Like the one that Google/Motorola is losing right now against Microsoft over h.264. Google asked for four billion dollars per year for you to watch h.264 videos on an Xbox. But in your warped world view that is probably purely defensive.
I don't entirely agree with you, but it has been pointed out that some "rights holders" have bought up patents as a defense against being sued by patent trolls. So yeah, it makes sense, in a way, to file for trivial patents as a defense against other trivial patents.
Obviously Samsung, being Samsung, will use this patent purely defensively. Most probably to defend sales if HTC, LG and others wake up and spend some more money on marketing their phones:-) I mean they are such an outstanding company with only the best of motives, several convictions in 2012 for price fixing, a CEO who was convicted for tax evasion, people getting cancer in their factories from chemical poisoning. And let's not forget their patents on rounded corners (which are strangely never mentioned, but Samsung has design patents that include rounded corners).
The real difference is what the law of the country in question says. For example, in Germany up to the late 70's to commit fraud you had to deceive _a person_. That's what the law said. Deceiving your bank's cash machine wouldn't have been fraud (the law was eventually changed).
If you knowingly trick a computer into giving you money that's not yours, it's not any different than tricking a person into the same. Open door fallacies are the worst.
That would depend on what the law actually says. And I mean the exact wording. In the case of a gambling machine, you throw in money, you press buttons, and the machine may or may not spit out money, which you then keep. That's how it works. If the machine spits it out, it is yours.
Apple scored poorly for environmental friendliness because they were demonstrably still using specific chemicals and types of non-recyclable plastic as well as having a planned obsolescence programme on their devices by making it difficult for users to replace batteries, whilst at the time selling devices whose batteries would at best last a few years before beginning to seriously lose charge creating an unnecessary surplus of binned devices increasing the landfill problem unnecessarily.
You could try to post which chemicals Apple was using at a time when other manufacturers stopped using them. I doubt you can find any evidence of this. On the other hand, it is well documented that Apple hadn't _promised_ to remove BFRs from their products (bromine flame retardants) because they were already gone, which lead to Greenpeace rating Apple much lower than for example HP who promised to remove BFRs at some point in the future.
Older "non-replacable" batteries are easily replaced by anyone who cares (I replaced the one in my iPod mini myself with a battery purchased on eBay for £3.95), newer ones are rated for 1,000 charges and Apple will replace them for you.
All the copyrighted materials that you download from Amazon or iTunes store or elsewhere, all those copyrighted materials that you download through streaming services like Pandora, or things like BBC iPlayer, are perfectly legal and paid for. Shouldn't they charge the post office when I order DVDs or CDs with copyright materials through mail?
You have a lot of dumb friends if they think burning a cd equates to more work than, oh, i don't know, the artists having to compose, play, and record those songs.
I probably have a lot of dumb friends. And a lot of friends who are more clever than you in many significant ways, but not interested in some things you are interested in.
pple don't allow alternative stores on their (not your) devices, so buying from Amazon has extra problems:)
Are you clueless or just trying to be obnoxious? Any music that you buy from Amazon ends up in your iTunes library automatically. There is an amazingly simple API that you can use to put songs into the iTunes library: Just move it into the folder "~/Music/iTunes/iTunes Music/Automatically Add to iTunes". Which is what Amazon does.
When you die the rights to that music dies with you.
Legally, I suppose it is part of my estate and goes to whoever inherits that estate. It certainly won't stop playing. Sadly though I must say that when I die, those who inherit it might lack the taste to appreciate it.
It's gotten a bit convoluted when you add in supporting other iDevices ("How the eft do I add music to a playlist that gets synched with only the iPhone and not the iPad again?").
That's not really difficult. You make an "iPhone playlist" and an "iPad playlist", maybe a "Jim's iPhone playlist" and a "Jill's iPhone playlist", and set each device to sync with that playlist.
80% of the world use Android phones for their MP3 needs, and with Apples market share, also went its store.
You seem to be just slightly confused. I can buy music wherever I like (well, that's Amazon, iTunes, anyone selling CDs, and some smaller players), and it works everywhere I care. Maybe Android phones are too stupid to use these sources, I wouldn't know. In that case, do Android users have to throw their libraries away and start paying for all their music again?
People who are willing to buy your product will buy it. People who are not willing to buy your product will either copy it from somewhere, or, simply ignore it and go on their way without it.
I know people who are basically honest and willing to pay the maker of a product. Where this doesn't quite work out is that these people are not quite sure who is the "maker". If I take a blank CD, make a copy of some music on my Mac, and give it them, they see _me_ as the "maker" of the CD, and if I don't ask for money, they have no bad conscience and no realisation that they have done anything wrong. These people are quite willing to pay for music on a CD in a shop, because someone "made" that CD and deserves to be paid. For these people it isn't about the money; they will gladly pay for the CD in a shop.
Enabling video rentals is surely a good reason. Without DRM, it would be impossible to offer a downloadable movie let's say to buy for $10 and to rent for $3. Because everybody who wants the movie would rent it for $3 and not buy it. As a consequence, the movie would not be available for rent. Which means I would have to pay $10 even if I only want to view it once, instead of viewing it once for $3.
You can argue that there should be no DRM on the $10 movie purchase, only on the $3 rental. This argument would be well supported by the fact that you can purchase music albums for similar prices without DRM. And since music is much more expensive per megabyte than movies (let's say $150 per GB instead of $10 per GB), the motivation for illegal copying of music should be higher. Music usually has a non-DRM protection by including buyer information (in the open in the case of iTunes, and there are some "private" tags in Amazon's mp3 music).
I can see how people might get tricked or confused, but that's only if they don't have a brain.
Actually, I had seen their website and hadn't noticed that you are supposed to pay the rest of your loan for the device _immediately_ if you cancelled the service contract. Not that it makes a big difference; it is common sense that you have to pay the money anyway, the only difference is that you have to pay in one lump sum instead of over the remaining number of months. And since T-mobile offers no-contract service (I think it is actually a one month contract), it should be easy to find a buyer for your phone.
What I find annoying is how difficult it is to find out what the actual terms are. For example, I tried to find out what actually happens when you have a contract with O2 in the UK, and you exceed your data limit. It's impossible to find out. T-mobile is very clear: On the cheapest contract for example you get 500 MB of very fast data per month, and after that an unlimited amount of very slow data. No extra payment, no matter how much you use. On O2, I checked it, and it was impossible to find out.
Wow phones are so expensive in the US. In the UK I'm paying GBP40/month (about 30 dollars I think) for "free" iPhone 4S, unlimited data including tethering, 500 talk minutes to any network and 1000 SMS. I didn't pay any upfront fee.
_Phones_ are cheaper in the USA, a lot cheaper. _Phone service contracts_ are a lot cheaper in the UK. Compare the price for on iPhone on the US and UK store (although the price difference is mostly due to 20% VAT, and you get better consumer protection in the UK, which is obviously included in the price). Now take the price for an iPhone on the Apple store, divide by 24, subtract from the phone contract cost so you know what you actually pay for the service, and the service is UK is absolutely cheap compared to US.
Apart from the fact that it was all on TV, no crime of any real importance has happened. One harmless looking medical doctor in Britain killed fifty times more people without anyone noticing.
Or take this: "A self-styled street preacher who lured three men to their deaths through job adverts on the Craigslist website has been sentenced to death in Ohio." So do we need to crack down on street preachers and Craigslist? Nonsense.
If you compare killings by bombs during marathons, and killings by open-source file system developers, there isn't that much difference. So surely we need to close down open-source file system development as well?
This would be a bit like if you had a secret crime lair where you kept all the evidence of your misdeeds. The government would have a right to search for it, but if they couldn't find it or couldn't figure out how to open it, they couldn't force you to open it for them or tell them where it is or acknowledge its existence.
A better analogy: There are guns hidden in a locked cupboard. It is locked, but can be opened with brute force. The police ask you to unlock it.
The fact that you have the keys to unlock the cupboard is evidence against you. The police will get the guns with or without your help, but without your help, they find it much harder to prove that you owned the guns or knew about them. In this case, the fact that you can decrypt the drive can itself be evidence against you. Imagine the police lost the hard drive, buys an identically looking replacement, encrypts it, and asks you for the decryption key - just to get evidence that you had decryption keys for the original drive.
By ordering to decrypt, the accused is compelled to tell the government what they are not already known, that is, the content of the encrypted drive that could be evidence against accused . Hence the 5th Amendment Violation
Wrong. They have the right to the information on the encrypted drive. What the government doesn't know is whether or not the accused is the one putting the encrypted data there. If he has the key, he is guilty - no need to decrypt the drive! If he doesn't have the key, he is innocent (all slightly exaggerated).
Where did the last sentence in this summary come from? It seems to be completely contradictory to the main content. Elaborate?
In this particular case, whether the defendant knew the password or not was in itself something that could be used as evidence against the defendant. Even if the hard drive had been destroyed or lost, supplying the password could be used against him. In a different case, if it is known that there is encrypted data and it is known that you have the password, and there is no evidence in the password itself, then they can compel you to decrypt.
If they had ideas, they wouldn't be doing a share buyback. A share buyback means they have more cash than they have good ways to spend it,
When Schwarzenegger went into politics, some people complained that he had more muscle than brains. Well, he had more muscle than Einstein had brains, so not really a problem.
Now they have far more than $100bn in the bank. Since you complain that they can't think of good ways of spending that money, you can surely give some examples where a company made good use just of ONE billion dollars? Facebook used $1bn to buy a company worth $100 million. HP is right now in court about their last big purchase, claiming they were scammed, and definitely claiming that they lost a few billion. There's Microsoft and Skype. Apple has been investing in manufacturers and used the money to buy technology that they are actually using, but there is just a limit to the money you can spend if you expect a return from the investment.
Actually they are, but when you have billions in the bank this decline can take decades.
And when you add $10 billion to the bank in the last quarter alone, bankruptcy will take even longer:-)
According to many, Apple makes about 70% of all profits in the phone market (Apple + Samsung make about 102%). More in the tablet market. And amazingly, Apple actually makes 45% of all profits in the PC market!
Here's how you do it: You split your development task up into small parts that should take 1 to 5 days. For each task, you write down your best estimate. Now of course you know you are bad at making good estimates, but that doesn't matter: You do the first part, then write down what you estimated, and when you actually finished. From that you extrapolate when you will finish - if you estimated two days and it took three, you estimate that the whole task will take 50% longer than estimated. After the second part is finished, you get an improved estimate, and so on.
That is a generic problem with fines and big corporations, not only something related with privacy issues. As long as fines are applied at absolute values corporations will only laugh at them and keep doing what they want. Fines should be applied at amounts proportionally to a company's value.
If one rogue employee does something wrong and the company is find 145,000 Euros, they won't be laughing. They'll fire him so he won't do it again. I think the problem here is not that they think Google should be fined more because the company is big, but Google should be fined more because they spied on an awful lot of people. Let's say a small company loses personal information of all their 1,000 customers. And eBay loses personal information of 0.01% of their customers, which happens to be also exactly 1,000 customers. The fine should be the same. If eBay loses data of a million customers, the fine should be so much higher.
If you really want to have effective deterrence, fines based on a percentage of annual income would be more effective. Some countries already do this with traffic tickets, to ensure that rich people have to care about getting a speeding ticket, rather than just laughing at the (to them) paltry amount.
These are different situations. Someone who makes 100 times more money than I will be driving about as much as I do and should get statistically the same number of parking tickets that I do. To make us both avoid parking tickets, we should get different fines.
But a company with 100 times more employees than another will statistically do things that are wrong 100 times more often than the smaller company. so for small offenses (like one employee cheating a customer) they shouldn't be fined more. It will happen 100 times more often, so they will be 100 times more because of that. Only for big offenses where the offense is big due to the size of the company they should be charged more. If the boss ordered all employees to cheat their customers, that's 100 times worse if the company is 100 times bigger and should be fined 100 times more.
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Apple is the one filing all the scam lawsuits.
Like the one that Google/Motorola is losing right now against Microsoft over h.264. Google asked for four billion dollars per year for you to watch h.264 videos on an Xbox. But in your warped world view that is probably purely defensive.
I don't entirely agree with you, but it has been pointed out that some "rights holders" have bought up patents as a defense against being sued by patent trolls. So yeah, it makes sense, in a way, to file for trivial patents as a defense against other trivial patents.
Obviously Samsung, being Samsung, will use this patent purely defensively. Most probably to defend sales if HTC, LG and others wake up and spend some more money on marketing their phones :-) I mean they are such an outstanding company with only the best of motives, several convictions in 2012 for price fixing, a CEO who was convicted for tax evasion, people getting cancer in their factories from chemical poisoning. And let's not forget their patents on rounded corners (which are strangely never mentioned, but Samsung has design patents that include rounded corners).
The real difference is what the law of the country in question says. For example, in Germany up to the late 70's to commit fraud you had to deceive _a person_. That's what the law said. Deceiving your bank's cash machine wouldn't have been fraud (the law was eventually changed).
If you knowingly trick a computer into giving you money that's not yours, it's not any different than tricking a person into the same. Open door fallacies are the worst.
That would depend on what the law actually says. And I mean the exact wording. In the case of a gambling machine, you throw in money, you press buttons, and the machine may or may not spit out money, which you then keep. That's how it works. If the machine spits it out, it is yours.
Apple scored poorly for environmental friendliness because they were demonstrably still using specific chemicals and types of non-recyclable plastic as well as having a planned obsolescence programme on their devices by making it difficult for users to replace batteries, whilst at the time selling devices whose batteries would at best last a few years before beginning to seriously lose charge creating an unnecessary surplus of binned devices increasing the landfill problem unnecessarily.
You could try to post which chemicals Apple was using at a time when other manufacturers stopped using them. I doubt you can find any evidence of this. On the other hand, it is well documented that Apple hadn't _promised_ to remove BFRs from their products (bromine flame retardants) because they were already gone, which lead to Greenpeace rating Apple much lower than for example HP who promised to remove BFRs at some point in the future.
Older "non-replacable" batteries are easily replaced by anyone who cares (I replaced the one in my iPod mini myself with a battery purchased on eBay for £3.95), newer ones are rated for 1,000 charges and Apple will replace them for you.
All the copyrighted materials that you download from Amazon or iTunes store or elsewhere, all those copyrighted materials that you download through streaming services like Pandora, or things like BBC iPlayer, are perfectly legal and paid for. Shouldn't they charge the post office when I order DVDs or CDs with copyright materials through mail?
We're Artisans - not engineers.
I've met too many who were not artisans, but children playing with finger paints. Or adults painting by numbers.
You have a lot of dumb friends if they think burning a cd equates to more work than, oh, i don't know, the artists having to compose, play, and record those songs.
I probably have a lot of dumb friends. And a lot of friends who are more clever than you in many significant ways, but not interested in some things you are interested in.
pple don't allow alternative stores on their (not your) devices, so buying from Amazon has extra problems :)
Are you clueless or just trying to be obnoxious? Any music that you buy from Amazon ends up in your iTunes library automatically. There is an amazingly simple API that you can use to put songs into the iTunes library: Just move it into the folder "~/Music/iTunes/iTunes Music/Automatically Add to iTunes". Which is what Amazon does.
When you die the rights to that music dies with you.
Legally, I suppose it is part of my estate and goes to whoever inherits that estate. It certainly won't stop playing. Sadly though I must say that when I die, those who inherit it might lack the taste to appreciate it.
It's gotten a bit convoluted when you add in supporting other iDevices ("How the eft do I add music to a playlist that gets synched with only the iPhone and not the iPad again?").
That's not really difficult. You make an "iPhone playlist" and an "iPad playlist", maybe a "Jim's iPhone playlist" and a "Jill's iPhone playlist", and set each device to sync with that playlist.
80% of the world use Android phones for their MP3 needs, and with Apples market share, also went its store.
You seem to be just slightly confused. I can buy music wherever I like (well, that's Amazon, iTunes, anyone selling CDs, and some smaller players), and it works everywhere I care. Maybe Android phones are too stupid to use these sources, I wouldn't know. In that case, do Android users have to throw their libraries away and start paying for all their music again?
People who are willing to buy your product will buy it. People who are not willing to buy your product will either copy it from somewhere, or, simply ignore it and go on their way without it.
I know people who are basically honest and willing to pay the maker of a product. Where this doesn't quite work out is that these people are not quite sure who is the "maker". If I take a blank CD, make a copy of some music on my Mac, and give it them, they see _me_ as the "maker" of the CD, and if I don't ask for money, they have no bad conscience and no realisation that they have done anything wrong. These people are quite willing to pay for music on a CD in a shop, because someone "made" that CD and deserves to be paid. For these people it isn't about the money; they will gladly pay for the CD in a shop.
There are no good reasons for DRM.
Enabling video rentals is surely a good reason. Without DRM, it would be impossible to offer a downloadable movie let's say to buy for $10 and to rent for $3. Because everybody who wants the movie would rent it for $3 and not buy it. As a consequence, the movie would not be available for rent. Which means I would have to pay $10 even if I only want to view it once, instead of viewing it once for $3.
You can argue that there should be no DRM on the $10 movie purchase, only on the $3 rental. This argument would be well supported by the fact that you can purchase music albums for similar prices without DRM. And since music is much more expensive per megabyte than movies (let's say $150 per GB instead of $10 per GB), the motivation for illegal copying of music should be higher. Music usually has a non-DRM protection by including buyer information (in the open in the case of iTunes, and there are some "private" tags in Amazon's mp3 music).
I can see how people might get tricked or confused, but that's only if they don't have a brain.
Actually, I had seen their website and hadn't noticed that you are supposed to pay the rest of your loan for the device _immediately_ if you cancelled the service contract. Not that it makes a big difference; it is common sense that you have to pay the money anyway, the only difference is that you have to pay in one lump sum instead of over the remaining number of months. And since T-mobile offers no-contract service (I think it is actually a one month contract), it should be easy to find a buyer for your phone.
What I find annoying is how difficult it is to find out what the actual terms are. For example, I tried to find out what actually happens when you have a contract with O2 in the UK, and you exceed your data limit. It's impossible to find out. T-mobile is very clear: On the cheapest contract for example you get 500 MB of very fast data per month, and after that an unlimited amount of very slow data. No extra payment, no matter how much you use. On O2, I checked it, and it was impossible to find out.
Wow phones are so expensive in the US. In the UK I'm paying GBP40/month (about 30 dollars I think) for "free" iPhone 4S, unlimited data including tethering, 500 talk minutes to any network and 1000 SMS. I didn't pay any upfront fee.
_Phones_ are cheaper in the USA, a lot cheaper. _Phone service contracts_ are a lot cheaper in the UK. Compare the price for on iPhone on the US and UK store (although the price difference is mostly due to 20% VAT, and you get better consumer protection in the UK, which is obviously included in the price). Now take the price for an iPhone on the Apple store, divide by 24, subtract from the phone contract cost so you know what you actually pay for the service, and the service is UK is absolutely cheap compared to US.
Apart from the fact that it was all on TV, no crime of any real importance has happened. One harmless looking medical doctor in Britain killed fifty times more people without anyone noticing.
Or take this: "A self-styled street preacher who lured three men to their deaths through job adverts on the Craigslist website has been sentenced to death in Ohio." So do we need to crack down on street preachers and Craigslist? Nonsense.
If you compare killings by bombs during marathons, and killings by open-source file system developers, there isn't that much difference. So surely we need to close down open-source file system development as well?
This would be a bit like if you had a secret crime lair where you kept all the evidence of your misdeeds. The government would have a right to search for it, but if they couldn't find it or couldn't figure out how to open it, they couldn't force you to open it for them or tell them where it is or acknowledge its existence.
A better analogy: There are guns hidden in a locked cupboard. It is locked, but can be opened with brute force. The police ask you to unlock it.
The fact that you have the keys to unlock the cupboard is evidence against you. The police will get the guns with or without your help, but without your help, they find it much harder to prove that you owned the guns or knew about them. In this case, the fact that you can decrypt the drive can itself be evidence against you. Imagine the police lost the hard drive, buys an identically looking replacement, encrypts it, and asks you for the decryption key - just to get evidence that you had decryption keys for the original drive.
By ordering to decrypt, the accused is compelled to tell the government what they are not already known, that is, the content of the encrypted drive that could be evidence against accused . Hence the 5th Amendment Violation
Wrong. They have the right to the information on the encrypted drive. What the government doesn't know is whether or not the accused is the one putting the encrypted data there. If he has the key, he is guilty - no need to decrypt the drive! If he doesn't have the key, he is innocent (all slightly exaggerated).
Where did the last sentence in this summary come from? It seems to be completely contradictory to the main content. Elaborate?
In this particular case, whether the defendant knew the password or not was in itself something that could be used as evidence against the defendant. Even if the hard drive had been destroyed or lost, supplying the password could be used against him. In a different case, if it is known that there is encrypted data and it is known that you have the password, and there is no evidence in the password itself, then they can compel you to decrypt.
If they had ideas, they wouldn't be doing a share buyback. A share buyback means they have more cash than they have good ways to spend it,
When Schwarzenegger went into politics, some people complained that he had more muscle than brains. Well, he had more muscle than Einstein had brains, so not really a problem.
Now they have far more than $100bn in the bank. Since you complain that they can't think of good ways of spending that money, you can surely give some examples where a company made good use just of ONE billion dollars? Facebook used $1bn to buy a company worth $100 million. HP is right now in court about their last big purchase, claiming they were scammed, and definitely claiming that they lost a few billion. There's Microsoft and Skype. Apple has been investing in manufacturers and used the money to buy technology that they are actually using, but there is just a limit to the money you can spend if you expect a return from the investment.
Actually they are, but when you have billions in the bank this decline can take decades.
And when you add $10 billion to the bank in the last quarter alone, bankruptcy will take even longer :-)
According to many, Apple makes about 70% of all profits in the phone market (Apple + Samsung make about 102%). More in the tablet market. And amazingly, Apple actually makes 45% of all profits in the PC market!
Here's how you do it: You split your development task up into small parts that should take 1 to 5 days. For each task, you write down your best estimate. Now of course you know you are bad at making good estimates, but that doesn't matter: You do the first part, then write down what you estimated, and when you actually finished. From that you extrapolate when you will finish - if you estimated two days and it took three, you estimate that the whole task will take 50% longer than estimated. After the second part is finished, you get an improved estimate, and so on.
That is a generic problem with fines and big corporations, not only something related with privacy issues. As long as fines are applied at absolute values corporations will only laugh at them and keep doing what they want. Fines should be applied at amounts proportionally to a company's value.
If one rogue employee does something wrong and the company is find 145,000 Euros, they won't be laughing. They'll fire him so he won't do it again. I think the problem here is not that they think Google should be fined more because the company is big, but Google should be fined more because they spied on an awful lot of people. Let's say a small company loses personal information of all their 1,000 customers. And eBay loses personal information of 0.01% of their customers, which happens to be also exactly 1,000 customers. The fine should be the same. If eBay loses data of a million customers, the fine should be so much higher.
If you really want to have effective deterrence, fines based on a percentage of annual income would be more effective. Some countries already do this with traffic tickets, to ensure that rich people have to care about getting a speeding ticket, rather than just laughing at the (to them) paltry amount.
These are different situations. Someone who makes 100 times more money than I will be driving about as much as I do and should get statistically the same number of parking tickets that I do. To make us both avoid parking tickets, we should get different fines.
But a company with 100 times more employees than another will statistically do things that are wrong 100 times more often than the smaller company. so for small offenses (like one employee cheating a customer) they shouldn't be fined more. It will happen 100 times more often, so they will be 100 times more because of that. Only for big offenses where the offense is big due to the size of the company they should be charged more. If the boss ordered all employees to cheat their customers, that's 100 times worse if the company is 100 times bigger and should be fined 100 times more.