That never happened. This is one of those "Al Gore said he invented the Internet" myths that people keep spreading around with a pretty callous disregard for the truth.
The truth is that in 2002, Turner CEO Jamie Kellner said that editing out commercials entirely with special software in DVRs is stealing. Nobody cares if you hit the fast-forward button. The networks care if you use software to automatically edit the commercials out entirely.
However, the bigger issue here is that some people think it's okay to steal stuff just because they dislike the seller. That's deeply troubling.
I'm really amazed by how many people have said here that they think downloading stuff off the Internet is okay, that it's just like setting the VCR, that it's not stealing. That really blows my mind.
I don't see much point in making a moral argument. I get the impression that talking about karma here would get me laughed out of the room.
How about a pragmatic argument, then? You want to be able to download high-quality TV shows and movies over the Internet, right? You want somebody to set up a store, like the iTunes Music Store, where you can legally get high-quality TV shows and movies. Well, guess what? Every time somebody says "Bit Torrent is just like a VCR" or "it's not stealing" or "I'm not doing anything wrong when I download," you make it just that much harder for Apple or anybody else to open such a store.
Every time you say something like that, you push the date of our opening back by a month.
If you won't buy a moral argument, will you at least buy that one?
I completely missed the miniseries. But when the new season was getting ready to start, a friend said I should check it out.
That part is fine.
The first thing I did was find a torrent of the miniseries
That part is not. The show was aired repeatedly on the Sci Fi channel in the weeks leading up to the series' premiere. A cut-down version was broadcast in prime time on NBC. The miniseries was released on DVD and made available for rent at any video-rental place in the country. There were numerous opportunities for you to watch the show.
But instead, you decided to steal it.
Guys, this is a problem. You're not seeing the difference between somebody offering something to you and you just taking it without permission.
I suscribe to the "try it and buy it if you like it after a week" philosophy. I don't see anything wrong with it.
What's wrong with it is that the people aren't offering you a chance to try before you buy. In order to try before you buy, you have to steal a copy from the owners. It's kind of sad that you don't see anything wrong with that.
If you wanted to turn this around into an argument that says, "Hey, content providers should offer this as a service," that would be fine. I'd be right there with you. But using it to say "It's okay to take things" just isn't right.
The problem with that argument is that it doesn't actually prove anything. Watch:
"I rob a convenience store and steal a can of Diet Coke. I like it so much that the next day, I go out and buy a case. I tell my friend that I like Diet Coke, and he buys a case."
Does this then lead to the conclusion that robbing convenience stores is good for Coca-Cola? It certainly does not.
The fact that some positive consequences might arise at some point in the future doesn't change the fact that demonstrable negative consequences occurred in the past. In other words, stealing is still wrong even if something good comes of it. The ends do not justify the means.
I have much respect for the "as far as I'm concerned" point of view. However, in this case, you're just plain wrong. There is a qualitative difference between recording a show when it's broadcast (via VCR or Tivo or whatever) and getting somebody else who recorded it to make a copy for you after the fact.
This different is not subtle, nor is it something you can dismiss with a wave of the hand. It doesn't go away when concealed behind an "as far as I'm concerned."
Sure, if you sell 1 million iMacs, maybe only 20, or 30% want to, but they do.
Try something closer to one in a thousand.
I was just very honestly disturbed by the comments you made.
Not really that worried about it. It sounds like you're not buying our products anyway. Instead you "buy G3 motherboards off eBay all the time." That pretty much puts you right at the top of the "don't give a shit" list.
As much as I like to hear talk like that, a better explanation is that the market is freakin' huge, and 5% of the installed base is still anywhere between 15 and 40 million units, depending on which estimate you believe.
Everybody likes to talk about how Apple owns such a small share of the market, but in doing so y'all lose sign of the fact that Apple is the fourth-largest computer manufacturer in the entire world, and the second-largest developer of operating-system software. Considering how narrow our focus is, I'd say those are two pretty remarkable facts, wouldn't you?
No. You should buy a PowerBook right now. Today, if possible. In fact, you should buy two. They're that good.
Do you have any friends who might be interested in buying PowerBooks? Bring them to the store with you. You should all buy as many PowerBooks as possible.
And while you're at it, don't forget to pick up an iPod. And one for the car!
quicktime's support for anamorphic video has, and continues, to suck.
You're confusing QuickTime with QuickTime-based applications. In QuickTime 7 we added new attributes that tell QuickTime applications to take a movie with native size X by Y and play it back at size A by B. But the applications have to set that attribute.
besides, why the fuck would you offer online movie downloads as anamorphic video?
Because that's what the video is. Standard-def TV masters are stored on videotape in anamorphic format. When they're played back on a widescreen set, they're stretched out to about 850 by 480. That's how widescreen SD works.
It makes no sense to stretch content before encoding it; at that point, you're just compressing noise. It only makes sense to encode it in the native format, 720 by 480, and then stretch it during playback. That's how you get the highest picture quality out of widescreen SD content.
24p describes how cameras like the dvx-100 record video--24 frames per second, progressive scan. not necessarily HD (the dvx-100 shoots straight DV).
I don't understand this comment at all. When I said "1080/24p," maybe I should have been more specific. I was referring to video in the 1920-by-1080 format playing back at 24 frames per second. That's what the vast majority of scripted TV drama is, as well as high-def movie transfers. When that TV goes out over the air, it's converted through a process called "pulldown" to 60i, sixty fields per second interlaced. But that's for broadcast. We obviously won't want to do that, because again, we'd just be compressing noise. If 3:2 is required, we'll add it during playback just like DVD players do.
jvc's HD cameras record 30 progressive frames at 720p, the other HD spec.
Actually, 720p is usually shot sixty frames per second, not thirty. That's why it's so great for sports.
But the vast majority of scripted content is still shot at 24 frames per second, either on film or in 1080/24p. Motion at 24 frames per second has a very distinctive look, totally different from what we're used to seeing on video. Because people are used to seeing 24-frames-per-second content, giving them 60i or 60p is a distraction. Plus it's more expensive, because storing 30 interlaced frames or 60 progressive frames per second obviously takes more disk space than 24 frames per second.
We're going to deliver whatever the master format is. If that's 24p, then we'll deliver 24p. If it's native 60i (like shot in 60i, not interlaced from 24p source), then we'll deliver 60i. QuickTime doesn't care. If adjustments need to be made between the movie on disk and the screen, like adding 3:2 pulldown for display on an interlaced-scan television, then we'll add it at the end, not at the beginning.
I know you're going to say I'm being a dick here, but I'm going to give you the pure, unvarnished truth:
Neither Apple's management nor Apple's shareholders give a shit about what the "alpha geeks" think.
I know, I know. It's harsh. But it's absolutely true. See, the "alpha geeks" are not our market. We don't sell to them. The "alpha geeks" are defined by one key characteristic: they're irrational. Now, I'm not trying to insult you. I mean it literally. Geeks are not rational. They base their purchasing decisions on things that, from a rational point of view, just don't make any sense. Things like politics, lack "openness," like "customizability." Things that just don't add up in the cost-benefit analysis.
That's fine. That's totally legitimate. But it's not our business.
We sell products to people who want them to work. We don't sell products to people who want to take them apart. There are other companies that do that. We don't seek to dominate them or to put them out of business. We don't see them as competition at all, because the kinds of people who buy our products would never buy a motherboard. They'd never buy Linux. Never in a million years.
Is there some overlap? Sure. We love the fact that some prominent hard-core geeks use Macs. But we're not going to abandon our business plan to woo them. We're not going to turn our backs on the vast and untapped market for next-generation content delivery services, a market which we basically created, in order to please some Internet message board guys.
Again, I'm sorry for sounding so harsh here. I don't mean to be rude. I'm just not going to sugar-coat it for you. You do your thing, whatever makes you happy. We'll do ours.
#1: That stuff about watching videos and listening to music is EXACTLY what Jobs said....
Let's be fair here. You don't exactly have to be a brain surgeon, you know? All you have to do is pay attention to the way people interact with their media. The difference between immersive media and ambient media jump out at you immediately.
No, pretty much everything you said here is wrong.
The Mac mini is meant to be a computer, nothing more. It was designed to be an inexpensive entry to the Mac product line for people who already own PCs and want to step up to something better. It doesn't have anything like the CPU power required for HD playback. You might be able to squeeze 4 Mbps out of it, maybe, if you hold your mouth just right and you're willing to live with some dropped frames. But anything more is not going to be an option this year, and maybe not next either.
And the iPod is not repeat not gonna say it one more time not meant to be a video-playback device. It's not even remotely designed for it. The iPod has a tiny hard drive that's designed for embedded applications, and a 32 MB (I think it is) RAM buffer cache that's optimized for dealing with song-sized chunks of data. That's about 4 MB. Even a half hour of HD content is gonna be half a gigabyte. There's basically no way for the iPod to play that without constantly keeping the hard drive running, and that will burn out the drive very quickly. Seriously, under constant use, the iPod hard drives' life spans are measured in tens of hours.
(How can we do photos, then? Easy. Photos are even smaller than songs. And unlike video, people often do want to carry photos around with them. Keep reading.)
Remember when I said the problem was part technology and part psychology? People like to listen to music while they do other things: Ride on the train, exercise, shop. People like to multi-task with their music.
Video, whether short-form like TV or long-form like movies, isn't like that. Video is an immersive experience. You sit down and you watch it, and you don't do anything else until it's over. That's a totally different interaction model than music.
So there's basically zero reason for video to be portable. You're not going to carry it around with you. You're going to watch it at home.
Exceptions? Sure. But Apple isn't a company that makes a habit of marketing to the exceptions. We shoot for a pretty clearly defined target market and let the exceptions buy their gadgets somewhere else. Chiefly because there aren't nearly enough exceptions out there to make it worth going after, financially speaking. We'd never be able to recover what we invest in R&D and design by selling a few hundred thousand units. We have to sell millions of units per quarter, otherwise the business plan just doesn't work.
Everybody's wrong about the video iPod thing. A video iPod would be a dumb idea for lots of reasons, some technical, some psychological. If you want to know where we're going with video playback, look not to the iPod but to its considerably less famous little brother, AirPort Express.
(Addendum: I see now that at least a couple of commenters have figured this out already. Good for them. You all suck for stealing my surprise. One of them even nailed the big challenge, still to date unsolved, right on the head. I wonder if you guys will know it when you see it?)
Yes, of course we're going to be selling new types of content via the iTunes distribution model. It may or may not happen through the "iTunes" name. On the one hand, selling movies and TV shows through a store called "iTunes" makes no sense. On the other, iTunes has HUGE brand recognition right now. It's a marketing decision.
What exactly we offer depends on whose content you're talking about. Some content will be provided to us in 720-by-486 anamorphic, which we'll encode in H.264 at between 1 and 2 megabits. (Did you notice that QuickTime 7 has additional support for anamorphic video? I knew you would.) Other content will come in at HD, and for the time being we'll scale that down to half-HD at 2 Mbps. Doing full 1080/24p at 8 Mbps just isn't practical right now given that even the fastest cable modems in the US top out at 4 Mbps; in order to get real-time streaming of full-HD content, you'd need one of those new-fangled fiber optic Internet services that the telcos are starting to roll out. That's too forward-thinking for phase one. But we can do 2 Mbps now to the same customers we're shipping iTunes songs to.
Pricing, terms and dates will be totally up in the air until five minutes before we announce, and maybe even after that. Remember the Australian store? We had to put that roll-out on indefinite hiatus when The Label That Shall Not Be Named pulled out. All of this depends on the content-providers. Yes, somebody out there is going to say "Pixar." To that person I whisper the name "Disney" and the phrase "subsidiary rights." It's not as simple as you think.
Basically what stands between us and roll-out today is 10% technological and 90% business. It strikes me as kinda funny that some people look only at the technology part of our operations for clues as to future directions. Yes, we shipped iTunes 4.8 with video playback. Whoopty-do. iTunes is built on QuickTime. Adding video support was so incredibly trivial, you wouldn't believe it. It's a tiny thing. What's a much bigger thing is the gradual shift, over the past two years, in the way we as a company do business. We are very serious about IP. We've made a name for ourselves as being the one company in the industry that, better than anybody else, understands the need to zealously protect intellectual property. So when we go to (say) Disney and ask them to let us distribute their unimaginably valuable IP over the Internet, we're going to have a little bit more credibility than whatever copycat tries to come along behind us (cough*Napster*cough, cough*Walmart*cough).
These are the things you guys need to be paying attention to. Not the product releases. The lawsuits. That's where you'll find the clues.
Your Canadian driver's license does, in fact, entitle you to drive in the state of California. A co-worker of mine just moved here from Sydney, and I helped him take care of the arrangements, so I happen to know all about the rules on this one. You must carry your original driver's license, not an IDP (I don't think you'd get an IDP coming from another English-speaking country anyway).
When you're in the United States on a temporary work visa, you are still considered a resident of your country of origin, just like you would be if you were here on a tourist visa.
That's part of what REAL ID is trying to fix. Being able to get into the country under false pretenses should be at least slightly less easy than it is right now, don't you think? Especially considering that states like my home state of California are seriously considering the bafflingly bad idea of giving driver's licenses to non-citizens.
Suggestion: Think before getting so snooty next time.
A record of live birth proves only that a person with a given name was born in a given place. That's only half of the task. The other half is to demonstrate that you are that person. Which is the purpose of the passport.
Just try to get into the country bearing only a birth certificate sometime. See how well it works for you.
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No, I'm just out of the office this week.
That never happened. This is one of those "Al Gore said he invented the Internet" myths that people keep spreading around with a pretty callous disregard for the truth.
The truth is that in 2002, Turner CEO Jamie Kellner said that editing out commercials entirely with special software in DVRs is stealing. Nobody cares if you hit the fast-forward button. The networks care if you use software to automatically edit the commercials out entirely.
However, the bigger issue here is that some people think it's okay to steal stuff just because they dislike the seller. That's deeply troubling.
I'm really amazed by how many people have said here that they think downloading stuff off the Internet is okay, that it's just like setting the VCR, that it's not stealing. That really blows my mind.
I don't see much point in making a moral argument. I get the impression that talking about karma here would get me laughed out of the room.
How about a pragmatic argument, then? You want to be able to download high-quality TV shows and movies over the Internet, right? You want somebody to set up a store, like the iTunes Music Store, where you can legally get high-quality TV shows and movies. Well, guess what? Every time somebody says "Bit Torrent is just like a VCR" or "it's not stealing" or "I'm not doing anything wrong when I download," you make it just that much harder for Apple or anybody else to open such a store.
Every time you say something like that, you push the date of our opening back by a month.
If you won't buy a moral argument, will you at least buy that one?
I completely missed the miniseries. But when the new season was getting ready to start, a friend said I should check it out.
That part is fine.
The first thing I did was find a torrent of the miniseries
That part is not. The show was aired repeatedly on the Sci Fi channel in the weeks leading up to the series' premiere. A cut-down version was broadcast in prime time on NBC. The miniseries was released on DVD and made available for rent at any video-rental place in the country. There were numerous opportunities for you to watch the show.
But instead, you decided to steal it.
Guys, this is a problem. You're not seeing the difference between somebody offering something to you and you just taking it without permission.
I suscribe to the "try it and buy it if you like it after a week" philosophy. I don't see anything wrong with it.
What's wrong with it is that the people aren't offering you a chance to try before you buy. In order to try before you buy, you have to steal a copy from the owners. It's kind of sad that you don't see anything wrong with that.
If you wanted to turn this around into an argument that says, "Hey, content providers should offer this as a service," that would be fine. I'd be right there with you. But using it to say "It's okay to take things" just isn't right.
The problem with that argument is that it doesn't actually prove anything. Watch:
"I rob a convenience store and steal a can of Diet Coke. I like it so much that the next day, I go out and buy a case. I tell my friend that I like Diet Coke, and he buys a case."
Does this then lead to the conclusion that robbing convenience stores is good for Coca-Cola? It certainly does not.
The fact that some positive consequences might arise at some point in the future doesn't change the fact that demonstrable negative consequences occurred in the past. In other words, stealing is still wrong even if something good comes of it. The ends do not justify the means.
I have much respect for the "as far as I'm concerned" point of view. However, in this case, you're just plain wrong. There is a qualitative difference between recording a show when it's broadcast (via VCR or Tivo or whatever) and getting somebody else who recorded it to make a copy for you after the fact.
This different is not subtle, nor is it something you can dismiss with a wave of the hand. It doesn't go away when concealed behind an "as far as I'm concerned."
Sure, if you sell 1 million iMacs, maybe only 20, or 30% want to, but they do.
Try something closer to one in a thousand.
I was just very honestly disturbed by the comments you made.
Not really that worried about it. It sounds like you're not buying our products anyway. Instead you "buy G3 motherboards off eBay all the time." That pretty much puts you right at the top of the "don't give a shit" list.
In fact, Bob and I exchanged e-mails briefly just a few hours ago. I was happy to confirm for him that I am, in fact, male.
He said he was too.
So we have that in common.
As much as I like to hear talk like that, a better explanation is that the market is freakin' huge, and 5% of the installed base is still anywhere between 15 and 40 million units, depending on which estimate you believe.
Everybody likes to talk about how Apple owns such a small share of the market, but in doing so y'all lose sign of the fact that Apple is the fourth-largest computer manufacturer in the entire world, and the second-largest developer of operating-system software. Considering how narrow our focus is, I'd say those are two pretty remarkable facts, wouldn't you?
No. You should buy a PowerBook right now. Today, if possible. In fact, you should buy two. They're that good.
Do you have any friends who might be interested in buying PowerBooks? Bring them to the store with you. You should all buy as many PowerBooks as possible.
And while you're at it, don't forget to pick up an iPod. And one for the car!
And while we're wishing, I'd like a pony.
All I have to say about this is: 20030076303.
Sigh. On second thought, I probably shouldn't have said that.
The address Steve uses is sjobs@pixar.com.
quicktime's support for anamorphic video has, and continues, to suck.
You're confusing QuickTime with QuickTime-based applications. In QuickTime 7 we added new attributes that tell QuickTime applications to take a movie with native size X by Y and play it back at size A by B. But the applications have to set that attribute.
besides, why the fuck would you offer online movie downloads as anamorphic video?
Because that's what the video is. Standard-def TV masters are stored on videotape in anamorphic format. When they're played back on a widescreen set, they're stretched out to about 850 by 480. That's how widescreen SD works.
It makes no sense to stretch content before encoding it; at that point, you're just compressing noise. It only makes sense to encode it in the native format, 720 by 480, and then stretch it during playback. That's how you get the highest picture quality out of widescreen SD content.
24p describes how cameras like the dvx-100 record video--24 frames per second, progressive scan. not necessarily HD (the dvx-100 shoots straight DV).
I don't understand this comment at all. When I said "1080/24p," maybe I should have been more specific. I was referring to video in the 1920-by-1080 format playing back at 24 frames per second. That's what the vast majority of scripted TV drama is, as well as high-def movie transfers. When that TV goes out over the air, it's converted through a process called "pulldown" to 60i, sixty fields per second interlaced. But that's for broadcast. We obviously won't want to do that, because again, we'd just be compressing noise. If 3:2 is required, we'll add it during playback just like DVD players do.
jvc's HD cameras record 30 progressive frames at 720p, the other HD spec.
Actually, 720p is usually shot sixty frames per second, not thirty. That's why it's so great for sports.
But the vast majority of scripted content is still shot at 24 frames per second, either on film or in 1080/24p. Motion at 24 frames per second has a very distinctive look, totally different from what we're used to seeing on video. Because people are used to seeing 24-frames-per-second content, giving them 60i or 60p is a distraction. Plus it's more expensive, because storing 30 interlaced frames or 60 progressive frames per second obviously takes more disk space than 24 frames per second.
We're going to deliver whatever the master format is. If that's 24p, then we'll deliver 24p. If it's native 60i (like shot in 60i, not interlaced from 24p source), then we'll deliver 60i. QuickTime doesn't care. If adjustments need to be made between the movie on disk and the screen, like adding 3:2 pulldown for display on an interlaced-scan television, then we'll add it at the end, not at the beginning.
I know you're going to say I'm being a dick here, but I'm going to give you the pure, unvarnished truth:
Neither Apple's management nor Apple's shareholders give a shit about what the "alpha geeks" think.
I know, I know. It's harsh. But it's absolutely true. See, the "alpha geeks" are not our market. We don't sell to them. The "alpha geeks" are defined by one key characteristic: they're irrational. Now, I'm not trying to insult you. I mean it literally. Geeks are not rational. They base their purchasing decisions on things that, from a rational point of view, just don't make any sense. Things like politics, lack "openness," like "customizability." Things that just don't add up in the cost-benefit analysis.
That's fine. That's totally legitimate. But it's not our business.
We sell products to people who want them to work. We don't sell products to people who want to take them apart. There are other companies that do that. We don't seek to dominate them or to put them out of business. We don't see them as competition at all, because the kinds of people who buy our products would never buy a motherboard. They'd never buy Linux. Never in a million years.
Is there some overlap? Sure. We love the fact that some prominent hard-core geeks use Macs. But we're not going to abandon our business plan to woo them. We're not going to turn our backs on the vast and untapped market for next-generation content delivery services, a market which we basically created, in order to please some Internet message board guys.
Again, I'm sorry for sounding so harsh here. I don't mean to be rude. I'm just not going to sugar-coat it for you. You do your thing, whatever makes you happy. We'll do ours.
#1: That stuff about watching videos and listening to music is EXACTLY what Jobs said....
Let's be fair here. You don't exactly have to be a brain surgeon, you know? All you have to do is pay attention to the way people interact with their media. The difference between immersive media and ambient media jump out at you immediately.
No, pretty much everything you said here is wrong.
The Mac mini is meant to be a computer, nothing more. It was designed to be an inexpensive entry to the Mac product line for people who already own PCs and want to step up to something better. It doesn't have anything like the CPU power required for HD playback. You might be able to squeeze 4 Mbps out of it, maybe, if you hold your mouth just right and you're willing to live with some dropped frames. But anything more is not going to be an option this year, and maybe not next either.
And the iPod is not repeat not gonna say it one more time not meant to be a video-playback device. It's not even remotely designed for it. The iPod has a tiny hard drive that's designed for embedded applications, and a 32 MB (I think it is) RAM buffer cache that's optimized for dealing with song-sized chunks of data. That's about 4 MB. Even a half hour of HD content is gonna be half a gigabyte. There's basically no way for the iPod to play that without constantly keeping the hard drive running, and that will burn out the drive very quickly. Seriously, under constant use, the iPod hard drives' life spans are measured in tens of hours.
(How can we do photos, then? Easy. Photos are even smaller than songs. And unlike video, people often do want to carry photos around with them. Keep reading.)
Remember when I said the problem was part technology and part psychology? People like to listen to music while they do other things: Ride on the train, exercise, shop. People like to multi-task with their music.
Video, whether short-form like TV or long-form like movies, isn't like that. Video is an immersive experience. You sit down and you watch it, and you don't do anything else until it's over. That's a totally different interaction model than music.
So there's basically zero reason for video to be portable. You're not going to carry it around with you. You're going to watch it at home.
Exceptions? Sure. But Apple isn't a company that makes a habit of marketing to the exceptions. We shoot for a pretty clearly defined target market and let the exceptions buy their gadgets somewhere else. Chiefly because there aren't nearly enough exceptions out there to make it worth going after, financially speaking. We'd never be able to recover what we invest in R&D and design by selling a few hundred thousand units. We have to sell millions of units per quarter, otherwise the business plan just doesn't work.
Okay.
Everybody's wrong about the video iPod thing. A video iPod would be a dumb idea for lots of reasons, some technical, some psychological. If you want to know where we're going with video playback, look not to the iPod but to its considerably less famous little brother, AirPort Express.
(Addendum: I see now that at least a couple of commenters have figured this out already. Good for them. You all suck for stealing my surprise. One of them even nailed the big challenge, still to date unsolved, right on the head. I wonder if you guys will know it when you see it?)
Yes, of course we're going to be selling new types of content via the iTunes distribution model. It may or may not happen through the "iTunes" name. On the one hand, selling movies and TV shows through a store called "iTunes" makes no sense. On the other, iTunes has HUGE brand recognition right now. It's a marketing decision.
What exactly we offer depends on whose content you're talking about. Some content will be provided to us in 720-by-486 anamorphic, which we'll encode in H.264 at between 1 and 2 megabits. (Did you notice that QuickTime 7 has additional support for anamorphic video? I knew you would.) Other content will come in at HD, and for the time being we'll scale that down to half-HD at 2 Mbps. Doing full 1080/24p at 8 Mbps just isn't practical right now given that even the fastest cable modems in the US top out at 4 Mbps; in order to get real-time streaming of full-HD content, you'd need one of those new-fangled fiber optic Internet services that the telcos are starting to roll out. That's too forward-thinking for phase one. But we can do 2 Mbps now to the same customers we're shipping iTunes songs to.
Pricing, terms and dates will be totally up in the air until five minutes before we announce, and maybe even after that. Remember the Australian store? We had to put that roll-out on indefinite hiatus when The Label That Shall Not Be Named pulled out. All of this depends on the content-providers. Yes, somebody out there is going to say "Pixar." To that person I whisper the name "Disney" and the phrase "subsidiary rights." It's not as simple as you think.
Basically what stands between us and roll-out today is 10% technological and 90% business. It strikes me as kinda funny that some people look only at the technology part of our operations for clues as to future directions. Yes, we shipped iTunes 4.8 with video playback. Whoopty-do. iTunes is built on QuickTime. Adding video support was so incredibly trivial, you wouldn't believe it. It's a tiny thing. What's a much bigger thing is the gradual shift, over the past two years, in the way we as a company do business. We are very serious about IP. We've made a name for ourselves as being the one company in the industry that, better than anybody else, understands the need to zealously protect intellectual property. So when we go to (say) Disney and ask them to let us distribute their unimaginably valuable IP over the Internet, we're going to have a little bit more credibility than whatever copycat tries to come along behind us (cough*Napster*cough, cough*Walmart*cough).
These are the things you guys need to be paying attention to. Not the product releases. The lawsuits. That's where you'll find the clues.
Your Canadian driver's license does, in fact, entitle you to drive in the state of California. A co-worker of mine just moved here from Sydney, and I helped him take care of the arrangements, so I happen to know all about the rules on this one. You must carry your original driver's license, not an IDP (I don't think you'd get an IDP coming from another English-speaking country anyway).
When you're in the United States on a temporary work visa, you are still considered a resident of your country of origin, just like you would be if you were here on a tourist visa.
Eighty-four words. Not one actual thought. Gotta be some kind of record.
That's part of what REAL ID is trying to fix. Being able to get into the country under false pretenses should be at least slightly less easy than it is right now, don't you think? Especially considering that states like my home state of California are seriously considering the bafflingly bad idea of giving driver's licenses to non-citizens.
Suggestion: Think before getting so snooty next time.
A record of live birth proves only that a person with a given name was born in a given place. That's only half of the task. The other half is to demonstrate that you are that person. Which is the purpose of the passport.
Just try to get into the country bearing only a birth certificate sometime. See how well it works for you.
I didn't get that far. When I saw that the very first sentence was wrong, I closed the window and go on with my day.
I guess the lesson to be learned here is that if you want to be taken seriously, don't open with nonsense.