There was absolutely nothing preventing them from selling the Ipad to the teen since they were in America and said nothing (according to them) about sending it overseas.
And that is exactly the opposite of what the store employee claims. He claims that he understands Farsi and the woman said, in Farsi, that she would send the iPad to a relative in Iran. And at that point selling the iPad to her would indeed be breaking the law - helping someone to export goods from the USA to the Iran carries a penalty of up to 20 years in jail.
He own the domain. People send the mail to him. So I hope that they trow that part out. The receiver can not be responsible, the sender should be.
No, people didn't send mail to him. They sent mail to the intended recipient, something went wrong on the way, and he set up his domain intentionally to benefit of these mistakes. What went wrong was the user making a mistake while typing the email address; that doesn't change who the intended recipient was, and it doesn't change that the mail was intercepted intentionally.
By the standards of retailing, Apple offers above average pay â" well above the minimum wage of $7.25 and better than the Gap, though slightly less than Lululemon, the yoga and athletic apparel chain, where sales staff earn about $12 an hour. The company also offers very good benefits for a retailer, including health care, 401(k) contributions and the chance to buy company stock, as well as Apple products, at a discount.
It's not about a "right" to do anything trumping anything else. If there was no law against (target-)shooting in the area in which the shooters were, how do you suggest they be prevented from having done something that caused an accidental fire?
I don't get this. There is no law against me driving a car (since I have a valid license). But if I cause an accidental car crash, I'm responsible for the damage.
Let's say I have a product that sells at retail for $600. I have an idea to improve the product by adding a $5 chip and a bit of clever software. The chip is covered by a patent available under an FRAND license. How much will the price rise if I do this?
If I raise the price to $630 (increase of $30 for end user), the retail chain probably takes something like 30 percent, that's $9. The "reasonable" 2.25 percent is $14.17, the chip is $5, total $28.17, leaving $1.83 for me. Well, that's great. Do you think I'm going to add this feature? Don't think so.
Now if I was mad enough to add this feature, say there is another feature to add with identical cost. Again a price increase of $30. But this time, the first patent holder gets another 2.25 percent of the added $30, that's $0.67. So now I make only $1.16. So does 2.25 percent of the final price seem reasonable?
What about a product like a current high end phone, which is a phone, a photo camera, a film camera, a games computer, an ebook reader, a music player, and two dozen other things that I forgot. That could easily covered by 30 patents available under an FRAND license. That's 67.5 percent. For the remaining 32.5 percent I have to develop, build, pay for the parts, and the sellers want to make some money as well. How is that supposed to work?
That simple concept doesn't deserve copyright protection period. I could write a tetris clone in my sleep after watching someone else play it for just 20 seconds.
It's easy to copy. It's a lot harder to come up with something so good yourself.
Apart from VLC which was taken off after a DMCA copyright notice, what GPL software has been attempted sold on the Apple app store though? There haven't been that many tests of whether the GPL and App Store are really incompatible.
Just saying: It seems that the App Store terms make it impossible to sell GPL licensed software for money. The GPL license allows to charge any amount of money for the software, you may charge your cost for the source code, you may charge nothing for the license. The App Store terms say that Apple delivers the software to you for free, what you pay for is the license to use it.
Apple is NOT (I repeat - NOT) afraid of being sued - even less afraid of a _threat_ of being sued. Especially the nickel and dime stuff that would be done for App Store _potential_ violations. Apple just wants to make more money off the App Store, so they reject as much good free stuff as possible, so that people will go _buy_ the non-free apps, so that they can make their (more than fair) share.
Of course they are not afraid of being sued. I would offer two possible explanations: 1. It was clear that one of the copyright holders didn't want his code to be on the App Store, and Apple respected the wishes of the copyright holder, which seems an entirely decent thing to do - even if possibly (as I said, it is up to debate) they would have the right to go against the wishes of the copyright holder. 2. The copyright holder said "fuck you" to Apple, and Apple said "fuck yourself" to the copyright holder. Your guess which explanation is better.
How does that satisfy the requirement for "Installation Information" (GPLv3) or "scripts used to control [...] installation of the executable" (GPLv2)? One still has to buy a $649 Mac and a $396 certificate (assuming four-year service life of an iOS device) to install it.
Here's the "installation information": Go to the App Store. Enter the name of the application into the search box. Search. Pick the application. Click on the "Install" button.
And I can't see any GPL requirement that all development tools would have to be free. And of course your numbers are intentionally exaggerated: Instead of buying a Mac, surely you must have a friend or family member who owns a Mac and would let you use it for free. And for $99 (once you install the software you don't need a developer account anymore) you get a lot more than just a certificate. For example right now about 100 hours worth of videos giving you quality information how to develop MacOS X and iOS software; that's probably more than you would ever get about Linux programming.
Not even that. The problem is that some copyright holders of GPL licensed software _claimed_ that having software based on their code was against the GPL license, and threatened to sue Apple. Whether that claim is true or not is up for debate, but clearly these people didn't _want_ their code on the App Store, and the _threat_ of being sued was enough for Apple to remove the software.
If the copyright holders agree that their GPL licensed software may be distributed through the App Store then there is no problem.
And in practice, when GPL licensed software appears on the App Store, anyone can get the source code (you can even include it in the application package), you can make the application available to anyone else who wants it by telling them where to download it, you can create derived works. It's exactly the opposite of the Tivo situation where you had code that followed the letter of the GPL but violated the spirit - on the App Store, you can in practice do all the things that GPL is supposed to allow you, even if the letter of the GPL license isn't followed.
So this might not be intentional or planned, but evolution at work: Nigerian scammers who send out believable emails get hundred times more responses by people who want to check out the scheme more closely, but 99% of those cannot be convinced to hand over actual money, no matter how much work the scammer invests. So the scammer makes no money and gives up scamming. Another scammer whose English is rubbish gets only one percent of the replies, but all those replies are from true idiots, so that scammer makes more money and keeps doing it.
True - mostly. A hybrid drive of some sort would make a lot of sense on a small laptop. Although you are less likely to need large amounts of storage on a small laptop - it doesn't really have the power or memory to deal well with large datasets, and the screen is not really good for image editing and stuff like that. Perhaps most users are satisfied with the price-performance os pure SSD drives on such machines.
A hybrid drive would make sense on any laptop. On my laptop I have tons of music, audiobooks, videos that take lots of space but really don't have to be read or written at any speed. The music will play fine at 32 KByte per second read speed. Would be great to have a hybrid drive where all this stuff is on the big and slow hard drive while all speed sensitive things are on the SSD part, without me having to do anything.
The problem is that there is only one maker of hybrid drives, and the hybrid drives they are making are rubbish. To be precise, they are slower than cheaper plain hard drives, which somehow defeats the purpose.
I miss the simpler days when software claiming to double your computers speed wasn't a scam, and was actually from a reputable company (Connectix, for example, before they were bought out by Microsoft). SpeedDoubler (for Mac) back then did logical things.
My company got a "not for resale" copy of SpeedDoubler which I installed on my 60 MHz PowerPC. It did indeed double the speed - when I uninstalled it:-( Utterly unmitigated rubbish.
General purpose, you say? Tell me, how many of those "general purpose" registers can you use with an integer multiply?
Oh, are we getting excited. Nobody gives a rat's arse for x86 32-bit mode. And in x86 64-bit mode, all 16 integer registers can be used with an integer multiply. By the way, nobody gives a rat's arse what AMD's involvement in this is.
The x86 has four general purpose registers. No one in their right mind would design a chip like that today.
x86 has eight general purpose registers. In 64 bit mode, it's 16 general purpose registers. Plus 16 vector registers of 256 bit each, holding 64 double precision, or 128 single precision floating point numbers, or up to 512 bytes. (That's the current versions).
... I'm not sure you understood the words I typed. Let me help. When I said "minimum of $15k for any work per year since you don't have an established track record," I meant that something like a minimum amount due would be required for people who don't have an established track record. Apple, as you note, has an established track record. Therefore, that clause wouldn't apply.
I understood perfectly well what you wrote. And I said it doesn't make any sense, because it doesn't. There was a time, long long ago, when Apple didn't have a proven track record. They started with 700,000 songs. 700,000 times $15k = 10.5 billion dollars. I'm quite sure Apple didn't pay 10.5 billion dollars to the record industry in 2003, mostly because they didn't have that amount of money.
In the case of the Sun, the record companies are also getting access to the Sun's wide subscriber network and (albeit questionable) reputation - again, they're an "established" player. While interesting, such a license agreement wouldn't be applicable to the brand new "Bob's Online Record Store", which lacks any market branding, subscribers, advertising power, etc.
Your argument doesn't make any sense at all. If a seller isn't good at selling music, the record company gets less money for copyright licenses, not more.
That "economists" need to be better statisticians. How much does it pay to rob a bank that you do at least a month's prep work for?
There's no problem with the statistics. £19,000 per person is the total average. If well-prepared bank robbers make more than average, then badly prepared bank robbers will make less than average.
I wonder if this study takes into account the robbers increasing in efficiency and effectiveness with each successive robbery. I know they have a 1 in 5 chance of being caught, but is their 10th robbery as sloppy as the previous 9? I tend to get better at my job, but does this apply to bank robbers? This is likely assuming they don't raise the stakes with each successive robbery, which they tend to do.
If the average bank robber in the average bank robbery has a 20% chance of being caught, and if bank robbers get better and less likely to be caught with experience, then it follows that your chances at getting caught in your first robbery are much higher than 20%.
Slashdotters are about evenly divided between those who think Windows Phone is rubbish compared to an iPhone, and those who think Windows Phone is rubbish compared to an Android phone. Microsoft has to convince these people that Windows Phone is better than their favourite phone, and that Microsoft is nearly as cool as their favourite company.
"that'll be 33% of gross sales, with a minimum of $15k for any work per year since you don't have an established track record,
That number would be nonsense. Apple has about 20 million songs. 20 million times $15k = 300 billion dollars. And they sold a total of about 19 billion songs (estimated from Wikipedia date for 10 billion and 15 billion sold). So that would be about $16 per song sold.
But there _are_ comparable contracts. UK newspapers have been giving away CDs full of music for free for quite a while. It would be interesting what lets say The Sun paid for the rights to give away a CD with 20 number one hits for free with every copy of their newspaper. I bet they didn't pay 20 times $150,000.
Wasn't there a story some months back about stores charging higher prices to those shopping from an iPad? Nothing to do with supports, just targetted pricing: Market research determined that iPad users would be willing to spend more in general (Presumably the penny-pinchers wouldn't buy iPads), and so it made business sense to use this correlation to determine more optimal prices on a targetted-for-the-user basis
Very short term gain. Whenever an iPad users finds out, what store do you think would they never shop at again, ever?
Yeah, it is sort-of unfortunate. My MBP is three-four years old now. I have the disposable income to buy another one, and I could at any time, but I'm not happy at the inability to swap the battery. I'd sort-of like an optical drive, too, but I could live with external for that.
If your MBP is three to four years old, then it has a battery that needs replacing every 300 or maybe 400 charges. Newer MacBooks have batteries that last 1000 charges. Yes, you have to pay for the battery replacement instead of just for the battery, but overall you will save money with the newer, non-user replaceable battery.
Well, Apple sells two entirely different MacBook Pro 15" models. Which would be the same in those respects, except that you can't just buy a replacement battery and install it yourself (but then your six year old MBP needed three battery replacements when a new one needs one).
I hope Retina display will be available for other models as well in a year or so.
I love my first gen MBP, it has served me well. But it has gone through 3 batteries, and I need to order another one now. (They bulge out and die)
There is a difference between 1st gen and current MacBooks. The user replaceable batteries only lasted for 300 charges, while the new non-replaceable ones should last 1000 charges. With larger capacity to start, so you will use fewer charges.
This may be pointing out the obvious, but so what if someone does pay, and does legitimately retrieve their data. What's to stop the Government from prosecuting them next? After all, they get the "Criminal" with the evidence, and they had to pay to get it, (weakly) proving its their data.
If its _your_ data, there is nothing the government could prosecute you for. If its _your_ illegal copies of copyrighted material, then I suggest it's a stupid idea to try and download any of that under the eyes of the government.
Slashdot Mirror
There was absolutely nothing preventing them from selling the Ipad to the teen since they were in America and said nothing (according to them) about sending it overseas.
And that is exactly the opposite of what the store employee claims. He claims that he understands Farsi and the woman said, in Farsi, that she would send the iPad to a relative in Iran. And at that point selling the iPad to her would indeed be breaking the law - helping someone to export goods from the USA to the Iran carries a penalty of up to 20 years in jail.
He own the domain. People send the mail to him. So I hope that they trow that part out. The receiver can not be responsible, the sender should be.
No, people didn't send mail to him. They sent mail to the intended recipient, something went wrong on the way, and he set up his domain intentionally to benefit of these mistakes. What went wrong was the user making a mistake while typing the email address; that doesn't change who the intended recipient was, and it doesn't change that the mail was intercepted intentionally.
By the standards of retailing, Apple offers above average pay â" well above the minimum wage of $7.25 and better than the Gap, though slightly less than Lululemon, the yoga and athletic apparel chain, where sales staff earn about $12 an hour. The company also offers very good benefits for a retailer, including health care, 401(k) contributions and the chance to buy company stock, as well as Apple products, at a discount.
Doesn't look that badly paid then.
It's not about a "right" to do anything trumping anything else. If there was no law against (target-)shooting in the area in which the shooters were, how do you suggest they be prevented from having done something that caused an accidental fire?
I don't get this. There is no law against me driving a car (since I have a valid license). But if I cause an accidental car crash, I'm responsible for the damage.
Let's say I have a product that sells at retail for $600. I have an idea to improve the product by adding a $5 chip and a bit of clever software. The chip is covered by a patent available under an FRAND license. How much will the price rise if I do this?
If I raise the price to $630 (increase of $30 for end user), the retail chain probably takes something like 30 percent, that's $9. The "reasonable" 2.25 percent is $14.17, the chip is $5, total $28.17, leaving $1.83 for me. Well, that's great. Do you think I'm going to add this feature? Don't think so.
Now if I was mad enough to add this feature, say there is another feature to add with identical cost. Again a price increase of $30. But this time, the first patent holder gets another 2.25 percent of the added $30, that's $0.67. So now I make only $1.16. So does 2.25 percent of the final price seem reasonable?
What about a product like a current high end phone, which is a phone, a photo camera, a film camera, a games computer, an ebook reader, a music player, and two dozen other things that I forgot. That could easily covered by 30 patents available under an FRAND license. That's 67.5 percent. For the remaining 32.5 percent I have to develop, build, pay for the parts, and the sellers want to make some money as well. How is that supposed to work?
That simple concept doesn't deserve copyright protection period. I could write a tetris clone in my sleep after watching someone else play it for just 20 seconds.
It's easy to copy. It's a lot harder to come up with something so good yourself.
Apart from VLC which was taken off after a DMCA copyright notice, what GPL software has been attempted sold on the Apple app store though? There haven't been that many tests of whether the GPL and App Store are really incompatible.
Just saying: It seems that the App Store terms make it impossible to sell GPL licensed software for money. The GPL license allows to charge any amount of money for the software, you may charge your cost for the source code, you may charge nothing for the license. The App Store terms say that Apple delivers the software to you for free, what you pay for is the license to use it.
Apple is NOT (I repeat - NOT) afraid of being sued - even less afraid of a _threat_ of being sued. Especially the nickel and dime stuff that would be done for App Store _potential_ violations. Apple just wants to make more money off the App Store, so they reject as much good free stuff as possible, so that people will go _buy_ the non-free apps, so that they can make their (more than fair) share.
Of course they are not afraid of being sued. I would offer two possible explanations: 1. It was clear that one of the copyright holders didn't want his code to be on the App Store, and Apple respected the wishes of the copyright holder, which seems an entirely decent thing to do - even if possibly (as I said, it is up to debate) they would have the right to go against the wishes of the copyright holder. 2. The copyright holder said "fuck you" to Apple, and Apple said "fuck yourself" to the copyright holder. Your guess which explanation is better.
How does that satisfy the requirement for "Installation Information" (GPLv3) or "scripts used to control [...] installation of the executable" (GPLv2)? One still has to buy a $649 Mac and a $396 certificate (assuming four-year service life of an iOS device) to install it.
Here's the "installation information": Go to the App Store. Enter the name of the application into the search box. Search. Pick the application. Click on the "Install" button.
And I can't see any GPL requirement that all development tools would have to be free. And of course your numbers are intentionally exaggerated: Instead of buying a Mac, surely you must have a friend or family member who owns a Mac and would let you use it for free. And for $99 (once you install the software you don't need a developer account anymore) you get a lot more than just a certificate. For example right now about 100 hours worth of videos giving you quality information how to develop MacOS X and iOS software; that's probably more than you would ever get about Linux programming.
Not even that. The problem is that some copyright holders of GPL licensed software _claimed_ that having software based on their code was against the GPL license, and threatened to sue Apple. Whether that claim is true or not is up for debate, but clearly these people didn't _want_ their code on the App Store, and the _threat_ of being sued was enough for Apple to remove the software.
If the copyright holders agree that their GPL licensed software may be distributed through the App Store then there is no problem.
And in practice, when GPL licensed software appears on the App Store, anyone can get the source code (you can even include it in the application package), you can make the application available to anyone else who wants it by telling them where to download it, you can create derived works. It's exactly the opposite of the Tivo situation where you had code that followed the letter of the GPL but violated the spirit - on the App Store, you can in practice do all the things that GPL is supposed to allow you, even if the letter of the GPL license isn't followed.
So this might not be intentional or planned, but evolution at work: Nigerian scammers who send out believable emails get hundred times more responses by people who want to check out the scheme more closely, but 99% of those cannot be convinced to hand over actual money, no matter how much work the scammer invests. So the scammer makes no money and gives up scamming. Another scammer whose English is rubbish gets only one percent of the replies, but all those replies are from true idiots, so that scammer makes more money and keeps doing it.
True - mostly. A hybrid drive of some sort would make a lot of sense on a small laptop. Although you are less likely to need large amounts of storage on a small laptop - it doesn't really have the power or memory to deal well with large datasets, and the screen is not really good for image editing and stuff like that. Perhaps most users are satisfied with the price-performance os pure SSD drives on such machines.
A hybrid drive would make sense on any laptop. On my laptop I have tons of music, audiobooks, videos that take lots of space but really don't have to be read or written at any speed. The music will play fine at 32 KByte per second read speed. Would be great to have a hybrid drive where all this stuff is on the big and slow hard drive while all speed sensitive things are on the SSD part, without me having to do anything.
The problem is that there is only one maker of hybrid drives, and the hybrid drives they are making are rubbish. To be precise, they are slower than cheaper plain hard drives, which somehow defeats the purpose.
I miss the simpler days when software claiming to double your computers speed wasn't a scam, and was actually from a reputable company (Connectix, for example, before they were bought out by Microsoft). SpeedDoubler (for Mac) back then did logical things.
My company got a "not for resale" copy of SpeedDoubler which I installed on my 60 MHz PowerPC. It did indeed double the speed - when I uninstalled it :-( Utterly unmitigated rubbish.
General purpose, you say? Tell me, how many of those "general purpose" registers can you use with an integer multiply?
Oh, are we getting excited. Nobody gives a rat's arse for x86 32-bit mode. And in x86 64-bit mode, all 16 integer registers can be used with an integer multiply. By the way, nobody gives a rat's arse what AMD's involvement in this is.
The x86 has four general purpose registers. No one in their right mind would design a chip like that today.
x86 has eight general purpose registers. In 64 bit mode, it's 16 general purpose registers. Plus 16 vector registers of 256 bit each, holding 64 double precision, or 128 single precision floating point numbers, or up to 512 bytes. (That's the current versions).
... I'm not sure you understood the words I typed. Let me help. When I said "minimum of $15k for any work per year since you don't have an established track record," I meant that something like a minimum amount due would be required for people who don't have an established track record. Apple, as you note, has an established track record. Therefore, that clause wouldn't apply.
I understood perfectly well what you wrote. And I said it doesn't make any sense, because it doesn't. There was a time, long long ago, when Apple didn't have a proven track record. They started with 700,000 songs. 700,000 times $15k = 10.5 billion dollars. I'm quite sure Apple didn't pay 10.5 billion dollars to the record industry in 2003, mostly because they didn't have that amount of money.
In the case of the Sun, the record companies are also getting access to the Sun's wide subscriber network and (albeit questionable) reputation - again, they're an "established" player. While interesting, such a license agreement wouldn't be applicable to the brand new "Bob's Online Record Store", which lacks any market branding, subscribers, advertising power, etc.
Your argument doesn't make any sense at all. If a seller isn't good at selling music, the record company gets less money for copyright licenses, not more.
That "economists" need to be better statisticians. How much does it pay to rob a bank that you do at least a month's prep work for?
There's no problem with the statistics. £19,000 per person is the total average. If well-prepared bank robbers make more than average, then badly prepared bank robbers will make less than average.
I wonder if this study takes into account the robbers increasing in efficiency and effectiveness with each successive robbery. I know they have a 1 in 5 chance of being caught, but is their 10th robbery as sloppy as the previous 9? I tend to get better at my job, but does this apply to bank robbers? This is likely assuming they don't raise the stakes with each successive robbery, which they tend to do.
If the average bank robber in the average bank robbery has a 20% chance of being caught, and if bank robbers get better and less likely to be caught with experience, then it follows that your chances at getting caught in your first robbery are much higher than 20%.
Slashdotters are about evenly divided between those who think Windows Phone is rubbish compared to an iPhone, and those who think Windows Phone is rubbish compared to an Android phone. Microsoft has to convince these people that Windows Phone is better than their favourite phone, and that Microsoft is nearly as cool as their favourite company.
"that'll be 33% of gross sales, with a minimum of $15k for any work per year since you don't have an established track record,
That number would be nonsense. Apple has about 20 million songs. 20 million times $15k = 300 billion dollars. And they sold a total of about 19 billion songs (estimated from Wikipedia date for 10 billion and 15 billion sold). So that would be about $16 per song sold.
But there _are_ comparable contracts. UK newspapers have been giving away CDs full of music for free for quite a while. It would be interesting what lets say The Sun paid for the rights to give away a CD with 20 number one hits for free with every copy of their newspaper. I bet they didn't pay 20 times $150,000.
Wasn't there a story some months back about stores charging higher prices to those shopping from an iPad? Nothing to do with supports, just targetted pricing: Market research determined that iPad users would be willing to spend more in general (Presumably the penny-pinchers wouldn't buy iPads), and so it made business sense to use this correlation to determine more optimal prices on a targetted-for-the-user basis
Very short term gain. Whenever an iPad users finds out, what store do you think would they never shop at again, ever?
Yeah, it is sort-of unfortunate. My MBP is three-four years old now. I have the disposable income to buy another one, and I could at any time, but I'm not happy at the inability to swap the battery. I'd sort-of like an optical drive, too, but I could live with external for that.
If your MBP is three to four years old, then it has a battery that needs replacing every 300 or maybe 400 charges. Newer MacBooks have batteries that last 1000 charges. Yes, you have to pay for the battery replacement instead of just for the battery, but overall you will save money with the newer, non-user replaceable battery.
Well, Apple sells two entirely different MacBook Pro 15" models. Which would be the same in those respects, except that you can't just buy a replacement battery and install it yourself (but then your six year old MBP needed three battery replacements when a new one needs one).
I hope Retina display will be available for other models as well in a year or so.
I love my first gen MBP, it has served me well. But it has gone through 3 batteries, and I need to order another one now. (They bulge out and die)
There is a difference between 1st gen and current MacBooks. The user replaceable batteries only lasted for 300 charges, while the new non-replaceable ones should last 1000 charges. With larger capacity to start, so you will use fewer charges.
This may be pointing out the obvious, but so what if someone does pay, and does legitimately retrieve their data. What's to stop the Government from prosecuting them next? After all, they get the "Criminal" with the evidence, and they had to pay to get it, (weakly) proving its their data.
If its _your_ data, there is nothing the government could prosecute you for. If its _your_ illegal copies of copyrighted material, then I suggest it's a stupid idea to try and download any of that under the eyes of the government.