Yes but the floppy had already been obsolete at that point (1998) due to its small size... the floppy would have eventually disappeared of its own accord due to lack of use by users.
It took quite a while actually. The only thing that convinced some software vendors to stop shipping them was customer complains about not hainv drives anymore. But for the most part, I agree. Apple led the charge but it was inevitable. A better argument would be Apple helping to popularize the hard drive as a standard component of desktops in the very early days.
It could not do what my 1985 Amiga could do, or what Windows 95/NT4 could do.
Heh, I remember Windows 95's multitasking. When you ran applications that wanted more RAM than you have, the OS just crashed. I don't reminisce fondly about the wonders of Windows 95 multitasking.
At some point some hardware company had to make the plunge, and in these cases it happened to be Apple.
Rather than it just "happened to be Apple", it was Apple for some very good reasons. Apple has a more loyal customer base for their PC's than other vendors because Apple has more differentiation, using a different OS. As such they can make more radical and major changes without losing as many customers to rival companies. Apple also spends more in R&D than most rivals PC makers because part of their business plan is to be more "cutting edge" and because they have the freedom to do so because they control more of the components of the systems they sell. In the long term this has developed a culture at Apple that pushes for these things. So being early adopters of GUI, mice, hard drives, USB, firewire, ethernet, etc. is not so much happenstance as business plan.
I've heard people say that accessories for Apple products tend to be a bit more expensive than no-name accessories, or that more
There are three causes for this belief. First, historically this idea took root because Apple accessories used different interfaces (first ADB then USB) from the standard and devices produced in lower quantity for a small market subset tend to cost more. The perception has persisted even when it is largely no longer true. Second, some peripherals require OS specific drivers and some manufacturers like to segregate their markets and sell the same hardware with different drivers at different prices which brings us to.. Third, retailers target markets with prices they think will make them the most money. The market for Apple users tends to be in the more affluent segment of society so some retailers target their premium (or premium branded) products as peripherals for Apple products.
Um..... please explain how Apple is responsible for the progression from floppies to hard drives, or from parallel ports to USB ports.
Well, Apple did play a role in both these technologies, although I think the previous poster overstates the case. Apple was probably the first major PC maker to stop including floppy drives by default on their machines. As such, they helped kill the floppy drive. Hard drives had long since been deployed widely at this point by everyone though, so they had little to do with the switch to hard drives. I suppose you could make an argument about the Mac classic being one of the first popular PC's with a hard drive, alongside their introduction of the GUI to the mainstream.
As for USB, well there's a lot more of a case for them. in 1998 USB existed, but the average user had never heard of it. Mice and keyboards all connected via parallel ports (or serial ports or ADB). USB was included on a few computers, but pretty much only for use with early webcams, and not many of them. The industry described USB adoption as a catch-22, in that peripheral makers could always reach a much larger market by using the old connectors and computer makers couldn't stop including them because they were needed for mice and keyboards.
In came Apple, who switched all external peripheral connectors to USB. It was the only option. Suddenly there was a guaranteed market for USB peripherals. This is why pretty much all the oldest USB peripherals you can find were in blue and clear plastic, to match the colors of the original iMac. Apple was the early adopter that was able to drive adoption of a standard that had stagnated and was being ignored.
The second is a result of the USB Consortium. To give Apple credit for this seems disingenuous, (especially since Apple would have preferred to kill USB in favor of Firewire).
Apple has never tried to kill USB. They have always pushed it as the best way to connect low power peripherals like keyboards and mice. They deploy it in parallel with Firewire which they think is the best way to connect hard drives, video cameras, etc. I happen to agree with them too. Some companies, however, wanted a cheaper alternative to Firewire and did not mind losing some of the capabilities, so they reworked USB to try to be an inferior clone of Firewire as well. Apple has been less than supportive of this, since they already have Firewire for that purpose and don't like to downgrade to inferior technologies until all the rest of the industry has done so and they have no real choice.
I would claim that Flash is not only very much in sight but it is the default encoding on Facebook -- keeping it very much alive... Do you think Facebook enjoys this overhead transcoding cost of its videos? I highly doubt it. I think this is a case of Facebook trying to building a unified cross platform experience for users...
Right, so Facebook capitulating means they recognize the importance of reaching customers without Flash and will do what it takes to reach them. They cant enjoy the overhead or complexity, so this is sign that Facebook will quite likely move to HTML5 for video in the future. It's nice when Apple's business goals line up with the best interests of users in the long term by promoting adoption of open standards.
This figure is from the China Daily article, right?
Indeed.
I find it highly suspicious.
You think the study was incorrect or fabricated? Could be. Even so, anyone who has spent time in Asia can tell you they certainly were very popular there.
...you should end up with several tens of millions sold every year. Have you seen the industry boast such numbers?
A quick Google search shows sales in China of 8 and 7 million in consecutive years in the late 90's. So that's not quite what your napkin estimates would require, but neither is it insignificant.
I don't get it. How would it be the "moral high ground" to prevent developers from selling and consumers from buying this application? Is there a theory this game presents a danger to someone? Is it just that you object to smoking being depicted for some reason? What morals are we talking about?
last story, there were people who were defending apple and maintained that no linkage of evil could be established about the prosecution regarding the iphone dismantlers. it turns out that 'representatives' of apple went out to a private citizen's quarters, and intending to search the premises.
Yeah and if I lost a valuable phone and the anti-theft feature told my boss where it was, he might send people to ask the owner of the house if they could come in and find it too. How is that evil? Mind you the home owner has every right to refuse and make them call the cops who will get a warrant to come in and look for it.
so, a private corporation sends 'representatives' to search people's homes... will there be anyone that would come up and defend this, i wonder...
If they have reason to believe their stolen property is in someone's home, they have every right to go ask if they can come in and look for it. If you lost your phone and location tracked it to a house would it be evil for you to ask the residents if you can come in and look for it?
Stealing the phone someone lost at the bar is unethical. Selling it to the highest bidder is unethical. Looking for your lost property... not unethical.
I wonder if they found him using the Gizmodo journalist's computer, which according to the EFF, was an illegal warrant.
The answer to your question is "no". Read this quote form the DA in the San Jose Business Journal:
“I told (Gizmodo) we will hold off and not do any investigation into the computer itself while we resolve this issue,” he said, adding that if attorneys 'come to the conclusion that Chen is not protected, Gizmodo may seek an injunction preventing investigators from moving forward and examining the computers.'
The part about having to wait 90 days. You don't have to do that. The asshole lost it.
No you don't have to do that. Mind you if it's more than a few hundred bucks you have to give it to the cops for 90 days so they can run an ad in the paper looking for the owner, or they'll arrest you for theft. But no, you don't have to do it. They also don't have to let you out of a small cell after you're convicted of grand theft either.
VCD (created 1993) was massively popular in the second half of the nineties
Really? I don't think I ever saw a single VCD on a store shelf.
Your experiences don't really define the popularity of a format. It never took off in North America but they were very popular in Asia, with more than half of Chinese homes containing a VCD player at one point.
Trade secrets only survive theft if the company took reasonable precautions. Leaving a trade secret prototype on a public bar stool is not reasonable precautions, so trade secret protection seems lost no matter what.
Legally speaking, I doubt you are correct. They wiped the data, tried to recover it, and demanded it back as soon as they knew who had it. Maybe the courts will agree with you, but I seriously doubt it.
As for whether keeping the phone constituted "theft" depends on whether the guy called Apple. If he did, it seems to me he made a "reasonable and just effort", and since Apple didn't want their property back, it was his to keep.
That would be the case if it was worth less than $100, but that is not the case. For items over $100 you have to contact the police or it is a theft. For items over $500 you have to give it to the cops and wait while they publish an ad for 90 days before it becomes yours to sell. That's the law. It was clearly theft regardless of if he called Apple.
not saying there wasnt, but what trade secrets were given away here?
That the next version of the phone is in final testing, what hardware is in it. The very fact that the next phone does not have a lot innovative in it is a trade secret in and of itself. The fact that there is a front facing camera may change whether or not competing phones start adding that to their design or not. So the design of the new phone certainly qualifies as a trade secret.
"...and knowingly having purchased stolen property."
I'm not getting how you concluded this part. Up until the time Gizmodo examined and concluded the device was actually Apple's property, they could not have known it was a lost prototype and who knows whether they had verified that a credible effort had not been made to return it.
The guy selling it to them had already said he found it in a bar. So are you claiming Gizmodo paid him $5000 because they thought he was lying or because they thought he had given it to the police for 90 days? Or is it just that they didn't know or care what the law was?
I can't figure out what law giz was supposed to have broken? Phone wasn't stolen.
According to CA law, selling it before giving it to the police and within 90 days while they try to contact the owner means it was stolen. Further, receiving stolen goods is also classified as theft. Now don't you think if you find an expensive device you should at least check the applicable law BEFORE you sell it. And if you find out someone has an expensive device that does not belong to them you should find out the law BEFORE you buy it?
Giz bought it to confirm what it was, because that's what they do.
Too bad that's a crime. Oh and publishing the info, probably also a violation of UTSA.
And Apple made no effort to get it back.
Actually the Apple employee who lost it went back to the bar, but the person who took it did not contact them or bring it back. As soon as Apple found out Gizmodo had it they formally requested it back. Gizmodo is screwed.
Actually, that seems very wrong since the law they cite with regard to the theft shows that selling the phone to Gizmodo made his acquisition of it theft and buying stolen goods is also classified as theft. So trade secret law does apply.
Possession is 9/10ths of the law. Abandoned property belongs to nobody.
You are ignorant of CA law. It would probably be better if you did not make declarative statements. The person who found this sold it to Gizmodo for $5000. Any property over $500 has to given to the police and after they publish an ad for 90 days and no one claims it, then it becomes your property to sell. Anything else is grand theft, a criminal offense. Buying property known to be stolen is likewise a criminal offense.
Besides the journalist did not keep the property.
He bought it, that's a crime.
and then returned it to the original owner (which he did not have to do, since the owner had abandoned the property).
I take it you did not bother to look up the law.
What Apple is trying to do is force the journalist to keep his mouth shut...
This isn't Apple, it's the cops investigating the theft. Apple is entitled to file suit for violation of their trade secret. If they choose to do so they will almost certainly win and be awarded both a punitive fine and damages as well as monies equal to whatever profit Gizmodo made by publishing the story. I'm not a fan of trade secret laws, but it is clear cut in this case.
But of course since he never signed an NDE he's breached no contract and committed no crime.
You're confusing NDA's with trade secrets. They are two different things.
He will eventually be freed.
Freed? Umm, they confiscated his computers. They didn't lock him up.
It's only a trade secret violation if Apple communicated the information in circumstances imparting an obligation of confidence. Leaving a phone on a bar stool does not count.
You're thinking of NDA's perhaps? Publishing information about an unreleased product when that information is the result of theft is open and shut, and it pretty clearly is theft according to CA's lost/abandoned property laws.
Since Apple didn't take reasonable precautions to protect their information, they probably lose their trade secret even if the phone was obtained illegally.
. If Apple can get a warrant (which they obviously can), those computers are fair game, along with anything else that might be relevant to the charges.
This was for criminal charges related to theft/receiving stolen property. It's the cops not Apple. Apple has not yet filed suit for the trade secret violations.
There is what you know, and what you don't know. Diplomacy is all about give and take.
Yeah, Obama secretly agreed to convert from "secret muslim" to "secret russian orthodox". Oh and not to reveal who killed JFK.
Being that Obama seemed to have gain much from Russia, one has to ask what we "gave" the Russians.
Umm, it's part of a treaty. You can read it. We gave them the treaty to reduce arms which they wanted as much as we did for political reasons and we agreed to remove a nuke from our stockpile for each of these, and the russians would much rather we had these than nukes because these are less dangerous to them and more dangerous to other countries Russia is worried about.
Or look at it another way. Russia is making deals with Hugo Chavez, perhaps this is our response in kind.
Does that make sense to you in some way? You're implying we're doing something secret that you don't know about, but you're just going to speculate in an obscure sort of way? How is that useful for anything? Maybe Obama made a secret agreement that the Russians will come over here and make us free shoes at night and hide out during the day. Maybe Obama agreed they can eat our children. Maybe obama agreed they can make us free shoes out of our children.
Don't be so quick to judge Bush and Obama just yet. It can take full generations for these policies to be fleshed out before anyone can start tracking cause/effect aspects of diplomatic relations.
I think the cause and effect is apparent. Other countries are talking to us and willing to actually make deals again that benefit us and them because we aren't ridiculing them for political gain.
Or something like the dotcom bubble that saw more average-to-poor people get rich and more rich people get average-to-poor than any other revolution in history.
What you're advocating is called "trickle down economics". Even it's most famous adherents like Greenspan have declared it a failure. You seem to think that the US economy is a meritocracy and that it is intelligence or motivation that determines how wealthy you are. That belief does not stand up to statistical analysis and completely ignores a fundamental trait of economic called the wealth condensation principal (or it takes money to make money if you want it in more colloquial terms). The best predictor or wealth is the wealth of a person's parents. The largest transfer of wealth in the US is inheritance. If a person is in the top few percent for wealth ti is almost a statistical certainty their parents were in the same category. The only thing that changed under the trickle down economics era has been for the middle class to gradually become the lower class.
So go ahead... make it so people like Bill Gates and Steve Jobs or their original employees who became rich developing their products have no motivation to get rich. See what it does to the standard of living in the US.
Bill Gates was the son of a lawyer and banker from a family of bankers. He's not a very good rags to riches story. He bought QDOS from the creators who worked hard to make it and used exploitive business practices to make himself rich while crippling progress in several fields of computing. But nevermind that. Basing the way your economy works upon statistical outliers is just idiotic. Let's make all the speed limits 200mph, because there are a few people with absurdly good reflexes that can drive that fast safely. Idiocy!
The idea that people will stop working hard and growing the economy if the government takes a larger share in taxes is not founded in any fact. It was an idea that did not pan out. In fact, countries with better social safety nets recovered from the global economic meltdown a lot faster than the US and aren't dealing with the huge booms in crime and homelessness we are. People take more risks and try more innovative things when failure means going on the dole and eating cheap food while living in a tiny apartment, instead of living on the streets until you get sick and having no realistic chance of ever working your way back up. You say if we return taxes to levels they were in the 70's people will no longer work hard and innovate? You're basing this on how terrible the economy was in the 70's compared to now?
Seriously, pick up a real economics textbook and learn how things work. Your ideas are unfounded and simply wrong.
In the analogies everybody likes, suppose your little town's printed newspaper receives an anonymous letter, to be printed in the reader's section, saying that. Does someone really think they would publish it? And, if they did, does anyone really think they would not be condenmed for defamation?
Ahh, but that's not the same thing at all. A small newspaper is not the same as an automatic transmission system for self publishing. With a small newspaper a person has to decide what to publish, so there is intent. With an automatic system it the end user publishing using provided tools. A better analogy is, do you sue the publisher of the small newspaper or the company that sold them their printing press?
Google is not being charged directly for the saying, but for covering the identity of the criminal.
Untrue. Google complies with all legal requests to identify their users to law enforcement and the judiciary. Google lost their case because they were, "making space available on virtual networking sites, in which users can post any type of message without any checks beforehand". Not for failing to identify the person who committed libel.
Freedom of speech does not mean the right say anything without consequences...
That's a strawman argument. I never said there should not be limits to free speech, just that suppliers of tools and services should not be held accountable for the speech of others.
... just the right to say, not being previously censored.
Apparently though it doesn't give you the right to not censor people who use your tools. Is Google now also liable for any slander that goes through Gmail because they do not censor it in advance? This is a stupid and irresponsible ruling.
So the executive class is making 100 times what they were and corporations are making more for their investors by getting cheap labor. And the average person gets screwed.
The thing here is, what you describe is not less wealth coming into the US, but the wealth coming into the US being less distributed among the populace. For example, you mention advances in robotics as a minus, but they're actually a productivity plus. They save time and allow for faster, cheaper manufacturing. You assume that profit won't make it's way to normal people.
What generally happens in situations like this is wealth disparity grows, then comes to a head, then there's a revolution. This could be a real revolution that redistributes the wealth by killing the rich, or it can be a social one like the new deal. Executives and the people who own companies are making 100 times more? Tax them 95 times more and redistribute that money back into the populace. Heck, they pay a tiny fraction of what they did in taxes in the 70's, we can sure reverse that and put the money into government programs. In fact, that's a much more likely solution than a populace putting up with greatly decreased standards of living and reduced government programs.
First time I've seen something like this, where Obama is more hawkish on a military matter than Bush ? Man that seems wierd...
I'd actually say he's more capable than Bush was. Bush couldn't deploy this because it risked war with Russia. Obama has skill as a diplomat and convinced them they could inspect the launch site and we'd remove a nuke from our arsenal for each one. Partly this was possible because Obama has a good diplomatic relationship with the Russians. So now we theoretically have another military option. This is why all those hardliners who think diplomacy is weakness are dead wrong.
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Yes but the floppy had already been obsolete at that point (1998) due to its small size... the floppy would have eventually disappeared of its own accord due to lack of use by users.
It took quite a while actually. The only thing that convinced some software vendors to stop shipping them was customer complains about not hainv drives anymore. But for the most part, I agree. Apple led the charge but it was inevitable. A better argument would be Apple helping to popularize the hard drive as a standard component of desktops in the very early days.
It could not do what my 1985 Amiga could do, or what Windows 95/NT4 could do.
Heh, I remember Windows 95's multitasking. When you ran applications that wanted more RAM than you have, the OS just crashed. I don't reminisce fondly about the wonders of Windows 95 multitasking.
At some point some hardware company had to make the plunge, and in these cases it happened to be Apple.
Rather than it just "happened to be Apple", it was Apple for some very good reasons. Apple has a more loyal customer base for their PC's than other vendors because Apple has more differentiation, using a different OS. As such they can make more radical and major changes without losing as many customers to rival companies. Apple also spends more in R&D than most rivals PC makers because part of their business plan is to be more "cutting edge" and because they have the freedom to do so because they control more of the components of the systems they sell. In the long term this has developed a culture at Apple that pushes for these things. So being early adopters of GUI, mice, hard drives, USB, firewire, ethernet, etc. is not so much happenstance as business plan.
I've heard people say that accessories for Apple products tend to be a bit more expensive than no-name accessories, or that more
There are three causes for this belief. First, historically this idea took root because Apple accessories used different interfaces (first ADB then USB) from the standard and devices produced in lower quantity for a small market subset tend to cost more. The perception has persisted even when it is largely no longer true. Second, some peripherals require OS specific drivers and some manufacturers like to segregate their markets and sell the same hardware with different drivers at different prices which brings us to.. Third, retailers target markets with prices they think will make them the most money. The market for Apple users tends to be in the more affluent segment of society so some retailers target their premium (or premium branded) products as peripherals for Apple products.
Um..... please explain how Apple is responsible for the progression from floppies to hard drives, or from parallel ports to USB ports.
Well, Apple did play a role in both these technologies, although I think the previous poster overstates the case. Apple was probably the first major PC maker to stop including floppy drives by default on their machines. As such, they helped kill the floppy drive. Hard drives had long since been deployed widely at this point by everyone though, so they had little to do with the switch to hard drives. I suppose you could make an argument about the Mac classic being one of the first popular PC's with a hard drive, alongside their introduction of the GUI to the mainstream.
As for USB, well there's a lot more of a case for them. in 1998 USB existed, but the average user had never heard of it. Mice and keyboards all connected via parallel ports (or serial ports or ADB). USB was included on a few computers, but pretty much only for use with early webcams, and not many of them. The industry described USB adoption as a catch-22, in that peripheral makers could always reach a much larger market by using the old connectors and computer makers couldn't stop including them because they were needed for mice and keyboards.
In came Apple, who switched all external peripheral connectors to USB. It was the only option. Suddenly there was a guaranteed market for USB peripherals. This is why pretty much all the oldest USB peripherals you can find were in blue and clear plastic, to match the colors of the original iMac. Apple was the early adopter that was able to drive adoption of a standard that had stagnated and was being ignored.
The second is a result of the USB Consortium. To give Apple credit for this seems disingenuous, (especially since Apple would have preferred to kill USB in favor of Firewire).
Apple has never tried to kill USB. They have always pushed it as the best way to connect low power peripherals like keyboards and mice. They deploy it in parallel with Firewire which they think is the best way to connect hard drives, video cameras, etc. I happen to agree with them too. Some companies, however, wanted a cheaper alternative to Firewire and did not mind losing some of the capabilities, so they reworked USB to try to be an inferior clone of Firewire as well. Apple has been less than supportive of this, since they already have Firewire for that purpose and don't like to downgrade to inferior technologies until all the rest of the industry has done so and they have no real choice.
I would claim that Flash is not only very much in sight but it is the default encoding on Facebook -- keeping it very much alive... Do you think Facebook enjoys this overhead transcoding cost of its videos? I highly doubt it. I think this is a case of Facebook trying to building a unified cross platform experience for users...
Right, so Facebook capitulating means they recognize the importance of reaching customers without Flash and will do what it takes to reach them. They cant enjoy the overhead or complexity, so this is sign that Facebook will quite likely move to HTML5 for video in the future. It's nice when Apple's business goals line up with the best interests of users in the long term by promoting adoption of open standards.
This figure is from the China Daily article, right?
Indeed.
I find it highly suspicious.
You think the study was incorrect or fabricated? Could be. Even so, anyone who has spent time in Asia can tell you they certainly were very popular there.
...you should end up with several tens of millions sold every year. Have you seen the industry boast such numbers?
A quick Google search shows sales in China of 8 and 7 million in consecutive years in the late 90's. So that's not quite what your napkin estimates would require, but neither is it insignificant.
I don't get it. How would it be the "moral high ground" to prevent developers from selling and consumers from buying this application? Is there a theory this game presents a danger to someone? Is it just that you object to smoking being depicted for some reason? What morals are we talking about?
last story, there were people who were defending apple and maintained that no linkage of evil could be established about the prosecution regarding the iphone dismantlers. it turns out that 'representatives' of apple went out to a private citizen's quarters, and intending to search the premises.
Yeah and if I lost a valuable phone and the anti-theft feature told my boss where it was, he might send people to ask the owner of the house if they could come in and find it too. How is that evil? Mind you the home owner has every right to refuse and make them call the cops who will get a warrant to come in and look for it.
so, a private corporation sends 'representatives' to search people's homes ... will there be anyone that would come up and defend this, i wonder ...
If they have reason to believe their stolen property is in someone's home, they have every right to go ask if they can come in and look for it. If you lost your phone and location tracked it to a house would it be evil for you to ask the residents if you can come in and look for it?
Stealing the phone someone lost at the bar is unethical. Selling it to the highest bidder is unethical. Looking for your lost property... not unethical.
I wonder if they found him using the Gizmodo journalist's computer, which according to the EFF, was an illegal warrant.
The answer to your question is "no". Read this quote form the DA in the San Jose Business Journal:
“I told (Gizmodo) we will hold off and not do any investigation into the computer itself while we resolve this issue,” he said, adding that if attorneys 'come to the conclusion that Chen is not protected, Gizmodo may seek an injunction preventing investigators from moving forward and examining the computers.'
The part about having to wait 90 days. You don't have to do that. The asshole lost it.
No you don't have to do that. Mind you if it's more than a few hundred bucks you have to give it to the cops for 90 days so they can run an ad in the paper looking for the owner, or they'll arrest you for theft. But no, you don't have to do it. They also don't have to let you out of a small cell after you're convicted of grand theft either.
VCD (created 1993) was massively popular in the second half of the nineties
Really? I don't think I ever saw a single VCD on a store shelf.
Your experiences don't really define the popularity of a format. It never took off in North America but they were very popular in Asia, with more than half of Chinese homes containing a VCD player at one point.
Trade secrets only survive theft if the company took reasonable precautions. Leaving a trade secret prototype on a public bar stool is not reasonable precautions, so trade secret protection seems lost no matter what.
Legally speaking, I doubt you are correct. They wiped the data, tried to recover it, and demanded it back as soon as they knew who had it. Maybe the courts will agree with you, but I seriously doubt it.
As for whether keeping the phone constituted "theft" depends on whether the guy called Apple. If he did, it seems to me he made a "reasonable and just effort", and since Apple didn't want their property back, it was his to keep.
That would be the case if it was worth less than $100, but that is not the case. For items over $100 you have to contact the police or it is a theft. For items over $500 you have to give it to the cops and wait while they publish an ad for 90 days before it becomes yours to sell. That's the law. It was clearly theft regardless of if he called Apple.
not saying there wasnt, but what trade secrets were given away here?
That the next version of the phone is in final testing, what hardware is in it. The very fact that the next phone does not have a lot innovative in it is a trade secret in and of itself. The fact that there is a front facing camera may change whether or not competing phones start adding that to their design or not. So the design of the new phone certainly qualifies as a trade secret.
Neither the finder nor Gizmodo are obligated to respect Apple's trade secrets.
I take it you've never heard of the Uniform Trade Secrets Act?
"...and knowingly having purchased stolen property."
I'm not getting how you concluded this part. Up until the time Gizmodo examined and concluded the device was actually Apple's property, they could not have known it was a lost prototype and who knows whether they had verified that a credible effort had not been made to return it.
The guy selling it to them had already said he found it in a bar. So are you claiming Gizmodo paid him $5000 because they thought he was lying or because they thought he had given it to the police for 90 days? Or is it just that they didn't know or care what the law was?
I can't figure out what law giz was supposed to have broken? Phone wasn't stolen.
According to CA law, selling it before giving it to the police and within 90 days while they try to contact the owner means it was stolen. Further, receiving stolen goods is also classified as theft. Now don't you think if you find an expensive device you should at least check the applicable law BEFORE you sell it. And if you find out someone has an expensive device that does not belong to them you should find out the law BEFORE you buy it?
Giz bought it to confirm what it was, because that's what they do.
Too bad that's a crime. Oh and publishing the info, probably also a violation of UTSA.
And Apple made no effort to get it back.
Actually the Apple employee who lost it went back to the bar, but the person who took it did not contact them or bring it back. As soon as Apple found out Gizmodo had it they formally requested it back. Gizmodo is screwed.
Actually, that seems very wrong since the law they cite with regard to the theft shows that selling the phone to Gizmodo made his acquisition of it theft and buying stolen goods is also classified as theft. So trade secret law does apply.
Possession is 9/10ths of the law. Abandoned property belongs to nobody.
You are ignorant of CA law. It would probably be better if you did not make declarative statements. The person who found this sold it to Gizmodo for $5000. Any property over $500 has to given to the police and after they publish an ad for 90 days and no one claims it, then it becomes your property to sell. Anything else is grand theft, a criminal offense. Buying property known to be stolen is likewise a criminal offense.
Besides the journalist did not keep the property.
He bought it, that's a crime.
and then returned it to the original owner (which he did not have to do, since the owner had abandoned the property).
I take it you did not bother to look up the law.
What Apple is trying to do is force the journalist to keep his mouth shut...
This isn't Apple, it's the cops investigating the theft. Apple is entitled to file suit for violation of their trade secret. If they choose to do so they will almost certainly win and be awarded both a punitive fine and damages as well as monies equal to whatever profit Gizmodo made by publishing the story. I'm not a fan of trade secret laws, but it is clear cut in this case.
But of course since he never signed an NDE he's breached no contract and committed no crime.
You're confusing NDA's with trade secrets. They are two different things.
He will eventually be freed.
Freed? Umm, they confiscated his computers. They didn't lock him up.
It's only a trade secret violation if Apple communicated the information in circumstances imparting an obligation of confidence. Leaving a phone on a bar stool does not count.
You're thinking of NDA's perhaps? Publishing information about an unreleased product when that information is the result of theft is open and shut, and it pretty clearly is theft according to CA's lost/abandoned property laws.
Since Apple didn't take reasonable precautions to protect their information, they probably lose their trade secret even if the phone was obtained illegally.
Umm, I don't think that is how the UTSA works.
. If Apple can get a warrant (which they obviously can), those computers are fair game, along with anything else that might be relevant to the charges.
This was for criminal charges related to theft/receiving stolen property. It's the cops not Apple. Apple has not yet filed suit for the trade secret violations.
There is what you know, and what you don't know. Diplomacy is all about give and take.
Yeah, Obama secretly agreed to convert from "secret muslim" to "secret russian orthodox". Oh and not to reveal who killed JFK.
Being that Obama seemed to have gain much from Russia, one has to ask what we "gave" the Russians.
Umm, it's part of a treaty. You can read it. We gave them the treaty to reduce arms which they wanted as much as we did for political reasons and we agreed to remove a nuke from our stockpile for each of these, and the russians would much rather we had these than nukes because these are less dangerous to them and more dangerous to other countries Russia is worried about.
Or look at it another way. Russia is making deals with Hugo Chavez, perhaps this is our response in kind.
Does that make sense to you in some way? You're implying we're doing something secret that you don't know about, but you're just going to speculate in an obscure sort of way? How is that useful for anything? Maybe Obama made a secret agreement that the Russians will come over here and make us free shoes at night and hide out during the day. Maybe Obama agreed they can eat our children. Maybe obama agreed they can make us free shoes out of our children.
Don't be so quick to judge Bush and Obama just yet. It can take full generations for these policies to be fleshed out before anyone can start tracking cause/effect aspects of diplomatic relations.
I think the cause and effect is apparent. Other countries are talking to us and willing to actually make deals again that benefit us and them because we aren't ridiculing them for political gain.
Or something like the dotcom bubble that saw more average-to-poor people get rich and more rich people get average-to-poor than any other revolution in history.
History isn't your strong suit is it?
What you're advocating is called "trickle down economics". Even it's most famous adherents like Greenspan have declared it a failure. You seem to think that the US economy is a meritocracy and that it is intelligence or motivation that determines how wealthy you are. That belief does not stand up to statistical analysis and completely ignores a fundamental trait of economic called the wealth condensation principal (or it takes money to make money if you want it in more colloquial terms). The best predictor or wealth is the wealth of a person's parents. The largest transfer of wealth in the US is inheritance. If a person is in the top few percent for wealth ti is almost a statistical certainty their parents were in the same category. The only thing that changed under the trickle down economics era has been for the middle class to gradually become the lower class.
So go ahead ... make it so people like Bill Gates and Steve Jobs or their original employees who became rich developing their products have no motivation to get rich. See what it does to the standard of living in the US.
Bill Gates was the son of a lawyer and banker from a family of bankers. He's not a very good rags to riches story. He bought QDOS from the creators who worked hard to make it and used exploitive business practices to make himself rich while crippling progress in several fields of computing. But nevermind that. Basing the way your economy works upon statistical outliers is just idiotic. Let's make all the speed limits 200mph, because there are a few people with absurdly good reflexes that can drive that fast safely. Idiocy!
The idea that people will stop working hard and growing the economy if the government takes a larger share in taxes is not founded in any fact. It was an idea that did not pan out. In fact, countries with better social safety nets recovered from the global economic meltdown a lot faster than the US and aren't dealing with the huge booms in crime and homelessness we are. People take more risks and try more innovative things when failure means going on the dole and eating cheap food while living in a tiny apartment, instead of living on the streets until you get sick and having no realistic chance of ever working your way back up. You say if we return taxes to levels they were in the 70's people will no longer work hard and innovate? You're basing this on how terrible the economy was in the 70's compared to now?
Seriously, pick up a real economics textbook and learn how things work. Your ideas are unfounded and simply wrong.
In the analogies everybody likes, suppose your little town's printed newspaper receives an anonymous letter, to be printed in the reader's section, saying that. Does someone really think they would publish it? And, if they did, does anyone really think they would not be condenmed for defamation?
Ahh, but that's not the same thing at all. A small newspaper is not the same as an automatic transmission system for self publishing. With a small newspaper a person has to decide what to publish, so there is intent. With an automatic system it the end user publishing using provided tools. A better analogy is, do you sue the publisher of the small newspaper or the company that sold them their printing press?
Google is not being charged directly for the saying, but for covering the identity of the criminal.
Untrue. Google complies with all legal requests to identify their users to law enforcement and the judiciary. Google lost their case because they were, "making space available on virtual networking sites, in which users can post any type of message without any checks beforehand". Not for failing to identify the person who committed libel.
Freedom of speech does not mean the right say anything without consequences...
That's a strawman argument. I never said there should not be limits to free speech, just that suppliers of tools and services should not be held accountable for the speech of others.
... just the right to say, not being previously censored.
Apparently though it doesn't give you the right to not censor people who use your tools. Is Google now also liable for any slander that goes through Gmail because they do not censor it in advance? This is a stupid and irresponsible ruling.
So the executive class is making 100 times what they were and corporations are making more for their investors by getting cheap labor. And the average person gets screwed.
The thing here is, what you describe is not less wealth coming into the US, but the wealth coming into the US being less distributed among the populace. For example, you mention advances in robotics as a minus, but they're actually a productivity plus. They save time and allow for faster, cheaper manufacturing. You assume that profit won't make it's way to normal people.
What generally happens in situations like this is wealth disparity grows, then comes to a head, then there's a revolution. This could be a real revolution that redistributes the wealth by killing the rich, or it can be a social one like the new deal. Executives and the people who own companies are making 100 times more? Tax them 95 times more and redistribute that money back into the populace. Heck, they pay a tiny fraction of what they did in taxes in the 70's, we can sure reverse that and put the money into government programs. In fact, that's a much more likely solution than a populace putting up with greatly decreased standards of living and reduced government programs.
First time I've seen something like this, where Obama is more hawkish on a military matter than Bush ? Man that seems wierd...
I'd actually say he's more capable than Bush was. Bush couldn't deploy this because it risked war with Russia. Obama has skill as a diplomat and convinced them they could inspect the launch site and we'd remove a nuke from our arsenal for each one. Partly this was possible because Obama has a good diplomatic relationship with the Russians. So now we theoretically have another military option. This is why all those hardliners who think diplomacy is weakness are dead wrong.