a third party, even if only one candidate makes it, that candidate will know that the only chance they have to survive the next vote is to push their platform the best way they can. It helps that they won't be in a majority position, because they won't need to concern themselves with actually running the country; just opposing short-sighted programs and promoting their party's ideas.
I think a more elegant solution would be for someone to write a virtual CD-R package :)
Along with the re-aac suggestion in this thread, I have another one: Shouldn't it be possible to create a virtual cd-r? Then it can burn at 500x, and be deleted when it's done. There are a number of times I've wanted to virtualize burning a CD or DVD. Anyone up for the challenge?
Now let's talk about Linux, and how it stole most of its OSS from HURD. Talk about a leech!
Add to this the fact that tape-based recordings degrade over time. HD DVD is production quality, and will not degrade (unless people continue to compress it). Why buy a DVD when you can download a higher quality version of the movie for "free"?
Of course, the filesizes put a crimp in this logic; it is cheaper to buy the movie on DVD than it is to download it in HD-DVD. Again, falling short of the Tape analogy.
I buy Apple products. I don't buy DRM-laden Apple products. I don't buy Sony branded products, but I do buy products with Sony components.
Come to think of it, even my Palm doesn't fall into that category. Neither does any current generation computer-related hardware I can think of. I sure hope you don't own anything created by Sony (music, movies, dvd players, computer components, circuit board components).... If you respond "Every consumer electronics device I own runs Linux!" then I have this to say: Sure... but when the Clueless User looks at those devices, do they see Linux, or do they see the hardware manufacturer, who, one way or another, supports DRM?
So... what's the IP equivalent of obtaining land by conquest? Starting a recording label?
However, taking the other side of the argument, reneging on agreements/contracts IS often a crime, and is also immoral. If you have entered into a contract whereby you pay someone for the limited rights to use their idea, on the condition that you promise not to blab that idea, and then you blab it anyway, you have broken your contract. They can return your money, but you can never return their idea, like you could if you stole a physical object.
If you rip audio from a CD, you lose audio quality. Now, you might argue that Apple's AAC files are a lower quality than Redbook Audio from the get-go, but then so is FM Radio. That didn't stop people from recording it to audiocassette in the 80's. The lower audio quality is the same lower audio quality you purchased (after being able to listen to a sample) from Apple.
Also: both RedBook Audio and AAC are lesser audio quality than the original performance. In fact, RedBook Audio is closer to AAC in quality than it is to the original performance. Apple's AAC files have not been ripped from RedBook CDs; they have been mastered from the same original DATs as the RedBook Audio. So, you should think of them as alternative recording media, NOT as devolving recording media as many are in the habit of doing (and as would be the case if you made an AAC transcoding of your RedBook audio CD). I still listen to old grammaphone LPs transcoded to AAC. They'd sound identical to me whether I ripped them to RedBook Audio and burned that to a CD, or ripped them to 160kbps AAC and played that from wherever. My audio equipment injects more variance than I can spot between the digital waveforms.
I'm a musician. I have composed music. I have performed music live. I have recorded and mastered music. I have distributed music. I have made money off of music. However, I have never sold a recording of my music. I might at some point in the future, but that doesn't suddenly make it illegal to copy the recordings of my music that I haven't set such copy restrictions upon.
I am also a software developer. I have designed software. I have written throwaway scripts to solve immediate problems. I have compiled and packaged software. I have distributed software. I have made money off of software. However, even though I have released shareware, I have never made money off of it. I do, however, have my name in the credits of a number of open source software packages.
I am also a writer. Many of the above statements apply here too. The point is that individuals can still produce original content and hold the rights to it; they can also make a living doing this. At no point are they required to make their profit off of restricting distribution of their original content and selling each instance as if it were the first sale. Enough can be made off of the first sale, and the understanding and skill behind that first sale.
I've been able to re-use IP I have created in subsequent contracts; the customer could already have got some of it for free, but they would rather pay for it and get something with the same quality but customized for them. Sort of like a potter making custom pottery. Anyone can buy clay. Anyone can buy cheap clay knockoffs of already made objects. Not everybody can make custom pottery. If someone makes a mug with a before-unthought-of lip design that is easier to drink from, and I copy this design, I could be guilty of copyright and/or patent infringement. I would not be stealing the person's mug, however; no matter how many of them I made and distributed myself.
When something is stolen, it is stolen from the person who currently holds it. When copyright is infringed, only the market of the original manufacturer is diluted; nothing is stolen from the person who currently holds it. Were the two conflatable, I would be stealing from my friend when I copied an audio track from his CD. As it is, I am legally copying an audio track; he has lost nothing. Of course, in some backward countries like the US, that copying is not legal. Instead, they have made it against civil law to dilute the manufacturer's (not the owner's) market. This doesn't mean it is suddenly stealing.
The Audio Cartel would like this to be treated as theft instead of dilution. Why? Because if you sell a used CD, it doesn't dilute the market, even though it can cut into the New Sales market through the Cartel's sales channels. Thus, selling a used CD is legal. However, if transfer was theft and not dilution, selling a used CD would be theft. That's why these semantics are so important.
Or, do what the iTMS FAQ says to do, and burn a backup audio CD of all music you buy from iTMS. It backs it up as RedBook Audio, which is DRM-Free. You can even burn DVDs of RedBook Audio. A single-layer DVD-R will store just over 8.5 hours of RedBook Audio. If the statistics cited above are true, and most people don't have more than 50 songs purchased through iTMS, that means (assuming 3.5 minutes per song) that all iTMS purchases can be stored in a DRM free format on a single DVD-R, which will take less than an hour to burn. The end result is no DRM, no loss in data quality (re-import in a lossless format if you want to preserve the quality), and a backup of your music (which you DO do, right?).
The end result is that the easiest way to do such things might soon be to run your app inside Linux in VMWare (for instance, run the MythTV LiveCD inside VMWare). That is, of course, assuming that VMWare is allowed access to that hardware by Vista, which seems questionable to me.
I don't quite follow you here, although I agree about the DRM.
it started with "user friendliness" back in the 80s
This seems different than locking down a product to prevent modification... did you mean to link this to the fact that their products used to be expensive, and value form over features?
when the Mac floppy drives had no eject button,
4 ways to eject: Special->Eject Disk, drag to trash (I know, horrible metaphor), press the Eject Disk button in dialog boxes, or use a paper clip to press the recessed eject button.
the monitor was built into the case, //GS, they were already selling modular Macintoshes in the LC series.
In 1984, Apple provided a choice between the Macintosh, and the Apple ][ series computer. The Mac was all-in-one, the ][ was modular, and booted into ProDOS. When Apple eventually discontinued the
etc.
Normally there's a logical series of examples before an "etc" but I have no idea what your next example would be, based on what you've said so far. Is it that Apple released a free Resource editor that let you modify almost any applications that ran on the Macintosh OS to your heart's content? Was it the fact that each Mac included a programmer's switch so that if you wanted to do something outside the GUI, you pressed a button, and you had direct access to all the hardware, the kernel message parsing, poweful memory manipulation tools, real-time ASM tools and control of the OS primitives?
Now it's gotten more insidious with DRM all over the place and vendor lock-in with the iPhone.
Would you like to explain that? I know of DRM in two places: 1) iTunes DRM'd AAC files, and 2) CSS decoding in the DVD Player. The DVD Player also has other annoying restrictions: it is region aware, and it is feature lockdown aware. Both instances are explained up front, and are neither insiduous, nor "all over the place."
The iPhone is truely annoying, although I'd argue that it isn't because of the vendor lock-in -- that's par for the course. It's the OS lockdown that they've paired with that. EVERY other Apple device has allowed me to, with a small amount of research, modify EVERYTHING to my heart's content. Now suddenly Apple is making me agree to a contract that forbids me from modifying anything, and at the same time has locked down the software artificially to "protect Cingular." That IS both insiduous and, as far as I can see, AGAINST everything Apple has stood for in the past. I, for one, am not amused.
I'm expecting the iPhone to flop given its high price, lock-in, and open alternatives based on Qt and GTK hitting the market around the same time.
Why? Apple is obviously not selling to the people that would buy a Qt or GTK-based device. They've scoped out 1% of the cellular market, and they're gunning for that focused demographic with all they've got. I think they'll do very well in that market space. However, that space only overlaps with the iPod and Macintosh userspace; it does not encompass them. For one, it does not encompass me (neither does the iPod; I prefer a more customizable Palm device, even if the interface is worse. After all, I normally play in shuffle mode anyway).
The iPhone would need at least three more things before I would buy it: SDIO, third party app support (even if run in a sandbox), and tactile feedback of some sort. However, Apple's entry into the market has done a few things: 1) it has shown that some of these features (WiFi) can be put in a phone that a carrier will carry, 2) it has introduced a new interface device that is MUCH better than old touchscreen technology, 3) it has introduced the idea of a consumer acceptable fullscreen phone (OK, LG really did that, but hey...), and 4) it has added a shiny, "just works" user interface to the phone market. All of these things will help push the competition to come up with something at least on-par, and possibly innovate somethi
Here's another thought: people bandy about "fair use" all the time -- fair use is generally reporting about some concept, including enough of the actual idea so that the spin-off concept is actually relevant. This is seen in parody, education and research. How would we apply "fair use" to physical property? Fundamentally, we say that whoever possesses an object has the right to use it as they see fit -- as long as they acquired the object in a legal manner, and are not endangering anyone else (or themselves in some jurisdictions) with its use. The War on Drugs added another condition: use of the object must not promote other illegal activities.
Any further reflections on these two paragraphs will show that there *has* to be distinction between physical objects and ideas in how we claim ownership. Otherwise, ownership eventually becomes meaningless, as both everybody and nobody own everything.
One last thought: If I sold you a house my dead grandfather had built 68 years ago, how would you feel if that house reverted to being public property 2 years later?
In our culture, only ideas enter the public domain. And yes, each year some do, despite the efforts of corporations trying to preserve their moneymaking cultural icons of the previous century. Not allowing this would eventually mean that someday, all ideas would be owned by a limited few. MUCH more of a problem than how things have turned out with physical property.
APE has been known to be an attack vector for years... it's a third party piece of software that lets other third parties make untrusted changes to the OS X kernel using a simple API. There are some really neat things done with it, and there have also been a few really buggy plugins made for it that can mess up the OS. Using APE to apply bugfixes was just asking for trouble.
Personally, I think the solution to this is for MS to break compatibility with those apps -- after all, they've been breaking compatibility with other apps ever since Windows 2000... Vista kills even more legacy support. Why not just patch the COM handling, and tell the TPDs they have to fix THEIR software?
Right now, I'm in a situation where I have to find and create workarounds and patches for both MS apps and third party apps in order to for my computers to stay both secure and functional. On OS X, I just have to avoid using dangerous apps, like you suggested. Of course, as soon as someone finds an attack vector usable with Apple Events, OS X will be the Emperor's new OS.