So, what's up with classical music lovers hating this idea and concept? If they weren't a bunch of pretentious blowhards before, they certainly upped the ante with that attitude. Give me a break. Most classical "lovers" are at home listening to their beloved music on a $10,000 record player pumped through $27,000 worth of "sonic purification" anyway, because anything less would be....well uncivilised.
For anyone with a bit of interest, Amazon has this series of "99 Greatest Hits by xxx" covering lots of classical composers, with recordings that are actually perfectly decent, at a very low price (I got some for £2.99 and others for £4.99). Doesn't need a $10,000 record player. Sounds perfectly fine with an iPod and $100 Grado headphones.
One of my favourite records is some really old piano music played by Dinu Lipatti - and no $10,000 player can help with the fact that a lot of it is radio recordings. Not recordings made in a radio station, but recordings made by holding a microphone to a radio. Doesn't change that he plays like a god.
You can skew the number all you want. Facts are facts, and the fact is that the conditions at Foxconn are bad. So bad that this year 150 workers threatened mass suicide in protest. They where all fired and forcibly removed. To me, that does not sound like a content work force.
These workers where threatening mass suicide "at the Apple factory" as was widely reported, because they were in danger of losing their jobs when Microsoft reduced the XBox production. That wasn't a work force unhappy with their jobs. It was a work force unhappy with the prospect of having no job.
True, but misleading, since the numbers for Foxconn only includes suicides in the workplace, while the national average includes all suicides.
True, but misleading again. Many, many Foxconn employees live at their workplace. You wouldn't expect a suicidal Foxconn employee to make a long journey to their birth place to commit suicide, would you? And you wouldn't expect someone to try suicide with an overdose of sleeping tablets (most common mode of failed suicide attempts in the USA), when they are in a dormitory, observed by others?
I have no intent of doing anything stupid like that, but if I did, a suicide wouldn't happen at my workplace, because it's not a good place for it. But if I was a Foxconn employee, living in a dormitory at the factory, a factory roof would seem a good choice. (Which is why the put up nets; it doesn't reduce the number of suicide attempts, but the number of successful attempts).
When I was in year three (That's when I was about eight, not sure what third grade means outside of Australia) I had an amusing argument with my teacher about "geometry". She claimed that if you stood right at the right spot at ground level, you could see all base four corner stones of a square pyramid. The argument ended up with me being sent to the headmasters office because I called her ignorant and facetious, but I did have my sweet moment when the headmaster informed her that she was wrong and that I was right.
She is right if you are big compared to the pyramid. I am not that good at geometry, but if you are taller than the depth of the pyramid then it should work.
It doesn't even have to be fixed size; if these maps were let's say between 1000 and 10,000 bytes, then round up to a multiple of 500 bytes, and only twenty different sizes get transmitted - very little information left.
Yes, but with an iPad (just like with the locked down iPhone), expect to pay an outrageous price to Apple for changing the battery (or expect the Apple battery to be no longer offered by Apple), so when the time comes, it will probably be cheaper to just buy a new entire iPad for yourself.
From personal experience: Replacing the battery on my iPod Mini (that's the one before the iPod Nano) cost me the enormous sum of £3.75. These prices do come down.
No question that Samsung is trying to piggyback off the success of the Apple design, but CONFUSE? How does that work? I accidentally bought a $500 Samsung tablet with the word "SAMSUNG" printed in all caps on the front and the back, thinking it was an Apple. Those tricksters!!
Well, no. My mum, god bless her, bought me a Samsung tablet as a Christmas present, thinking it was an iPad. She's never heard of Apple or Samsung, she just bought what looked to her like an iPad. (Story made up like the one I responded to).
70? Don't you mean 120 years after artist's death [wikipedia.org]? It must be allowed for Mikey Mouse to belong to Disney perpetually. You don't want Mickey to fall into wrong hands, do you? Expect another extension in 20 years, not that anyone cares anymore.
The first extension was made after one of the World Wars, when a large number of authors had died at very young age, and this was cutting the number of years of copyright protection down for some people. Arguably quite reasonable at the time. On the other hand, they should really have changed it to "number of years since publishing". If a 20 year old writes some great music, it seems bizarre to me that the length of copyright is different, depending on whether he dies at 21 or at 99. Or that a 20 year old author who dies at 80 gets 60 + X years, while a 70 year old author who dies at 80 only gets 10 + X years.
Wouldn't winning this particular case end in the increase of online music sales prices? I mean... if the distributors of digital music are forced to pay more money in order to "license" these songs/albums, won't they just pass those price increases on to the consumer?
In the case of iTunes, Apple will have a contract that says "we give the music to our customers for X cents (whether "give" is "license" or "sell" is irrelevant here), and we keep 30% of the X cents, and give 70% of the X cents to the record company. In return, Apple gets (probably) a single master, and a promise that the record companies are responsible if anything is wrong with copyright etc."
So how much the record companies have to pay to whom is of no concern to Apple. And what the customers pay is of no concern to Sister Sledge.
Seriously though, capitalism was never predicated around petitions. If you want "pure capitalism" to work, then the response is to not buy Apple products. A petition may be a useful adjunct, so Apple knows why they're being boycotted, but a petition without accompanying action is meaningless.
So what would be the result if nobody bought any Apple product anymore? There were reports that over 300 workers threatened suicide at the Apple factory quite recently. Actually, that was workers who were in fear of losing their jobs because Microsoft was reducing XBox production, but the headlines reported about suicide threats at the "Apple factory". So you many people would lose their jobs if Apple stops building iPhones? How many would kill themselves?
Imagine the following. Let's say that walking 1 KM per day reduces your chance to die by 80%. Thus insurance decides to say, oh wait I can offer better rates for life insurance if I look at all those people who walk 1 KM per day. So off the insurance goes and people start walking and we are happy little bunnies.
There is one problem with this: Death is actually quite cheap. Your pension insurance would love it if you smoked heavily and startet hanggliding and mountaineering as a hobby at 65. Your health insurance would rather have you die than paying for twenty years of care.
In at least some states you aren't allowed to charge differently based on whether you have filed claims, which is a pretty sane way to regulate.
Here in the UK, one young man got the shock of his life when he tried to insure his car, and the insurance company offered to insure him for £24,000 a year. Seems they can't refuse to insure you, but there is no law limiting how much they can charge (after causing a few accidents)
The title of this article is wrong. Everything I read shows no decision has been made yet. The Judge ruled that there is no need for a prelimenary injunction.
I followed the link in the meaningless drivel that claims to be a submission. The link points to a blog full of meaningless drivel with another link. That link points to another blog full of meaningless drivel which contains a link to an Ars Technica article. And if you follow that link, you find that a submitter has quoted a clueless twat who copied an article from a clueless twat who read an Ars Technica article and didn't understand a word of it.
Just a few hours ago Slashdot reported that a judge had refused an injunction against ReDigi, and now they are supposed to have won their case? I'd say there are two possibilities: One, that we have a judge who can run at speeds exceeding the speed of light, because that's the only way a case could have finished so quick. Or second, that the submitter is a clueless twat you didn't understand a word of what he is actually submitting. Since there is no link to any real information, I assume the latter.
So we did training classes and any employee is now supposed to be able to cry "Stop!" when something starts to get too hazardous without consequences. During the classes employees who tried to use the argument "Well, adjusted for man-hours of work we kill fewer people than other agencies." were "hammered" for missing the point. *The point is a culture of safety where one loss is unacceptable.*
If you are paid by tax payers money, then people had to work to create the taxes, and when people work, accidents happen, and some people die. So someone who is really good at statistics can probably figure out that X million dollars taxes spent = 1 person dead due to a work related accident. Therefore, spending X million dollars or more in taxes to save one life is counter productive. My guess is that X is somewhere between 5 and 10.
I can understand that it works that way and yet, at the same time, what prevents people from renaming the file or putting it elsewhere in order to keep a copy and yet sell it at the same time?
Well, that would be copyright infringement, and therefore illegal. So people won't do it, or so I would assume. Same as people don't take stuff out of shops without paying, because it is illegal.
In the end, things can change ownership without any payment being made. There must be millions of songs legally purchased where the owner has died meanwhile. So I would assume that their heirs are now the proper owners of that music. Or a couple buying music together with a joint account, and they get divorced, each getting half the music.
midnight phone calls, requests to drive to far away places (using your own gas and time), and a fair amount of disrespect
It seems that you are a good person, trying to help others. Unfortunately, it seems to be a very bad side in the nature of some people that this doesn't get you any respect, quite the opposite. Try this: Next time you meet one of these people, and people discuss what to do, you suggest going to some nice restaurant and you say loud enough that it can't be missed: "You pay". When they ask why, you say "well, I solved this problem for you for free, didn't I"?
So what happens? They might never ask for your help again. Good. They might ask for your help again, and you can now very easily refuse, in spite of your good nature. Good. Or you get a good meal, and you get respect. Good.
I do think Apple are worse than MS. Apple is responsible for translating the closed Console ecosystem to phones, tablets, and soon, PCs. Insisting on a 30% cut of whatever they do allow you to sell on their platform is quite bad.
Actually, Apple doesn't take 30% of everything. Apple pays 70% of the retail price to developers, but you are assuming that Apple gets 100%. I regularly find some shop that sells Apple Gift Cards at 20% rebate or so and use those; you can be quite sure that if I pay £20 for a £25 gift card then Apple is getting less than £20 from that sale, but developers would get 70% of £25.
And that still doesn't address my concern about requiring active participation in litigation against you. I just don't see why the fifth doesn't hold, even in the real world. Is it just another case of precedent overriding the Constitution? (SCOTUS has ruled that the clear intent of the Constitution is legally binding, even if something is omitted in the language - another slippery slope for another day.)
The password is not evidence. The password gives the court access to evidence that is not protected by the fifth amendment. Here is a different situation where you couldn't be compelled to tell the password:
There is a computer with encrypted files. It is definitely known that one of two persons encrypted the files, and that the person who encrypted the files is guilty of a crime, and the other person isn't. Here the fact alone that you know the password, or even that you once knew the password and forgot it, would be evidence against you. So in this case the password _is_ evidence. But in this woman's case, the password itself isn't evidence.
Well, usually you're innocent until proven guilty, so I guess they'd have to proof you didn't forget and are actually withholding it.
"Innocent until proven guilty" is all about how court cases are run. There is more than "innocent until proven guilty", there is also the fact that the police has to tell you about your rights, that they can't do illegal searches, and on the other hand that you have to cooperate in searches - which this woman is refusing to do. And there are rules what happens when someone acts against the court rules. Jurors can be jailed in extreme cases. Evidence can be thrown out. And _you_ can go to jail for "contempt of court". There are different rules applying.
Now the fact is that this is her computer, which she used daily for the scam she was running, and which she encrypted to cover her tracks. Forgetting the password seems unlikely.
Don't this implicate that police now can jail anyone as they like? Just generate a random file and demand that the accused shall provide a "decyption key". If not they can be held and jailed for contempt?
1. It is and always was possible for a police officer to be a criminal, and a criminal police officer could always forge evidence against you. Nothing new.
2. The police would not only have to generate a random file, they would also have to convince a judge to give them a warrant with a good reason to search that particular file; a concrete reason why it would be likely that this file holds evidence. And the reason would have to be good enough not only to convince the judge who signs the warrant, but also the judge in the court case, with your lawyer present.
Atheism: no. There is no spiritual or moral component of atheism.
You're a bloody ignorant idiot.
Here's the moral component: _I_ am the highest authority to judge what I am doing. Therefore _I_ am the one who is solely responsible for living my life the right way. There is only one life, only one chance of doing it right. I won't come back to fix what I'm doing wrong, so _I_ intend to do things right the first time. If Christians or Muslims hide behind their "religion" to justify whatever evil they do, _I_ can't do that. I can't blame anything on a higher authority because _I_ am the highest authority for myself.
That's funny, I thought people bought phones that do what they want, not what the maker of the phone wants.
You may have thought that, but you are wrong in your assumptions what people want. People don't _want_ multitasking. They want a phone that they can use, that lets them do what they want to do easily, and that has a good battery life. "Multitasking" is not something that people want. Multitasking can be a means to achieve what people want - on a desktop computer or laptop with a decent battery, it is a good way to achieve what people want. On a mobile phone, it's not.
Funny you should say that. Know what happens if you dereference null in Objective C? Well, "send a message to nil," but it's the same concept. The answer: the method silent returns 0/false/nil (depending on what the return signature is). That's it. No exception and no warning.
That, my friend, is not a bug, it is a language feature. A very well thought-through feature that makes programming for Objective-C a lot, lot simpler. Sending a message to a nil object is not an exception; it is something that happens very regular. It's like "free" or "realloc" in Standard C: A NULL argument there is a regular occurence.
Slashdot Mirror
So, what's up with classical music lovers hating this idea and concept? If they weren't a bunch of pretentious blowhards before, they certainly upped the ante with that attitude. Give me a break. Most classical "lovers" are at home listening to their beloved music on a $10,000 record player pumped through $27,000 worth of "sonic purification" anyway, because anything less would be....well uncivilised.
For anyone with a bit of interest, Amazon has this series of "99 Greatest Hits by xxx" covering lots of classical composers, with recordings that are actually perfectly decent, at a very low price (I got some for £2.99 and others for £4.99). Doesn't need a $10,000 record player. Sounds perfectly fine with an iPod and $100 Grado headphones.
One of my favourite records is some really old piano music played by Dinu Lipatti - and no $10,000 player can help with the fact that a lot of it is radio recordings. Not recordings made in a radio station, but recordings made by holding a microphone to a radio. Doesn't change that he plays like a god.
You can skew the number all you want. Facts are facts, and the fact is that the conditions at Foxconn are bad. So bad that this year 150 workers threatened mass suicide in protest. They where all fired and forcibly removed. To me, that does not sound like a content work force.
These workers where threatening mass suicide "at the Apple factory" as was widely reported, because they were in danger of losing their jobs when Microsoft reduced the XBox production. That wasn't a work force unhappy with their jobs. It was a work force unhappy with the prospect of having no job.
True, but misleading, since the numbers for Foxconn only includes suicides in the workplace, while the national average includes all suicides.
True, but misleading again. Many, many Foxconn employees live at their workplace. You wouldn't expect a suicidal Foxconn employee to make a long journey to their birth place to commit suicide, would you? And you wouldn't expect someone to try suicide with an overdose of sleeping tablets (most common mode of failed suicide attempts in the USA), when they are in a dormitory, observed by others?
I have no intent of doing anything stupid like that, but if I did, a suicide wouldn't happen at my workplace, because it's not a good place for it. But if I was a Foxconn employee, living in a dormitory at the factory, a factory roof would seem a good choice. (Which is why the put up nets; it doesn't reduce the number of suicide attempts, but the number of successful attempts).
When I was in year three (That's when I was about eight, not sure what third grade means outside of Australia) I had an amusing argument with my teacher about "geometry". She claimed that if you stood right at the right spot at ground level, you could see all base four corner stones of a square pyramid. The argument ended up with me being sent to the headmasters office because I called her ignorant and facetious, but I did have my sweet moment when the headmaster informed her that she was wrong and that I was right.
She is right if you are big compared to the pyramid. I am not that good at geometry, but if you are taller than the depth of the pyramid then it should work.
It doesn't even have to be fixed size; if these maps were let's say between 1000 and 10,000 bytes, then round up to a multiple of 500 bytes, and only twenty different sizes get transmitted - very little information left.
Yes, but with an iPad (just like with the locked down iPhone), expect to pay an outrageous price to Apple for changing the battery (or expect the Apple battery to be no longer offered by Apple), so when the time comes, it will probably be cheaper to just buy a new entire iPad for yourself.
From personal experience: Replacing the battery on my iPod Mini (that's the one before the iPod Nano) cost me the enormous sum of £3.75. These prices do come down.
No question that Samsung is trying to piggyback off the success of the Apple design, but CONFUSE? How does that work? I accidentally bought a $500 Samsung tablet with the word "SAMSUNG" printed in all caps on the front and the back, thinking it was an Apple. Those tricksters!!
Well, no. My mum, god bless her, bought me a Samsung tablet as a Christmas present, thinking it was an iPad. She's never heard of Apple or Samsung, she just bought what looked to her like an iPad. (Story made up like the one I responded to).
yes no one had glossy black tablets with 1 inch radius corners before iPad, not that 1992 compaq I linked to above
Can we see a picture from the side as well? I would just bet that it was a teeny bit thicker than the iPad. Thick enough to destroy any similarity.
70? Don't you mean 120 years after artist's death [wikipedia.org]? It must be allowed for Mikey Mouse to belong to Disney perpetually. You don't want Mickey to fall into wrong hands, do you? Expect another extension in 20 years, not that anyone cares anymore.
The first extension was made after one of the World Wars, when a large number of authors had died at very young age, and this was cutting the number of years of copyright protection down for some people. Arguably quite reasonable at the time. On the other hand, they should really have changed it to "number of years since publishing". If a 20 year old writes some great music, it seems bizarre to me that the length of copyright is different, depending on whether he dies at 21 or at 99. Or that a 20 year old author who dies at 80 gets 60 + X years, while a 70 year old author who dies at 80 only gets 10 + X years.
Wouldn't winning this particular case end in the increase of online music sales prices? I mean... if the distributors of digital music are forced to pay more money in order to "license" these songs/albums, won't they just pass those price increases on to the consumer?
In the case of iTunes, Apple will have a contract that says "we give the music to our customers for X cents (whether "give" is "license" or "sell" is irrelevant here), and we keep 30% of the X cents, and give 70% of the X cents to the record company. In return, Apple gets (probably) a single master, and a promise that the record companies are responsible if anything is wrong with copyright etc."
So how much the record companies have to pay to whom is of no concern to Apple. And what the customers pay is of no concern to Sister Sledge.
Seriously though, capitalism was never predicated around petitions. If you want "pure capitalism" to work, then the response is to not buy Apple products. A petition may be a useful adjunct, so Apple knows why they're being boycotted, but a petition without accompanying action is meaningless.
So what would be the result if nobody bought any Apple product anymore? There were reports that over 300 workers threatened suicide at the Apple factory quite recently. Actually, that was workers who were in fear of losing their jobs because Microsoft was reducing XBox production, but the headlines reported about suicide threats at the "Apple factory". So you many people would lose their jobs if Apple stops building iPhones? How many would kill themselves?
Imagine the following. Let's say that walking 1 KM per day reduces your chance to die by 80%. Thus insurance decides to say, oh wait I can offer better rates for life insurance if I look at all those people who walk 1 KM per day. So off the insurance goes and people start walking and we are happy little bunnies.
There is one problem with this: Death is actually quite cheap. Your pension insurance would love it if you smoked heavily and startet hanggliding and mountaineering as a hobby at 65. Your health insurance would rather have you die than paying for twenty years of care.
In at least some states you aren't allowed to charge differently based on whether you have filed claims, which is a pretty sane way to regulate.
Here in the UK, one young man got the shock of his life when he tried to insure his car, and the insurance company offered to insure him for £24,000 a year. Seems they can't refuse to insure you, but there is no law limiting how much they can charge (after causing a few accidents)
The title of this article is wrong. Everything I read shows no decision has been made yet. The Judge ruled that there is no need for a prelimenary injunction.
I followed the link in the meaningless drivel that claims to be a submission. The link points to a blog full of meaningless drivel with another link. That link points to another blog full of meaningless drivel which contains a link to an Ars Technica article. And if you follow that link, you find that a submitter has quoted a clueless twat who copied an article from a clueless twat who read an Ars Technica article and didn't understand a word of it.
Quote from Ars Technica here http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2012/02/judge-denies-record-labels-request-to-shutter-used-mp3-store.ars : "Sullivanâ(TM)s decision means that the case is still headed to trial, where Capitol will attempt to prove its allegations that ReDigi facilitates wanton copyright infringement and is not protected by the first-sale doctrine."
Just a few hours ago Slashdot reported that a judge had refused an injunction against ReDigi, and now they are supposed to have won their case? I'd say there are two possibilities: One, that we have a judge who can run at speeds exceeding the speed of light, because that's the only way a case could have finished so quick. Or second, that the submitter is a clueless twat you didn't understand a word of what he is actually submitting. Since there is no link to any real information, I assume the latter.
So we did training classes and any employee is now supposed to be able to cry "Stop!" when something starts to get too hazardous without consequences. During the classes employees who tried to use the argument "Well, adjusted for man-hours of work we kill fewer people than other agencies." were "hammered" for missing the point. *The point is a culture of safety where one loss is unacceptable.*
If you are paid by tax payers money, then people had to work to create the taxes, and when people work, accidents happen, and some people die. So someone who is really good at statistics can probably figure out that X million dollars taxes spent = 1 person dead due to a work related accident. Therefore, spending X million dollars or more in taxes to save one life is counter productive. My guess is that X is somewhere between 5 and 10.
I can understand that it works that way and yet, at the same time, what prevents people from renaming the file or putting it elsewhere in order to keep a copy and yet sell it at the same time?
Well, that would be copyright infringement, and therefore illegal. So people won't do it, or so I would assume. Same as people don't take stuff out of shops without paying, because it is illegal.
In the end, things can change ownership without any payment being made. There must be millions of songs legally purchased where the owner has died meanwhile. So I would assume that their heirs are now the proper owners of that music. Or a couple buying music together with a joint account, and they get divorced, each getting half the music.
midnight phone calls, requests to drive to far away places (using your own gas and time), and a fair amount of disrespect
It seems that you are a good person, trying to help others. Unfortunately, it seems to be a very bad side in the nature of some people that this doesn't get you any respect, quite the opposite. Try this: Next time you meet one of these people, and people discuss what to do, you suggest going to some nice restaurant and you say loud enough that it can't be missed: "You pay". When they ask why, you say "well, I solved this problem for you for free, didn't I"?
So what happens? They might never ask for your help again. Good. They might ask for your help again, and you can now very easily refuse, in spite of your good nature. Good. Or you get a good meal, and you get respect. Good.
I do think Apple are worse than MS. Apple is responsible for translating the closed Console ecosystem to phones, tablets, and soon, PCs. Insisting on a 30% cut of whatever they do allow you to sell on their platform is quite bad.
Actually, Apple doesn't take 30% of everything. Apple pays 70% of the retail price to developers, but you are assuming that Apple gets 100%. I regularly find some shop that sells Apple Gift Cards at 20% rebate or so and use those; you can be quite sure that if I pay £20 for a £25 gift card then Apple is getting less than £20 from that sale, but developers would get 70% of £25.
And that still doesn't address my concern about requiring active participation in litigation against you. I just don't see why the fifth doesn't hold, even in the real world. Is it just another case of precedent overriding the Constitution? (SCOTUS has ruled that the clear intent of the Constitution is legally binding, even if something is omitted in the language - another slippery slope for another day.)
The password is not evidence. The password gives the court access to evidence that is not protected by the fifth amendment. Here is a different situation where you couldn't be compelled to tell the password:
There is a computer with encrypted files. It is definitely known that one of two persons encrypted the files, and that the person who encrypted the files is guilty of a crime, and the other person isn't. Here the fact alone that you know the password, or even that you once knew the password and forgot it, would be evidence against you. So in this case the password _is_ evidence. But in this woman's case, the password itself isn't evidence.
Well, usually you're innocent until proven guilty, so I guess they'd have to proof you didn't forget and are actually withholding it.
"Innocent until proven guilty" is all about how court cases are run. There is more than "innocent until proven guilty", there is also the fact that the police has to tell you about your rights, that they can't do illegal searches, and on the other hand that you have to cooperate in searches - which this woman is refusing to do. And there are rules what happens when someone acts against the court rules. Jurors can be jailed in extreme cases. Evidence can be thrown out. And _you_ can go to jail for "contempt of court". There are different rules applying.
Now the fact is that this is her computer, which she used daily for the scam she was running, and which she encrypted to cover her tracks. Forgetting the password seems unlikely.
Don't this implicate that police now can jail anyone as they like? Just generate a random file and demand that the accused shall provide a "decyption key". If not they can be held and jailed for contempt?
1. It is and always was possible for a police officer to be a criminal, and a criminal police officer could always forge evidence against you. Nothing new.
2. The police would not only have to generate a random file, they would also have to convince a judge to give them a warrant with a good reason to search that particular file; a concrete reason why it would be likely that this file holds evidence. And the reason would have to be good enough not only to convince the judge who signs the warrant, but also the judge in the court case, with your lawyer present.
Atheism: no. There is no spiritual or moral component of atheism.
You're a bloody ignorant idiot.
Here's the moral component: _I_ am the highest authority to judge what I am doing. Therefore _I_ am the one who is solely responsible for living my life the right way. There is only one life, only one chance of doing it right. I won't come back to fix what I'm doing wrong, so _I_ intend to do things right the first time. If Christians or Muslims hide behind their "religion" to justify whatever evil they do, _I_ can't do that. I can't blame anything on a higher authority because _I_ am the highest authority for myself.
That's funny, I thought people bought phones that do what they want, not what the maker of the phone wants.
You may have thought that, but you are wrong in your assumptions what people want. People don't _want_ multitasking. They want a phone that they can use, that lets them do what they want to do easily, and that has a good battery life. "Multitasking" is not something that people want. Multitasking can be a means to achieve what people want - on a desktop computer or laptop with a decent battery, it is a good way to achieve what people want. On a mobile phone, it's not.
Funny you should say that. Know what happens if you dereference null in Objective C? Well, "send a message to nil," but it's the same concept. The answer: the method silent returns 0/false/nil (depending on what the return signature is). That's it. No exception and no warning.
That, my friend, is not a bug, it is a language feature. A very well thought-through feature that makes programming for Objective-C a lot, lot simpler. Sending a message to a nil object is not an exception; it is something that happens very regular. It's like "free" or "realloc" in Standard C: A NULL argument there is a regular occurence.