The issue is that moderate Muslims so rarely have anything bad to say about this, and what's more, "moderate" Muslims often do agree with two core principles: Sharia law is actually a good thing, and Islam (and Sharia) should take over the world.
If you watch only Fox news, or don't really watch international news, you could certainly get that impression. Remember the big blowup over cartoons of Mohammed a few years back? I remember the footage of muslim clerics placing themselves bodily between the embassy and a crowd of angry citizens with rocks, preaching to them to stop and interposing their own bodies to stop rocks from hitting a building.
To put this in perspective, imagine a muslim huge army had just come into Mexico and overthrown their corrupt leaders. They set up a government beholden to them, gave over huge amounts of the land and businesses to mostly muslim foreign investors and had just build a number of very large, permanent military bases there. Imagine you live in Texas and it is filled with christian refugees from the war torn area telling you about their friends and family killed in bombings or shot for no reason. Many people, including some in the invading army refer to this as a crusade against the evil christians and many in the middle east are calling for further action to stop the dangerous radical christians. Under very real threat of invasion from the south, tensions are high and realistically, the US army is simply too small to stop an invasion if it happens. Now further imagine someone publishes a blasphemous anti-christian video, say of jesus partaking in a rape or killing of muslim children that implies all christians are a violent threat, just the excuse used to invade Mexico. So a mob of angry Texans goes to the Iranian embassy in Houston and is throwing rocks and protesting the video and the invasion. Now picture local christian priests showing up to stop the protests and put their lives at risk by confronting an angry mob. Would it happen? I'd like to think so, but I'm by no means certain it would.
Radicals are radicals and your assumption that most muslims want to impose their religion on others is simply that, your assumption. There are quite a few moderate and progressive muslims. There are also a lot of radical christians in the US these days. Heck, you can't even publish nudity or sex on regular TV because of their religiously based censorship. It's not like christians have the high ground of tolerance and freedom of expression to pontificate from.
Or Silverlight or Realmedia files or Powerpoint files... but that sort of misses the point. To allow an publisher to reach iPhone users, Apple doesn't have to support every kind of file format that ever existed. They jsut have to support open standard formats and developer can use. ANY publisher can create content iPhone users can see by making a standards compliant Web page.
"Ticketmaster may have monopoly influence, but they haven't been leveraging that into other markets. Simply having a monopoly is not illegal."
Ticketmaster made the same sort of lock-out deals with venues that MS made with OEMs.
You seem to be under the mistaken impression that MS was in court for "lock-out deals" instead of illegally tying IE and Windows. In order for Ticketmaster to be in the same situation they would have not only had to have a lock-in on venues as they do, but bundle a "free" beverage coupon for their new line of beer which they require all venues they do business with to carry at the bar.
I guess I can't give your pet theories about influence brokering much credit because you don't seem to understand antitrust law well enough to even know what's going on. You should really read a bit on the topic, heck just read the wikipedia page.
Peer review (as formalized by scientific journals gatekeeping their publishing) is not a necessary part of the process.
Peer review is a necessary part of modern science as it is the only way methodological issues can be raised so that alternate hypothesis can be proposed and tested.
it shines a bright light on exactly what peer review is, and what it isn't. It is *not* science. It *is* a way of restricting publishing.
Peer review does not restrict publishing. You can publish anywhere you want. Peer review weeds out much of the garbage where no one has looked at or critically examined research. That's why people not directly researching the exact topic generally don't bother with non-peer reviewed science. If it can't stand up to peer review, usually there is a very good reason.
Part of the problem is that science is a moving target.
For a rational mind, that shouldn't be a problem at all. It's only for the irrational who want a belief without anything behind it that this becomes a problem. A reasoning mind "believes" whatever the best evidence to date supports.
The truth is very slippery.
The "truth" is irrelevant. We can never absolutely prove or know anything outside of mathematics. In the real world we don't have a "truth". We just have rational, logically supported belief, and irrational belief.
And yet, if you want to get technical about it, what we currently think is "the truth" about the origin of the universe is a collection of models that agree with the data to some extent. Some of these models are guaranteed to be overturned.
All of them will be changed as they become more specific and as more evidence comes to light. That is not a reason to believe the opposite of what the data is currently supporting. That's called "being irrational".
Activists on both sides of an issue do the same thing. Each side chooses the evidence that supports their predetermined belief. The other side of "scientific impotence" is "appeal to authority".
Appeal to authority implies people believe whatever a supposed expert says without evidence. Science is about a formalized logical method of forming beliefs based upon inductive support for deductive evidence. Peer review is also part of this process. I'd like to think the people conducting these studies were very careful about what they labelled as "science" but based upon their choice of topics, I doubt it. That said, citing belief in the scientific consensus presented by experts in a field is not an appeal to authority, but is supported by a logical process. It is the opposite of a logical fallacy.
Once issues become politicalized it becomes very difficult to make a scientific judgement one way or another because of all the competing agendas and misinformation on both sides.
Not really, because there is always data and methodologies and peer review. You just have to think critically and logically. If only we taught logic, critical thinking, and the hands on application of the scientific method in schools.
Also, as the CEO of Warner Music Group I hereby give you my permission to distribute any work that falls under our copyright.
You do not really have a reason to beleive that I am lying do you?
You wrote, "They've learned their lesson and are now paying..." Was the "They" not Apple in your sentence? You were replying to a comment about Apple and MS had not been mentioned.
I was just making the point that before the DOJ actions against them, MS wasn't making any political contributions while their competitors were.
And your theory is that they were "targeted" because of this?
Ticketmaster had a more credible monopoly than MS ever did...
Ticketmaster may have monopoly influence, but they haven't been leveraging that into other markets. Simply having a monopoly is not illegal.
That does not strike me as entirely unreasonable, since, by default, every work of art in the U.S. is copyright upon creation. Registration is not necessary for basic copyright rights.
It's just another movement of the copyright goalposts that always go in the same direction. But you may have missed the note that this is not how other works are treated, like photographs... only audio works. It would also mean you can't make a recording fair use and let people copy it freely since they will have to constantly research it to try to prove it has been licensed and even then, just because someone says it isn't copyrighted and posts it, how do you know they're telling the truth? I suppose there are audio search programs/databases now, but no free ones I know of.
Does the defendant merely have to be ignorant of the existence of a copy with a copyright notice, or also ignorant of the fact that what he has is covered by copyright?
The defendant in a normal "innocent infringer" case does not have to be ignorant that the work is copyrighted, but that the work is not public domain or licensed such that it can be used. There are countless public domain works and works freely available to be copied on the internet. The difference in this case is the courts are placing the onus on the infringer to research and find out the copyright info, as opposed to how they treat media other than phonographic recordings.
Actually, I'd bet that eventually it will happen if not at WWDC just to ward off any anti-trust issues with iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch development being tied to owning at least one Mac computer.
How would that constitute an antitrust issue? Tying is not illegal in the general case. Buy Blamo brand shampoo get a mini bottle of Blamo conditioner for free. Whee they're bundled. It's perfectly legal until you gain dominance in one of the relevant markets.
Seriously, they don't encrypt the content of an iPhone by default? I mean, it's not the default on Blackberry, but it's there and Blackberry have been around for a long time. When making a new device, why not build encryption into the filesystem? Apple has all the components already from their desktop and it can't suck that much battery. Now Apple is offering encryption just for e-mail? Really, that isn't good enough. And while I'm at it, Google what's up with you doing the same bloody thing? Come on guys. It's 2010. Encryption should be there by default so if your phone is stolen the data is useless, especially if you're going to offer a remote wipe. Wiping just the keys is a lot faster than hoping they don't turn it off while you wipe the whole drive.
What I'm suggesting is that, if Apple changes course and allows Firefox on the iPhone...
Then they will have completely changed their business strategy and depending upon what the new strategy is, could do anything.
they will require that Mozilla remove support for Ogg Video (particularly now that Ogg video is being supported by Google). Hopefully I'm wrong.
I know that's what you're saying, but I don't see that it makes a lick of sense. Why would that be in Apple's best interests?
I doubt anyone is making much off of H264 right now, but if you want to get some idea of how much could be made from H264 once its position is secure take a look at MP3 - Thomson is making a ton off of that and I think that video has much greater potential.
Yeah, except Apple doesn't own MPEG-LA, they own a couple of patents in the pool meaning they stand to make little or nothing, especially compared to the profit they make by selling more hardware.
I think that Apple's hostility to Ogg would be just as much from Google involvement with Ogg as from any ability to make money from H264.
What hostility? Apple doesn't block Ogg using programs on the iPhone. They let you use Ogg codecs on Macs. My Safari browser open Oggs via video tags just fine, because it uses any codecs you install on the machine, including Ogg. They just didn't want it as the standard in HTML5 video for the same reason Google did not, they handle a lot of video and performance means money to them. Getting good battery performance on iPods, iPhones, etc. when it is not supported by existing hardware would be a nightmare for Apple. Added bandwidth costs for YouTube would likewise be a problem for Google. It's not that either has a grudge against Ogg, they just didn't want it to be the one and only standard in HTML for business reasons. You'll note Google isn't offering an Ogg version of YouTube.
In any event, the ideal would be for Apple to explain the rules for what they block and what they don't and enforce them consistently.
They can't catch all violations because they don't have the manpower, but almost every instance of an app being not accepted is a case of it not being within the published rules. Now here on Slashdot it is clear lot of people never bothered to read those rules and never bother to RTFAs that explain such when it happens in the news.
For now, it appears that they reserve the right to block anything that is not in their financial and strategic interest.
They certainly can, it's their application service. I find it a bit restrictive so I don't own an iPhone or use their app store. I don't see why this is a problem.
From ClosedSource, yeah I think it' a troll. Apple has always made political contributions to both parties, mostly democrats. The implication is Apple has changed who they contribute to or how much since the DoJ announced they were making an investigation, but since nothing has been provided to support that claim, he's probably just trolling for responses without anything behind his statements.
Why not just build javascript + html5 + css3 web apps? You get full platform independence and no app store hassles.
If such apps started to get really popular, Apple would have to implement a mechanism to enable them to charge for access to them.
You can sell apps on the app store or give them away for free. You can package Web apps as regular apps on the app store and sell them or give them away for free. You can put Web apps on the Web and charge for access or give them away for free. So how did your post get modded "insightful"? Apple wants and encourages developers to give apps away because it makes Apple money by motivating the sale of iPhones. You're clueless and so is whoever modded you up as anything but "funny".
Seems like they're trying to dodge the DoJ by adding "competition."
No one has yet explained what dev tools have to do with competition law for a platform with 20% of the market. This is just another rumor based upon speculation about other speculation. Don't hold your breath.
f Mozilla gets Firefox on the iPhone by agreeing to tailor Firefox to Apple's wishes (e.g. strip out Ogg or anything else that Apple doesn't like) then that would be a total sellout on Mozilla's part.
Mozilla can get Firefox on the iPhone the same way Opera did, by following the rules. No interpreted code, which probably means a complete rewrite of the Firefox architecture. Mind you, there are apps to play Ogg on the iPhone, so I doubt that would be an objection. Apple doesn't seem to have any problem with Ogg in general, they just want to use a hardware optimized format as much as possible for defaults.
Apple has a financial interest in H264
You should probably do some more research. Apple makes little or nothing in H.264 licensing. They're a very minor patent holder in the pool. It's not in any way significant compared to the money they make selling more iPhones and iPods.
What if iPhone Firefox had a built-in Flash viewer that would be activated only after the software were approved, e.g. with a datebomb or visiting a secret website that would not be available until "everyone" had the app installed?
Then apple would revoke the keys for security reasons and it would stop working, of course.
This could be the crowbar move to get Apple moving with Flash after everyone sees how wonderful it is.
"This case is that Apple is using it's "monopoly" on music sales to limit Amazon's ability to sell music. Namely, by demanding that the music labels cannot give preferential pricing to a third party without offering it on Apple's store as well. If a music label wants to make a track of the week 70 cents on Amazon, it also becomes 70 cents on iTunes."
Exactly, what if someone went after walmart for selling cheaper items? Its called competition asshats...
The difference here is what you're buying at Walmart. You see, the RIAA is a trust, convicted multiple times of leveraging their cartel on music publishing in order to harm competition and fix prices. It's an interesting example, because the RIAA and Walmart have actually fought over this very issue. The RIAA has been fighting to maintain control and made statements about how they didn't want Apple to be another Walmart able to force them to offer price discounts and block them from leveraging their cartel.
For the sake of simplicity, let's use an analogy. In most places, electrical power distribution is a local monopoly for a number of reasons. Since that's one of the few monopolies that is well known to consumers, it makes a good example. Now suppose a couple of "filling stations" for electric cars started operating and one of them took over 70% of the market. They're a large, bulk customer and they also install a wind farm on the premises to lower costs. The power company demanded they remove it and were rebuffed. So suppose your local power distributor decided to start charging higher prices to that charging station and lower prices to their rival. And what if they made a deal that on days where power was constrained by brownouts, they'd provide power to one of the charging stations but not the other, simply to force more customers to the smaller company to prevent either from having enough power to stand up to them. Now the smaller charging station isn't doing anything illegal, but the power distribution monopoly is. They're violating antitrust law and the deal they made with that charging station is illegal. In this example the RIAA is the power distributor, and Apple and Amazon are the filling stations.
IF amazon sells cheaper music then I will buy from them. Apple cannot dictate that it's unfair something is cheaper somewhere else.
Because the RIAA has monopoly influence on the music publishing market, it is illegal for them to charge different prices to different people for the same products. Apple can certainly tell the RIAA that, and if this goes to court, you have two companies potentially with monopoly influence and hopefully the courts will do the right thing. Breaking up the RIAA would, of course, be ideal, but since their former employees are running the justice department, that seems unlikely.
As they say on Slashdot, "but X is not a monopoly like Y! they play by different rules!". Normally, X=Apple and Y=Microsoft; in this particular case, X=Amazon and Y=Apple.
Actually, everyone plays by the same rules, but those rules apply to monopolized markets. In this case Apple might have sufficient dominance in the digital music download market. The RIAA does have sufficient influence in the music publishing market (multiple antitrust convictions). Amazon does not seem to have monopoly influence, but the RIAA making exclusive deals with them probably is a violation of the law and illegal. For that matter, the differential pricing afforded to Amazon and which they claim as a trade secret is almost certainly illegal as well. While Amazon may not be held liable for those deals, that doesn't mean the RIAA will not be convicted and those deals abrogated.
Of course, the matter of Apple being a monopoly in the first place is a separate one. But, apparently, they have 70% of online music sales market, so there is good reason to look into it closely, which is precisely what they're doing.
Agreed. Although really this is the result of the courts not dealing effectively with existing criminal trusts. Apple is close on market share for digital music downloads and portable digital players, both markets where the RIAA and Microsoft have been abusing their existing and legally established dominant market shares. MS has been convicted, in fact, with regard to Windows Media Player. So when Apple leverages their market share, it raises my ire less. So far their "abuses" have done more to make the market competitive than anything by countering the influence of other monopolists in ways that benefit the consumer. I've no illusions this is for any reason other than that it happens to benefit Apple financially, mind you, but for the courts to intervene here after turning a blind eye or providing a legal slap on the wrist to the others would be a travesty against the consumer.
But that's not damage from the infringement. Generally the method used for copyright infringement is to try to calculate lost sales. In the case of free software in the past, this has been zero in more than one case, with punitive damages being awarded only.
The OP suggested that AAPL are overvalued by the market. You can't use the P/E as evidence they aren't because the P is the very valuation the OP argued is too high!
No, you can't use it in isolation, only in conjunction with estimates by analysts and growth history.
Growth doesn't magically continue because it happened last year and the substantial sort of growth that seems to be factored into the Apple price seems (to me) to require significant successful new products. The iPod and iPhone have been radically successful but I'm not convinced Apple have other new business directions lined up to continue such growth
Before the iPod it was the iMac, then iBook, then mini. But the thing is, Apple's growth is fueled by more than future successes. All their major products are still growing in the market. Mac sales are up 30% year over year. The saturated iPod market, up 12%. iPhone, still increasing. Last quarter Apple managed a 90% increase in profit over the previous year, while the stock price went up 7%. The street is being very conservative considering how consistent Apple has been. Most analysts have price targets way higher than the current selling price. This trend is what 8-10 years now? I'm not a big fan of most of Apple's products (I do use a Mac) but to not recognize that they are a very, very consistently growing company with a plan to continue verges on irrational.
Low pe values tend to equate to stability, high not so much...
Actually, low P/E values usually correlate with companies that aren't growing or where growth is erratic. Many companies with low P/E values aren't even close to what you would call stable, with large growth one quarter and a drop off the next, or with negative growth.
High P/E values tend to correspond to companies that the market believes are a sure thing, or are constantly growing.
No, the P/E suggest how investors believe a company will grow. It's how the market represents companies that have steady and predictable growth, as Apple has for quite some time. Low P/E generally means the company is not expected to grow, or the chances of growth are low.
Clearly they have to be regarded in context, but in this context of tech stocks, I think it's fairly clear. Apple is gaining in value because they are growing consistently in all different economic climates. Middle of the road analysts have target prices 20% above the current price, with some going a lot further than that.
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The issue is that moderate Muslims so rarely have anything bad to say about this, and what's more, "moderate" Muslims often do agree with two core principles: Sharia law is actually a good thing, and Islam (and Sharia) should take over the world.
If you watch only Fox news, or don't really watch international news, you could certainly get that impression. Remember the big blowup over cartoons of Mohammed a few years back? I remember the footage of muslim clerics placing themselves bodily between the embassy and a crowd of angry citizens with rocks, preaching to them to stop and interposing their own bodies to stop rocks from hitting a building.
To put this in perspective, imagine a muslim huge army had just come into Mexico and overthrown their corrupt leaders. They set up a government beholden to them, gave over huge amounts of the land and businesses to mostly muslim foreign investors and had just build a number of very large, permanent military bases there. Imagine you live in Texas and it is filled with christian refugees from the war torn area telling you about their friends and family killed in bombings or shot for no reason. Many people, including some in the invading army refer to this as a crusade against the evil christians and many in the middle east are calling for further action to stop the dangerous radical christians. Under very real threat of invasion from the south, tensions are high and realistically, the US army is simply too small to stop an invasion if it happens. Now further imagine someone publishes a blasphemous anti-christian video, say of jesus partaking in a rape or killing of muslim children that implies all christians are a violent threat, just the excuse used to invade Mexico. So a mob of angry Texans goes to the Iranian embassy in Houston and is throwing rocks and protesting the video and the invasion. Now picture local christian priests showing up to stop the protests and put their lives at risk by confronting an angry mob. Would it happen? I'd like to think so, but I'm by no means certain it would.
Radicals are radicals and your assumption that most muslims want to impose their religion on others is simply that, your assumption. There are quite a few moderate and progressive muslims. There are also a lot of radical christians in the US these days. Heck, you can't even publish nudity or sex on regular TV because of their religiously based censorship. It's not like christians have the high ground of tolerance and freedom of expression to pontificate from.
Just let me view site number 1. nope, flash.
Or Silverlight or Realmedia files or Powerpoint files... but that sort of misses the point. To allow an publisher to reach iPhone users, Apple doesn't have to support every kind of file format that ever existed. They jsut have to support open standard formats and developer can use. ANY publisher can create content iPhone users can see by making a standards compliant Web page.
"Ticketmaster may have monopoly influence, but they haven't been leveraging that into other markets. Simply having a monopoly is not illegal."
Ticketmaster made the same sort of lock-out deals with venues that MS made with OEMs.
You seem to be under the mistaken impression that MS was in court for "lock-out deals" instead of illegally tying IE and Windows. In order for Ticketmaster to be in the same situation they would have not only had to have a lock-in on venues as they do, but bundle a "free" beverage coupon for their new line of beer which they require all venues they do business with to carry at the bar.
I guess I can't give your pet theories about influence brokering much credit because you don't seem to understand antitrust law well enough to even know what's going on. You should really read a bit on the topic, heck just read the wikipedia page.
Peer review (as formalized by scientific journals gatekeeping their publishing) is not a necessary part of the process.
Peer review is a necessary part of modern science as it is the only way methodological issues can be raised so that alternate hypothesis can be proposed and tested.
it shines a bright light on exactly what peer review is, and what it isn't. It is *not* science. It *is* a way of restricting publishing.
Peer review does not restrict publishing. You can publish anywhere you want. Peer review weeds out much of the garbage where no one has looked at or critically examined research. That's why people not directly researching the exact topic generally don't bother with non-peer reviewed science. If it can't stand up to peer review, usually there is a very good reason.
Part of the problem is that science is a moving target.
For a rational mind, that shouldn't be a problem at all. It's only for the irrational who want a belief without anything behind it that this becomes a problem. A reasoning mind "believes" whatever the best evidence to date supports.
The truth is very slippery.
The "truth" is irrelevant. We can never absolutely prove or know anything outside of mathematics. In the real world we don't have a "truth". We just have rational, logically supported belief, and irrational belief.
And yet, if you want to get technical about it, what we currently think is "the truth" about the origin of the universe is a collection of models that agree with the data to some extent. Some of these models are guaranteed to be overturned.
All of them will be changed as they become more specific and as more evidence comes to light. That is not a reason to believe the opposite of what the data is currently supporting. That's called "being irrational".
Activists on both sides of an issue do the same thing. Each side chooses the evidence that supports their predetermined belief. The other side of "scientific impotence" is "appeal to authority".
Appeal to authority implies people believe whatever a supposed expert says without evidence. Science is about a formalized logical method of forming beliefs based upon inductive support for deductive evidence. Peer review is also part of this process. I'd like to think the people conducting these studies were very careful about what they labelled as "science" but based upon their choice of topics, I doubt it. That said, citing belief in the scientific consensus presented by experts in a field is not an appeal to authority, but is supported by a logical process. It is the opposite of a logical fallacy.
Once issues become politicalized it becomes very difficult to make a scientific judgement one way or another because of all the competing agendas and misinformation on both sides.
Not really, because there is always data and methodologies and peer review. You just have to think critically and logically. If only we taught logic, critical thinking, and the hands on application of the scientific method in schools.
Also, as the CEO of Warner Music Group I hereby give you my permission to distribute any work that falls under our copyright. You do not really have a reason to beleive that I am lying do you?
Nope and thanks, I'll begin distribution.
Actually, I wasn't implying anything about Apple.
You wrote, "They've learned their lesson and are now paying..." Was the "They" not Apple in your sentence? You were replying to a comment about Apple and MS had not been mentioned.
I was just making the point that before the DOJ actions against them, MS wasn't making any political contributions while their competitors were.
And your theory is that they were "targeted" because of this?
Ticketmaster had a more credible monopoly than MS ever did...
Ticketmaster may have monopoly influence, but they haven't been leveraging that into other markets. Simply having a monopoly is not illegal.
That does not strike me as entirely unreasonable, since, by default, every work of art in the U.S. is copyright upon creation. Registration is not necessary for basic copyright rights.
It's just another movement of the copyright goalposts that always go in the same direction. But you may have missed the note that this is not how other works are treated, like photographs... only audio works. It would also mean you can't make a recording fair use and let people copy it freely since they will have to constantly research it to try to prove it has been licensed and even then, just because someone says it isn't copyrighted and posts it, how do you know they're telling the truth? I suppose there are audio search programs/databases now, but no free ones I know of.
Does the defendant merely have to be ignorant of the existence of a copy with a copyright notice, or also ignorant of the fact that what he has is covered by copyright?
The defendant in a normal "innocent infringer" case does not have to be ignorant that the work is copyrighted, but that the work is not public domain or licensed such that it can be used. There are countless public domain works and works freely available to be copied on the internet. The difference in this case is the courts are placing the onus on the infringer to research and find out the copyright info, as opposed to how they treat media other than phonographic recordings.
Actually, I'd bet that eventually it will happen if not at WWDC just to ward off any anti-trust issues with iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch development being tied to owning at least one Mac computer.
How would that constitute an antitrust issue? Tying is not illegal in the general case. Buy Blamo brand shampoo get a mini bottle of Blamo conditioner for free. Whee they're bundled. It's perfectly legal until you gain dominance in one of the relevant markets.
Seriously, they don't encrypt the content of an iPhone by default? I mean, it's not the default on Blackberry, but it's there and Blackberry have been around for a long time. When making a new device, why not build encryption into the filesystem? Apple has all the components already from their desktop and it can't suck that much battery. Now Apple is offering encryption just for e-mail? Really, that isn't good enough. And while I'm at it, Google what's up with you doing the same bloody thing? Come on guys. It's 2010. Encryption should be there by default so if your phone is stolen the data is useless, especially if you're going to offer a remote wipe. Wiping just the keys is a lot faster than hoping they don't turn it off while you wipe the whole drive.
What I'm suggesting is that, if Apple changes course and allows Firefox on the iPhone...
Then they will have completely changed their business strategy and depending upon what the new strategy is, could do anything.
they will require that Mozilla remove support for Ogg Video (particularly now that Ogg video is being supported by Google). Hopefully I'm wrong.
I know that's what you're saying, but I don't see that it makes a lick of sense. Why would that be in Apple's best interests?
I doubt anyone is making much off of H264 right now, but if you want to get some idea of how much could be made from H264 once its position is secure take a look at MP3 - Thomson is making a ton off of that and I think that video has much greater potential.
Yeah, except Apple doesn't own MPEG-LA, they own a couple of patents in the pool meaning they stand to make little or nothing, especially compared to the profit they make by selling more hardware.
I think that Apple's hostility to Ogg would be just as much from Google involvement with Ogg as from any ability to make money from H264.
What hostility? Apple doesn't block Ogg using programs on the iPhone. They let you use Ogg codecs on Macs. My Safari browser open Oggs via video tags just fine, because it uses any codecs you install on the machine, including Ogg. They just didn't want it as the standard in HTML5 video for the same reason Google did not, they handle a lot of video and performance means money to them. Getting good battery performance on iPods, iPhones, etc. when it is not supported by existing hardware would be a nightmare for Apple. Added bandwidth costs for YouTube would likewise be a problem for Google. It's not that either has a grudge against Ogg, they just didn't want it to be the one and only standard in HTML for business reasons. You'll note Google isn't offering an Ogg version of YouTube.
In any event, the ideal would be for Apple to explain the rules for what they block and what they don't and enforce them consistently.
They can't catch all violations because they don't have the manpower, but almost every instance of an app being not accepted is a case of it not being within the published rules. Now here on Slashdot it is clear lot of people never bothered to read those rules and never bother to RTFAs that explain such when it happens in the news.
For now, it appears that they reserve the right to block anything that is not in their financial and strategic interest.
They certainly can, it's their application service. I find it a bit restrictive so I don't own an iPhone or use their app store. I don't see why this is a problem.
From ClosedSource, yeah I think it' a troll. Apple has always made political contributions to both parties, mostly democrats. The implication is Apple has changed who they contribute to or how much since the DoJ announced they were making an investigation, but since nothing has been provided to support that claim, he's probably just trolling for responses without anything behind his statements.
Why not just build javascript + html5 + css3 web apps? You get full platform independence and no app store hassles.
If such apps started to get really popular, Apple would have to implement a mechanism to enable them to charge for access to them.
You can sell apps on the app store or give them away for free. You can package Web apps as regular apps on the app store and sell them or give them away for free. You can put Web apps on the Web and charge for access or give them away for free. So how did your post get modded "insightful"? Apple wants and encourages developers to give apps away because it makes Apple money by motivating the sale of iPhones. You're clueless and so is whoever modded you up as anything but "funny".
Seems like they're trying to dodge the DoJ by adding "competition."
No one has yet explained what dev tools have to do with competition law for a platform with 20% of the market. This is just another rumor based upon speculation about other speculation. Don't hold your breath.
f Mozilla gets Firefox on the iPhone by agreeing to tailor Firefox to Apple's wishes (e.g. strip out Ogg or anything else that Apple doesn't like) then that would be a total sellout on Mozilla's part.
Mozilla can get Firefox on the iPhone the same way Opera did, by following the rules. No interpreted code, which probably means a complete rewrite of the Firefox architecture. Mind you, there are apps to play Ogg on the iPhone, so I doubt that would be an objection. Apple doesn't seem to have any problem with Ogg in general, they just want to use a hardware optimized format as much as possible for defaults.
Apple has a financial interest in H264
You should probably do some more research. Apple makes little or nothing in H.264 licensing. They're a very minor patent holder in the pool. It's not in any way significant compared to the money they make selling more iPhones and iPods.
What if iPhone Firefox had a built-in Flash viewer that would be activated only after the software were approved, e.g. with a datebomb or visiting a secret website that would not be available until "everyone" had the app installed?
Then apple would revoke the keys for security reasons and it would stop working, of course.
This could be the crowbar move to get Apple moving with Flash after everyone sees how wonderful it is.
Ha ha ha. No.
"This case is that Apple is using it's "monopoly" on music sales to limit Amazon's ability to sell music. Namely, by demanding that the music labels cannot give preferential pricing to a third party without offering it on Apple's store as well. If a music label wants to make a track of the week 70 cents on Amazon, it also becomes 70 cents on iTunes."
Exactly, what if someone went after walmart for selling cheaper items? Its called competition asshats...
The difference here is what you're buying at Walmart. You see, the RIAA is a trust, convicted multiple times of leveraging their cartel on music publishing in order to harm competition and fix prices. It's an interesting example, because the RIAA and Walmart have actually fought over this very issue. The RIAA has been fighting to maintain control and made statements about how they didn't want Apple to be another Walmart able to force them to offer price discounts and block them from leveraging their cartel.
For the sake of simplicity, let's use an analogy. In most places, electrical power distribution is a local monopoly for a number of reasons. Since that's one of the few monopolies that is well known to consumers, it makes a good example. Now suppose a couple of "filling stations" for electric cars started operating and one of them took over 70% of the market. They're a large, bulk customer and they also install a wind farm on the premises to lower costs. The power company demanded they remove it and were rebuffed. So suppose your local power distributor decided to start charging higher prices to that charging station and lower prices to their rival. And what if they made a deal that on days where power was constrained by brownouts, they'd provide power to one of the charging stations but not the other, simply to force more customers to the smaller company to prevent either from having enough power to stand up to them. Now the smaller charging station isn't doing anything illegal, but the power distribution monopoly is. They're violating antitrust law and the deal they made with that charging station is illegal. In this example the RIAA is the power distributor, and Apple and Amazon are the filling stations.
IF amazon sells cheaper music then I will buy from them. Apple cannot dictate that it's unfair something is cheaper somewhere else.
Because the RIAA has monopoly influence on the music publishing market, it is illegal for them to charge different prices to different people for the same products. Apple can certainly tell the RIAA that, and if this goes to court, you have two companies potentially with monopoly influence and hopefully the courts will do the right thing. Breaking up the RIAA would, of course, be ideal, but since their former employees are running the justice department, that seems unlikely.
As they say on Slashdot, "but X is not a monopoly like Y! they play by different rules!". Normally, X=Apple and Y=Microsoft; in this particular case, X=Amazon and Y=Apple.
Actually, everyone plays by the same rules, but those rules apply to monopolized markets. In this case Apple might have sufficient dominance in the digital music download market. The RIAA does have sufficient influence in the music publishing market (multiple antitrust convictions). Amazon does not seem to have monopoly influence, but the RIAA making exclusive deals with them probably is a violation of the law and illegal. For that matter, the differential pricing afforded to Amazon and which they claim as a trade secret is almost certainly illegal as well. While Amazon may not be held liable for those deals, that doesn't mean the RIAA will not be convicted and those deals abrogated.
Of course, the matter of Apple being a monopoly in the first place is a separate one. But, apparently, they have 70% of online music sales market, so there is good reason to look into it closely, which is precisely what they're doing.
Agreed. Although really this is the result of the courts not dealing effectively with existing criminal trusts. Apple is close on market share for digital music downloads and portable digital players, both markets where the RIAA and Microsoft have been abusing their existing and legally established dominant market shares. MS has been convicted, in fact, with regard to Windows Media Player. So when Apple leverages their market share, it raises my ire less. So far their "abuses" have done more to make the market competitive than anything by countering the influence of other monopolists in ways that benefit the consumer. I've no illusions this is for any reason other than that it happens to benefit Apple financially, mind you, but for the courts to intervene here after turning a blind eye or providing a legal slap on the wrist to the others would be a travesty against the consumer.
That's a good point. I was assuming it was a GPLv2 program but a little research shows it is GPLv3, at least right now.
They lost whatever changes was made to the code.
But that's not damage from the infringement. Generally the method used for copyright infringement is to try to calculate lost sales. In the case of free software in the past, this has been zero in more than one case, with punitive damages being awarded only.
The OP suggested that AAPL are overvalued by the market. You can't use the P/E as evidence they aren't because the P is the very valuation the OP argued is too high!
No, you can't use it in isolation, only in conjunction with estimates by analysts and growth history.
Growth doesn't magically continue because it happened last year and the substantial sort of growth that seems to be factored into the Apple price seems (to me) to require significant successful new products. The iPod and iPhone have been radically successful but I'm not convinced Apple have other new business directions lined up to continue such growth
Before the iPod it was the iMac, then iBook, then mini. But the thing is, Apple's growth is fueled by more than future successes. All their major products are still growing in the market. Mac sales are up 30% year over year. The saturated iPod market, up 12%. iPhone, still increasing. Last quarter Apple managed a 90% increase in profit over the previous year, while the stock price went up 7%. The street is being very conservative considering how consistent Apple has been. Most analysts have price targets way higher than the current selling price. This trend is what 8-10 years now? I'm not a big fan of most of Apple's products (I do use a Mac) but to not recognize that they are a very, very consistently growing company with a plan to continue verges on irrational.
Low pe values tend to equate to stability, high not so much...
Actually, low P/E values usually correlate with companies that aren't growing or where growth is erratic. Many companies with low P/E values aren't even close to what you would call stable, with large growth one quarter and a drop off the next, or with negative growth.
High P/E values tend to correspond to companies that the market believes are a sure thing, or are constantly growing.
A high PE ratio suggests bad value.
No, the P/E suggest how investors believe a company will grow. It's how the market represents companies that have steady and predictable growth, as Apple has for quite some time. Low P/E generally means the company is not expected to grow, or the chances of growth are low.
Clearly they have to be regarded in context, but in this context of tech stocks, I think it's fairly clear. Apple is gaining in value because they are growing consistently in all different economic climates. Middle of the road analysts have target prices 20% above the current price, with some going a lot further than that.