If you don't copy the market leader, you are dismissed out of hand.
Did Apple copy the market leader when they released the first iPod? Did they copy the market leader when they released the iPhone? Or the iPad? Or the MacBook Air?
That could make for a very interesting legal case... Grabbing a phone and destroying the memory card is one thing, but what are the legal ramifications of an officer illegally searching a storage technology on a server almost assuredly in another state over wired technology, and then destroying evidence there?
Hacking laws: Accessing another's computer or server without or exceeding authorisation.
Either way, I don't know why iOS applications are allowed to distribute windows executable files. While iOS malware is definitely Apple's fault when it happens, I guess you can't really argue that Windows malware is a problem if nothing tries to execute them, and execute them as Administrator after all.
There is probably just nothing that checks for this kind of nonsense. This is not a threat, just a big WTF.
The "worst" thing is to release a new product 15 months after the previous new product. For example iPhone 5 fifteen months after iPhone 4S. So you have one quarter with sales going through the roof because of a new product, then four quarters later sales are quiet because everyone is waiting for the next great product.
You should go to MacRumors where they have a guy keeping on and on and on and on posting exactly the same nonsense as you do. You could make a friend and drown your sorrows together.
Sounds like the beginning of the iOS walled garden for OSX
Walled garden can be nice. I had a fox regularly coming into my garden shitting on the grass. It stinks. Badly. Didn't quite need to put a wall around the garden, put some spikes on top of the bit of fence that the fox or foxes used.
You can choose three settings: 1. Allow only apps from the App Store (known maker, vetted to some degree). 2. Allow only signed apps (maker of the app is known to Apple). 3. Allow anything. Signed apps also have the advantage that the OS knows when the app is upgraded that this is indeed the same app, so it can trust the upgraded app in the same way as the original.
The moron (and you) is conflating open source and piracy... which is moronic.
Open source and piracy have a common characteristic: Not paying. That makes the idea that there might be correlation not moronic. But in the phone market, quite different from the computer market, there is another connection: There is an open source OS that makes piracy easy, and a closed source OS that makes piracy hard. Of course pirates will choose the OS that makes piracy easy, which just happens to be the open source OS.
Put two fridges side by side. I'm sure they'll look alike too.
I have two fridges in my home, and they look radically different from each other.
Among tablets, there are a few that look very much different than the iPad, there are some that have a certain similarity but nowhere near the point where Apple could claim its design patents were infringed with a straight face, and then there is the original Samsung tablet which is very much a copy. Then there is the re-designed Samsung tablet, which is most likely changed enough to be not infringing Apple's design patents, but then it suffers from not having a consistent design.
The MS guy may just have answered out of incompetence.
You are very quick throwing around big words like "incompetence". "Incompetence" means not doing his job well. His job, as a PR person, is to tell the press (and bloggers) exactly what Microsoft wants him to tell them - so not answering the question can mean that he is actually very competent. His job is most definitely not to make up answers on the spot if he doesn't know the answer - so at worst, this is lack of knowledge, but not incompetence. And of course he gave a prepared statement as an answer. It is totally competent to give a prepared statement, in order to avoid a question that might as well be a trick question.
"Citing âoecompany policy,â Skype PR man Chaim Haas wouldnâ(TM)t confirm or deny, telling me only that the chat service âoeco-operates with law enforcement agencies as much as is legally and technically possible.â"
Well, what do you expect? He is a PR person. He can't answer that question, unless the legal department has told him what answer to give. And we haven't actually seen the exact question that was asked and the devil could very well be in the details. Slight difference in questioning might give completely different answer.
Just as an example: The headline here says "Microsoft won't say if Skype is secure or not". The summary asks whether Skype conversations [could be monitored]. The article headline asks whether Skype can eavesdrop on your conversations. These are three different questions within five minutes, so we cannot possibly know question the PR man refused to answer. My guess: None of those three.
If you are a professional software dev (IE, it is your primary source of income), my advice to you is to seek alternative employment with a consistently traded value for the labor, and do software as a potentially lucrative hobby on the side.
My company pays me a very nice salary every month for being a professional software developer thank you very much.
And 30% is the difference between the advertised price and the cash that the developer gets. Now buy a $50 iTunes store giftcard. Do you think Apple gets $50 for it? Of course not. Stores wouldn't sell gift cards if they didn't make money. So when you use that card to pay $10 for an app, the developer gets $7, but Apple didn't ever get the full $10.
It's also because, for developers, it means not having to deal with Google's open, flexible approach in Android to everything the Apple controls with an iron fist in iOS (especially when it comes to the App Store vs. the Android Marketplace).
More than three billion dollars paid to iOS developers. How much money has ended up in Android developers' pockets?
Everyone drives faster than the speed limit allows and the police does not even bother stopping anyone unless they are way over the limit.
That's a very bad example. Except for places where speed limits are taken as a source of income and everyone above the speed limit _will_ be stopped, speed limits are supposed to keep traffic safe. But it's not sticking to the actual number what makes traffic safe, it's the reduction in speed. If in place A there is a speed limit of 60 mph and everybody sticks to it and many people go slower, and in place B there is a speed limit of 50 mph and everybody goes faster and some people go 10 miles faster, then people go at the same speed in both places - and that's what counts.
You are quoting the Hungarian Penal code saying "He who takes a foreign object from another to illegally misappropriate it..." Here it is clear that if taking the object somehow creates a duplicate, so that both the rightful owner and the other person have one, a theft has been committed. Because the "taking" has happened, and the misappropriation has happened. This is different from US law, where "depriving the owner" is what makes it theft. Most likely both laws were written by people who didn't expect the possibility of such duplication, and they would have assumed that both laws would have the same effect, but they don't.
Of course there is the little detail that the Hungarian Penal code talks about "foreign objects". And software is not an object. Electricity is not an object either, and as a result, in the early 20th century the first person in Germany who had the grand idea of using their neighbour's electricity supply without paying got away with it - it didn't meet the definition of theft given by the law. New laws were introduced quickly.
This is not theft. Theft means you take something from the victim, something he will no longer possess. In all such cases, the victim will remain in possession of the 'stolen' object, therefore one can argue that no actual theft has taken place.
An interesting difference between US and German law: US law includes "deprive the rightful owner", while German law includes "enrich the unlawful taker". So with the German interpretation theft would have taken place (except there "theft" is only for physical items).
A point could be made that anybody trying to create a minimalist design, would invariably end up with a very similar design.
I imagine how this could play out in court:
Apple: These guys copied our minimalistic design!
Defense: Anybody trying to create a minimalist design would invariably end up with a very similar design.
Jony Ive: Judge, can I have a week?
One week later: Jony Ive: Look, here is a completely different minimalist design.
What Google and Samsung should do, is make their products highly customizable. Allow the user to design their own product. Want rounded corners instead of sharp ones? There you go. Want a black border around your screen? No problem. Want an aluminum case? Want some fruit depicted on the back of your device? Etc.
I'm quite sure Apple can design products better than I can. I very, very much hope that Google and Samsung employ someone who can design products better than I can. Even if they cannot guess my preferences, and everyone has different preferences, they can design something that I like better than anything I could design myself.
This is not theft. Theft means you take something from the victim, something he will no longer possess. In all such cases, the victim will remain in possession of the 'stolen' object, therefore one can argue that no actual theft has taken place.
Depending on interpretation, it is either fraud or copyright infringement. I'd tend more to call it fraud. Like getting a CD from a physical store by convincing the cashier that you paid for it, when you actually didn't; that wouldn't be theft but fraud.
What would be dangerous would be an interpretation as computer hacking. Don't know what exactly the laws would be called, but that could be worse than fraud.
Ive read some comments on the pages in the links and they seem to say this is not Apples fault but the dev's fault for not using the "3 lines of code" to verify in app purchases. What I want to ask is why this is not the default behavior in iOS.
You mean it's the developers' fault for making the assumption that their customers are honest.
Doubtful. A human being intent on doing harm to others will invariably find a way to achieve their goals. If you plan on killing 14 people, I doubt you'll be terribly concerned about violating gun control laws.
Wanting to kill people is madness. Some people will have attacks of madness, and then the attack goes away later on. If that person has a gun and ammunition handy, people get killed. If that person doesn't have gun and ammunition handy, the attack of madness may go away.
And for longer lasting madness, the person would have to find the means for killing lots of people. Getting a gun is a very easy means. If that possibility is not there, killing lots of people is hard.
For similar reasons, a lot of the suicides in the USA are men killing themselves with guns. The same person with no gun available would have probably tried some other method, which quite possibly would have failed. That's why the USA has higher suicide rates among males than other countries; not because they are more prone to suicide, but because they are most likely to have some effective means to achieve their goal.
You have two children in tow... You are in one of the most expensive sections of town. Your children want to eat at McDonald's. You can A) take your children to the relatively inexpensive McDonald's, where they want to go. B) take them to a VERY expensive restaurant, where they'll sit and whine about not going to McDonald's.
Story that I heard from a very expensive restaurant: Parents and young son are supposed to order their meals. Son says loudly "I want sausage and chips". Chef sends an employee to the nearest butcher to buy sausages, cuts the potatoes for chips, kid gets sausage and chips.
I'd see it as a business opportunity. "We'll send someone to your home who will fix your problem for a fixed fee of $99. Or we will send you an iPad for $399".
Its worth remembering what happened to a poor boston student who rented her car for a carshare out using relay rides (and their liability insurance (same 1 million dollar liability insurance GM is using):
An unusual case. The person renting her car killed himself and injured others. Since the person was dead, he couldn't tell anyone that there was insurance through the company organising the car rental.
That student is not going to pay the cost of the accident, because quite simply, the accident wasn't her fault, so she has no liability. At worst it may be that her own insurance will pay and her insurance will become more expensive. Where I live, that can happen if your car is hit by an uninsured driver, your insurance pays for your repairs, and they can't claim the money back from the uninsured driver. (In theory, you can sue them for the damage (higher insurance cost), in practice they don't have any money; that's why they are not insured). Or if someone steals your car and causes damage to your car and to others; your insurance will pay and the premium goes up. Again, you can sue the thief if he is caught.
It's strange how when the iPhone was released, they had to find something bad to say about it, so they added the purchase price and the cost of a two year contract and claimed that was the price for an iPhone. (Which of course it wasn't, it was the price for an iPhone with two years use already paid for). Now they have to find something bad to say about the Lumia, they decided to talk down the price of the Lumia, so they publish the real price, minus subsidies.
Slashdot Mirror
If you don't copy the market leader, you are dismissed out of hand.
Did Apple copy the market leader when they released the first iPod? Did they copy the market leader when they released the iPhone? Or the iPad? Or the MacBook Air?
That could make for a very interesting legal case... Grabbing a phone and destroying the memory card is one thing, but what are the legal ramifications of an officer illegally searching a storage technology on a server almost assuredly in another state over wired technology, and then destroying evidence there?
Hacking laws: Accessing another's computer or server without or exceeding authorisation.
Either way, I don't know why iOS applications are allowed to distribute windows executable files. While iOS malware is definitely Apple's fault when it happens, I guess you can't really argue that Windows malware is a problem if nothing tries to execute them, and execute them as Administrator after all.
There is probably just nothing that checks for this kind of nonsense. This is not a threat, just a big WTF.
The "worst" thing is to release a new product 15 months after the previous new product. For example iPhone 5 fifteen months after iPhone 4S. So you have one quarter with sales going through the roof because of a new product, then four quarters later sales are quiet because everyone is waiting for the next great product.
You should go to MacRumors where they have a guy keeping on and on and on and on posting exactly the same nonsense as you do. You could make a friend and drown your sorrows together.
Sounds like the beginning of the iOS walled garden for OSX
Walled garden can be nice. I had a fox regularly coming into my garden shitting on the grass. It stinks. Badly. Didn't quite need to put a wall around the garden, put some spikes on top of the bit of fence that the fox or foxes used.
You can choose three settings: 1. Allow only apps from the App Store (known maker, vetted to some degree). 2. Allow only signed apps (maker of the app is known to Apple). 3. Allow anything. Signed apps also have the advantage that the OS knows when the app is upgraded that this is indeed the same app, so it can trust the upgraded app in the same way as the original.
The moron (and you) is conflating open source and piracy... which is moronic.
Open source and piracy have a common characteristic: Not paying. That makes the idea that there might be correlation not moronic. But in the phone market, quite different from the computer market, there is another connection: There is an open source OS that makes piracy easy, and a closed source OS that makes piracy hard. Of course pirates will choose the OS that makes piracy easy, which just happens to be the open source OS.
Put two fridges side by side. I'm sure they'll look alike too.
I have two fridges in my home, and they look radically different from each other.
Among tablets, there are a few that look very much different than the iPad, there are some that have a certain similarity but nowhere near the point where Apple could claim its design patents were infringed with a straight face, and then there is the original Samsung tablet which is very much a copy. Then there is the re-designed Samsung tablet, which is most likely changed enough to be not infringing Apple's design patents, but then it suffers from not having a consistent design.
The MS guy may just have answered out of incompetence.
You are very quick throwing around big words like "incompetence". "Incompetence" means not doing his job well. His job, as a PR person, is to tell the press (and bloggers) exactly what Microsoft wants him to tell them - so not answering the question can mean that he is actually very competent. His job is most definitely not to make up answers on the spot if he doesn't know the answer - so at worst, this is lack of knowledge, but not incompetence. And of course he gave a prepared statement as an answer. It is totally competent to give a prepared statement, in order to avoid a question that might as well be a trick question.
"Citing âoecompany policy,â Skype PR man Chaim Haas wouldnâ(TM)t confirm or deny, telling me only that the chat service âoeco-operates with law enforcement agencies as much as is legally and technically possible.â"
Well, what do you expect? He is a PR person. He can't answer that question, unless the legal department has told him what answer to give. And we haven't actually seen the exact question that was asked and the devil could very well be in the details. Slight difference in questioning might give completely different answer.
Just as an example: The headline here says "Microsoft won't say if Skype is secure or not". The summary asks whether Skype conversations [could be monitored]. The article headline asks whether Skype can eavesdrop on your conversations. These are three different questions within five minutes, so we cannot possibly know question the PR man refused to answer. My guess: None of those three.
If you are a professional software dev (IE, it is your primary source of income), my advice to you is to seek alternative employment with a consistently traded value for the labor, and do software as a potentially lucrative hobby on the side.
My company pays me a very nice salary every month for being a professional software developer thank you very much.
And 30% is the difference between the advertised price and the cash that the developer gets. Now buy a $50 iTunes store giftcard. Do you think Apple gets $50 for it? Of course not. Stores wouldn't sell gift cards if they didn't make money. So when you use that card to pay $10 for an app, the developer gets $7, but Apple didn't ever get the full $10.
It's also because, for developers, it means not having to deal with Google's open, flexible approach in Android to everything the Apple controls with an iron fist in iOS (especially when it comes to the App Store vs. the Android Marketplace).
More than three billion dollars paid to iOS developers. How much money has ended up in Android developers' pockets?
Everyone drives faster than the speed limit allows and the police does not even bother stopping anyone unless they are way over the limit.
That's a very bad example. Except for places where speed limits are taken as a source of income and everyone above the speed limit _will_ be stopped, speed limits are supposed to keep traffic safe. But it's not sticking to the actual number what makes traffic safe, it's the reduction in speed. If in place A there is a speed limit of 60 mph and everybody sticks to it and many people go slower, and in place B there is a speed limit of 50 mph and everybody goes faster and some people go 10 miles faster, then people go at the same speed in both places - and that's what counts.
You are quoting the Hungarian Penal code saying "He who takes a foreign object from another to illegally misappropriate it..." Here it is clear that if taking the object somehow creates a duplicate, so that both the rightful owner and the other person have one, a theft has been committed. Because the "taking" has happened, and the misappropriation has happened. This is different from US law, where "depriving the owner" is what makes it theft. Most likely both laws were written by people who didn't expect the possibility of such duplication, and they would have assumed that both laws would have the same effect, but they don't.
Of course there is the little detail that the Hungarian Penal code talks about "foreign objects". And software is not an object. Electricity is not an object either, and as a result, in the early 20th century the first person in Germany who had the grand idea of using their neighbour's electricity supply without paying got away with it - it didn't meet the definition of theft given by the law. New laws were introduced quickly.
This is not theft. Theft means you take something from the victim, something he will no longer possess. In all such cases, the victim will remain in possession of the 'stolen' object, therefore one can argue that no actual theft has taken place.
An interesting difference between US and German law: US law includes "deprive the rightful owner", while German law includes "enrich the unlawful taker". So with the German interpretation theft would have taken place (except there "theft" is only for physical items).
A point could be made that anybody trying to create a minimalist design, would invariably end up with a very similar design.
I imagine how this could play out in court:
Apple: These guys copied our minimalistic design!
Defense: Anybody trying to create a minimalist design would invariably end up with a very similar design.
Jony Ive: Judge, can I have a week?
One week later: Jony Ive: Look, here is a completely different minimalist design.
What Google and Samsung should do, is make their products highly customizable. Allow the user to design their own product. Want rounded corners instead of sharp ones? There you go. Want a black border around your screen? No problem. Want an aluminum case? Want some fruit depicted on the back of your device? Etc.
I'm quite sure Apple can design products better than I can. I very, very much hope that Google and Samsung employ someone who can design products better than I can. Even if they cannot guess my preferences, and everyone has different preferences, they can design something that I like better than anything I could design myself.
This is not theft. Theft means you take something from the victim, something he will no longer possess. In all such cases, the victim will remain in possession of the 'stolen' object, therefore one can argue that no actual theft has taken place.
Depending on interpretation, it is either fraud or copyright infringement. I'd tend more to call it fraud. Like getting a CD from a physical store by convincing the cashier that you paid for it, when you actually didn't; that wouldn't be theft but fraud.
What would be dangerous would be an interpretation as computer hacking. Don't know what exactly the laws would be called, but that could be worse than fraud.
Ive read some comments on the pages in the links and they seem to say this is not Apples fault but the dev's fault for not using the "3 lines of code" to verify in app purchases. What I want to ask is why this is not the default behavior in iOS.
You mean it's the developers' fault for making the assumption that their customers are honest.
Doubtful. A human being intent on doing harm to others will invariably find a way to achieve their goals. If you plan on killing 14 people, I doubt you'll be terribly concerned about violating gun control laws.
Wanting to kill people is madness. Some people will have attacks of madness, and then the attack goes away later on. If that person has a gun and ammunition handy, people get killed. If that person doesn't have gun and ammunition handy, the attack of madness may go away.
And for longer lasting madness, the person would have to find the means for killing lots of people. Getting a gun is a very easy means. If that possibility is not there, killing lots of people is hard.
For similar reasons, a lot of the suicides in the USA are men killing themselves with guns. The same person with no gun available would have probably tried some other method, which quite possibly would have failed. That's why the USA has higher suicide rates among males than other countries; not because they are more prone to suicide, but because they are most likely to have some effective means to achieve their goal.
You have two children in tow... You are in one of the most expensive sections of town. Your children want to eat at McDonald's. You can A) take your children to the relatively inexpensive McDonald's, where they want to go. B) take them to a VERY expensive restaurant, where they'll sit and whine about not going to McDonald's.
Story that I heard from a very expensive restaurant: Parents and young son are supposed to order their meals. Son says loudly "I want sausage and chips". Chef sends an employee to the nearest butcher to buy sausages, cuts the potatoes for chips, kid gets sausage and chips.
I'd see it as a business opportunity. "We'll send someone to your home who will fix your problem for a fixed fee of $99. Or we will send you an iPad for $399".
Its worth remembering what happened to a poor boston student who rented her car for a carshare out using relay rides (and their liability insurance (same 1 million dollar liability insurance GM is using):
An unusual case. The person renting her car killed himself and injured others. Since the person was dead, he couldn't tell anyone that there was insurance through the company organising the car rental.
That student is not going to pay the cost of the accident, because quite simply, the accident wasn't her fault, so she has no liability. At worst it may be that her own insurance will pay and her insurance will become more expensive. Where I live, that can happen if your car is hit by an uninsured driver, your insurance pays for your repairs, and they can't claim the money back from the uninsured driver. (In theory, you can sue them for the damage (higher insurance cost), in practice they don't have any money; that's why they are not insured). Or if someone steals your car and causes damage to your car and to others; your insurance will pay and the premium goes up. Again, you can sue the thief if he is caught.
It's strange how when the iPhone was released, they had to find something bad to say about it, so they added the purchase price and the cost of a two year contract and claimed that was the price for an iPhone. (Which of course it wasn't, it was the price for an iPhone with two years use already paid for). Now they have to find something bad to say about the Lumia, they decided to talk down the price of the Lumia, so they publish the real price, minus subsidies.