Oregon law obviously doesn't apply, but California law. California law is a bit unusual in that it calls all kinds of things "theft" that have different names elsewhere. For example, if you rent a car, and don't return it, and the rental car company asks you to return it, and you keep it for another eleven days, then by California law it will be assumed that this was theft. The important one in this case is that when you find someone's lost property, and take it, and then neither return it to the owner nor hand it over to the police, then California law calls this theft.
The way this is written always causes confusion among the feeble-minded. For example, unlike other cases where the theft happens right when you take something that you shouldn't take, in the case of lost property it is absolutely fine to pick up lost property, then you can take some time looking for the owner, and it's not theft. When you finally keep it instead of handing it over to the police, that is when it becomes theft. In this case, when the finder sold the phone to Gizmodo it was obvious that he wasn't returning it to the owner or giving it to the police, so at that point it became a theft and the sale was a sale of stolen goods. Some people ask why Apple only called it a theft when pictures appeared on the internet and not earlier - obviously Apple didn't _know_ it was theft up to that point; for all they knew someone could be knocking on every door in Cupertino to find the owner.
In Oregon, you would likely have to look for crimes related to lost property. For example, in New York you must give lost property to the police within ten days of finding or receiving it, otherwise it is a misdemeanour punishable with jail up to six months (they don't give that misdemeanour any name, so apparently it is not theft, but you go to jail anyway). According to New York law, not only the finder, but also Gizmodo committed a misdemeanour - they should have given the phone to the police within ten days from buying it.
But don't concentrate too much on the word "theft". "Theft" is what it is called in California, but I can guarantee that not returning lost property will be some kind of crime, often under a different name, in any civilised and many uncivilised countries.
Boats can not go downwind faster than the wind. Rather than jump out and try to announce to the world how much smarter you are than the people who actually did stuff, maybe you should first go read and comprehend what they actually did.
A "boat" skating on ice can do it no problem: Say 10 mph wind. Go at a very sharp angle; the wind will accelerate you to say 8 mph in wind direction but say 30 mph real speed. Now go into a sharp curve and turn into the direction of the wind, changing the sails to minimal wind resistance. You don't lose your speed instantly, so you can go 30 mph in wind direction for a bit and gradually slow down. Set sails again at a sharp angle to get your 30 mph speed again and repeat. It should be no problem to have an average speed of > 10 mph in direction of the wind.
Now with this particular arrangement you don't get 10 mph in wind direction _all the time_, but much higher _on the average_.
Is that true? Does it cost the telcos less to have all those radios and towers sitting around not doing anything? I think the cost lies in building and maintaining the capacity. Once it's there, it's most cost effective (in a bits/dollar sense) to keep your network as close to saturation as possible. Costs are not in fact proportional to volume, and they shouldn't bill as if they were.
For UK broadband ISPs you rent their lines from BT, the main cost is renting the capacity. Every megabit / second capacity for delivery to end users costs them money. Using the capacity up to its limit is essentially free.
So download all night long and driving their usage up from 50% to 51% has almost zero cost to the ISP. Downloading at peek times when 100% of the capacity is used, forcing the ISP to rent more capacity off BT to keep their customers happy, that costs the ISP real money.
If you're talking about someone doing 50 in a 30, you're correct that it's pretty easy. But the difference between 60 and 70 isn't as obvious as you may think. Calling it accurately, and consistently? BS. That's why they have Radar and LiDar and all their other toys, so they can catch the minor offenders as well.
The correct way would always be that the policeman makes the best measurement that he can, tells the court how the speed was measured, the court estimates how much the error in that measurement could be, and subtracts the possible error from the measured speed, because that would be the speed that is _proven_. In the case under discussion, the policeman measured the speed by estimating it was 73mph. Which is fine. The court decided that 70mph was proven, which in my opinion is _not_ fine. I wouldn't believe that the policeman's estimate would be guaranteed correct within 3 mph.
while I'm all for manners, refusing vital blood tests when doctors forget to put the word "please" on weekend requests just seems damn right stupid and dangerous. How can any manager sit there and support this measure?
Someone put out a warning not to upset stupid people, because there are so many more of them. In the British NHS, it is the managers. There are just so many more managers than anything else. They vastly outnumber people doing the actual work. You could shoot half the people working at the NHS, and if you remove the bodies, nobody would miss them.
Wanted to mod the parent up, now I have to reply to your nonsense. The link you are posting compares frontal crash between two cars at 50 mph each and a crash at 100 mph against an immovable object (and finding they are not the same). They are comparing the wrong thing: They should compare a frontal crash between two cars at 50 mph each and a crash at 100 mph against an unmoving car, which is not the same thing.
The original poster compared being hit from behind by a car travelling 20 mph faster vs. crashing into a car with a 50 mph speed difference. Huge difference.
I couldn't disagree more. When I'm forced to use my gf's Mac for anything (by which I mean anything) I am utterly lost. In fairness, her Mac is the first real exposure to OS X I ever had, but we've been together for four years. I've been swearing at her computer for that entire time.
My grandchildren did better than you at the age of nine. I needed to explain two things to them: 1. On granddad's computer, the Internet is called "Safari". 2. On granddad's computer, Word is called "AppleWorks". That's all they needed to know.
I was thinking the same thing, but the problem here is twofold. (1) Their religion has a very deep-seeded intolerance for making fun of their god. Or even trying to draw his face for that matter.
Muslims are not to draw pictures of Mohammed because he (quite reasonably) feared that some people would get confused and pray to Mohammed instead of Allah, and would forget that Mohammed was just the messenger, whereas Allah is the "real thing". So drawing a caricature of Mohammed would be obviously insulting, like drawing a caricature of the Queen of England would be insulting to some, but the real bad thing would be a muslim making a picture of Mohammed, hanging it on his wall and starting to pray to it. That's what the "no pictures" thing is really about.
Obviously that needs a bit of brain to understand, and the truly thoughtless religious types are often lacking that.
Umm. I wouldn't be opposed to them taxing the _profits_, not gross sales. Particularly if they let me deduct the losses when I sell something for less than I paid for it a month ago.
That would be what they will be doing. The point is that if you have $20,000 gross revenue then you have to tell them so they can calculate your taxable profits and tax you on them. Or possibly find out that you had no taxable profits. Like if you bought a car for $100,000 and sell it a year later for $60,000, you then have to report your sales, but you are not going to be taxed on anything.
What's to stop someone from having multiple eBay / PayPal accounts? Will keeping each of them under $20k or 200 transactions prevent reporting?
I don't know how the US IRS works; in the countries that I know that kind of action, when found out, would make you enemies in the IRS. And that is not a good idea, since nobody in the whole world is hundred percent correct in all their tax affairs, and by pulling a stunt like this you would make it obvious that any incorrectness on your part is not an innocent mistake but an attempt at tax evasion.
I was mostly considering the "reduced damages" part. A million dollars was probably almost nothing for Harrison, especially since it was also a fairly small portion of the money he made from his infringing work, so that may actually be a reduced amount. If you're a small, independent musician, a million dollars is probably enough to bankrupt you, so you can hardly call it reduced damages.
Only a small portion of the song melody was copied, the majority wasn't. And lots of records were sold because it was George Harrison singing, and more because it was George Harrison playing guitar, and I reckon that the number of records sold because someone thought it was a new recording of a song they knew was very, very close to zero.
If the law said the maximum was "$100 per infringed work" or "three times the retail price of the infringed work", then although it still could add up to a lot for multiple infringements, it wouldn't be "cruel and unsual". Instead, the number is $30K per work for non-willful infringement, which is grossly excessive for something that retails for $1 and would add around $0.30 to the copyright holder's pocket.
There is nothing with the maximum. Let's say a record company decided to make a CD with Michael Jackson's greatest hits just after he died without having the copyright, assuming that it would sell lots, and the copyright holder wouldn't be able to sue anymore. $150,000 per infringed work could be quite reasonable. The problem is that making a song available for downloading on the internet, where statistically the number of downloads is ONE (with a P2P program where you have to share music to be able to download on the average every song is copied _from_ your computer as often as it is copied _to_ your computer, which would be once), lets the RIAA argue that millions _could_ download the song when in reality only _one person_ does on the average, so the punishment is much much too close to the maximum.
Consider this: Jammie Thomas, 24 songs = 1.92 million dollars. Psystar, MacOS X, ONE operating system, $30,000. The problem is not the maximum, the problem is the ridiculous percentage of the maximum that the RIAA asks for.
the DMCA sets statutory damages for software piracy
It's sad when people don't know what they are talking about. DMCA is about software piracy _when an effective copy protection scheme was circumvented_. So unless you can point to some copy protection scheme that Apple circumvented, the DMCA says nothing. Statutory damages are between $750 to $30,000 _per title_ unless the FSF can show _willful infringement_ on Apple's part. So $30,000 is the limit. One the other hand, according to Wikipedia "defendants who can show that they were "not aware and had no reason to believe" they were infringing copyright may have the damages reduced to $200 per work".
And as Psystar found out, Apple has better lawyers than Jammie Thomas had.
Yeah. Since Amazon doesn't hold a controlling share of the digital music market, they're free to do that. Apple isn't.
Apple doesn't have a "controlling share" in the digital music market, they only have about 25%. Amazon has quite a large share itself, both from music downloads and CDs (you know what the D in CD stands for? It doesn't stand for digital, but the music on a CD _is_ digital). But the OP expressed himself badly: It is not Amazon who is restricting competition, it is whoever sells music to Amazon at a price that is so low they can sell music for less than Apple has to pay for it, and still make a profit. And Apple is basically saying to the music industry: When you sell music to someone else so cheap that we can't compete with their prices, then we won't do any free advertisements for that music.
No the fuck it didn't. The iPad proved that people will buy anything if it's had enough Apple hype ladled onto it. I think the new wave of Windows 7 and Android tablets will show that in short order. Sadly, breathless hype is a speciality of Apple disciples, and so we'll be hearing about how revolutionary the iPad is long after everyone who actually wanted a real tablet computer has bought one and is happily at home using it.
I noticed your post was modded up as "Insightful". It makes me wonder why the rating menu doesn't have a "completely of his rocker" entry.
Where did you find any "breathless hype"? I haven't seen any. I have seen plenty of information what the iPad does - it is basically a huge iPod Touch and by being huge it suddenly becomes very useful. It has applications that are easy to call up and many of them look very nice and they all are very easy to use. Have you ever used the word "ladled" and "disciples" anywhere except in connection with Apple products? What is going on in your sad little mind that Apple outselling a Windows-based product makes you choose strange words like that?
Someone more clever than me wrote: "I couldn't figure out what would be the killer application for the iPad. Now I know: The killer feature is: It is _no computer_". People don't want a "real tablet computer". 70 percent of all people who bought a netbook or laptop never wanted a "computer" in the first place.
Actually it's quite bad and goes against the basic principles of the free market and a free society in general. If I want to write my own software to do something using my own skills alone I should be able to do it. These patents are totally nonsensical
So what exactly is it that you have the skills to do? Make an implementation of h.264, which means you only have to work your way through 200 pages of spec, concentrated but with not one spark of inventiveness required? You aren't allowed to do that without a patent license, because the hard work (the h.264 spec) is covered by all these patents. Or do you mean create a different spec for video compression, work it all out and come up with something that does decent compression, without copying what others have done before you? My respect if you can do that, and patent law won't stop you.
Think about it this way, there are a number of ways to create an image, you can use ink, CRT, LCD, LED, etc. but with patents like the patent pool that MPEG-LA has, they have a patent for a "technology to display an image" with the result of being an etch-a-sketch, if I want to make a CRT, I still have to pay them money because it is "technology to display an image" despite me not even using their technology at all.
Bloody nonsense. MPEG-LA has lots of patents for "technology to effectively compress and decompress video data using the h.264 format". You don't have to pay them anything for video compression. You pay them for video compression using _their_ h.264 format. And the patent pool that people are complaining about makes sure that you can call _one_ place and get a license to all nine hundred seventy six patents that you need for one patent, instead of having to negotiate with three dozen different companies. The patents are there, whether they are pooled or not, but the pooling makes it much easier to license things.
There's no such thing as "exactly" with software patents. Most of them are so broad and hopeless, they claim ideas, not specific implementations. Most software patents do not state and present any actual software that is being patented - i.e. no code, and no algorithm. In fact, it wouldn't make sense for them to list any actual code to patent because copyright already gives them a far greater protection than patents would.
And all that doesn't apply to h.264, because you get the spec which tells you _exactly_ to the most excruciatingly tiny detail everything you need to know to implement it, plus the provide a sample implementation that actually works (although not very quick). And all these people complaining here how far reaching software patents are, Nero uses h.264 - exactly the one video compression format that all these patents are originally intended for. This is like a company making an exact replica of an iPad and complaining how unfair it is that Apple has all these touchscreen patents. h.264 and MPEG-LA are one of the very few examples of patents actually used the way they are supposed to be used; people developing stuff that has real value and wanting their reward for it.
his makes no sense to me -- that would seem to imply the most likely thing to end up on the SSD is my swap partition, which is the last thing I want on SSD. Yeah, read would be faster, but the wear would be awful. Maybe I'm missing something. I'd probably be happier if it just exposed the 4GB as a different partition...
Let's do a bit of math. Let's say we are writing 100 MB/second, 24/7, 365 days a year. A year has about 30 million seconds, so we write about 3 million GB. Since the drive has 4 GB, every byte is written 750,000 times. That should be no problem at all, I'd expect the drive to last a few years at that rate. And nobody writes 100 MB/second 24/7.
But could we just say that if you spend significant amounts of time writing to your swap file, then you don't need a hybrid drive, but more RAM?
Foxconn has over 400,000 employees. The suicide rate in China was ~13 out of 100,000. So that means Foxconn has a suicide rate (if the year continues on this pace) that is less than half of the country average.
Suicide rate in the USA was 12.3 out of 100,000 in 2006; total of about 33,000 suicides; that's the latest numbers. It's amazing with Apple; first we were told that an iPhone costs $2000 (because obviously we have to add all the phone contracts to the purchase price; strange that nobody did that with any other phone), then it is the amazing exploding iPods (which, strange enough, were all damaged from the outside), now it is all the suicide at Foxconn, which are obviously Apple's fault, even though Foxconn produces for all the computer manufacturers, and the suicide rate is actually far below both Chinese and US average.
What's wrong with that? Shouldn't a person be allowed to sell his device at the price he wants to?
As a result, the average amount of money spent by users would be less than the average amount of money paid to Apple. In other words, Apple gets less than people are paying, and people pay more than Apple charges. It is in the interest of the scalper, but not in the interest of Apple or the user. Since Apple has no obligation to these parasites, it is best to keep them away from the business.
1. Buy out all the hard drive manufacturers.
2. Pressure ISPs into providing truly unlimited downloads.
3. Secretly seed loads of torrents with 1080p copies of all the movies they can find.
4. Wait for the geeks to run out of disk storage and buy TB after TB of disk space.
5. Profit!
Jobs is going to end up (if not already) looking like a real jerk in this whole case. He just needs to swallow his pride and leave well enough alone. Apple will gain nothing by taking revenge on these people. And it is revenge. Sad.
The thief, Brian Hogan, was asked by his friends to return the phone, because the loss would likely destroy the career of Gray Powell. His answer: "Sucks for him. He lost his phone. Shouldn't have lost his phone." So to Brian Hogan I would say "Sucks for you. You stole the phone. Shouldn't have stolen the phone".
Please tell how you would go about putting a value on a prototype.
Well, Gizmodo paid $8500 for a _stolen_ prototype, opening them up for all kinds of risks. How much would Apple have received if they had started an auction for one iPhone prototype to the highest bidder? There were offers from other outfits for $10,000 (which were retracted when these guys figured out the phone was stolen). So obviously Apple had no intention to sell that prototype, but they could easily have sold it for say $20,000 to $50,000.
Or lets say Apple has a big event when the next iPhone is released, and one lucky journalist in the audience wins a real iPhone prototype (no trade secret anymore because it is the event of the actual release, just the rarity). You could probably sell that prototype for a few thousand.
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Oregon law obviously doesn't apply, but California law. California law is a bit unusual in that it calls all kinds of things "theft" that have different names elsewhere. For example, if you rent a car, and don't return it, and the rental car company asks you to return it, and you keep it for another eleven days, then by California law it will be assumed that this was theft. The important one in this case is that when you find someone's lost property, and take it, and then neither return it to the owner nor hand it over to the police, then California law calls this theft.
The way this is written always causes confusion among the feeble-minded. For example, unlike other cases where the theft happens right when you take something that you shouldn't take, in the case of lost property it is absolutely fine to pick up lost property, then you can take some time looking for the owner, and it's not theft. When you finally keep it instead of handing it over to the police, that is when it becomes theft. In this case, when the finder sold the phone to Gizmodo it was obvious that he wasn't returning it to the owner or giving it to the police, so at that point it became a theft and the sale was a sale of stolen goods. Some people ask why Apple only called it a theft when pictures appeared on the internet and not earlier - obviously Apple didn't _know_ it was theft up to that point; for all they knew someone could be knocking on every door in Cupertino to find the owner.
In Oregon, you would likely have to look for crimes related to lost property. For example, in New York you must give lost property to the police within ten days of finding or receiving it, otherwise it is a misdemeanour punishable with jail up to six months (they don't give that misdemeanour any name, so apparently it is not theft, but you go to jail anyway). According to New York law, not only the finder, but also Gizmodo committed a misdemeanour - they should have given the phone to the police within ten days from buying it.
But don't concentrate too much on the word "theft". "Theft" is what it is called in California, but I can guarantee that not returning lost property will be some kind of crime, often under a different name, in any civilised and many uncivilised countries.
Boats can not go downwind faster than the wind. Rather than jump out and try to announce to the world how much smarter you are than the people who actually did stuff, maybe you should first go read and comprehend what they actually did.
A "boat" skating on ice can do it no problem: Say 10 mph wind. Go at a very sharp angle; the wind will accelerate you to say 8 mph in wind direction but say 30 mph real speed. Now go into a sharp curve and turn into the direction of the wind, changing the sails to minimal wind resistance. You don't lose your speed instantly, so you can go 30 mph in wind direction for a bit and gradually slow down. Set sails again at a sharp angle to get your 30 mph speed again and repeat. It should be no problem to have an average speed of > 10 mph in direction of the wind.
Now with this particular arrangement you don't get 10 mph in wind direction _all the time_, but much higher _on the average_.
Is that true? Does it cost the telcos less to have all those radios and towers sitting around not doing anything? I think the cost lies in building and maintaining the capacity. Once it's there, it's most cost effective (in a bits/dollar sense) to keep your network as close to saturation as possible. Costs are not in fact proportional to volume, and they shouldn't bill as if they were.
For UK broadband ISPs you rent their lines from BT, the main cost is renting the capacity. Every megabit / second capacity for delivery to end users costs them money. Using the capacity up to its limit is essentially free.
So download all night long and driving their usage up from 50% to 51% has almost zero cost to the ISP. Downloading at peek times when 100% of the capacity is used, forcing the ISP to rent more capacity off BT to keep their customers happy, that costs the ISP real money.
If you're talking about someone doing 50 in a 30, you're correct that it's pretty easy. But the difference between 60 and 70 isn't as obvious as you may think. Calling it accurately, and consistently? BS. That's why they have Radar and LiDar and all their other toys, so they can catch the minor offenders as well.
The correct way would always be that the policeman makes the best measurement that he can, tells the court how the speed was measured, the court estimates how much the error in that measurement could be, and subtracts the possible error from the measured speed, because that would be the speed that is _proven_. In the case under discussion, the policeman measured the speed by estimating it was 73mph. Which is fine. The court decided that 70mph was proven, which in my opinion is _not_ fine. I wouldn't believe that the policeman's estimate would be guaranteed correct within 3 mph.
while I'm all for manners, refusing vital blood tests when doctors forget to put the word "please" on weekend requests just seems damn right stupid and dangerous. How can any manager sit there and support this measure?
Someone put out a warning not to upset stupid people, because there are so many more of them. In the British NHS, it is the managers. There are just so many more managers than anything else. They vastly outnumber people doing the actual work. You could shoot half the people working at the NHS, and if you remove the bodies, nobody would miss them.
Wanted to mod the parent up, now I have to reply to your nonsense. The link you are posting compares frontal crash between two cars at 50 mph each and a crash at 100 mph against an immovable object (and finding they are not the same). They are comparing the wrong thing: They should compare a frontal crash between two cars at 50 mph each and a crash at 100 mph against an unmoving car, which is not the same thing.
The original poster compared being hit from behind by a car travelling 20 mph faster vs. crashing into a car with a 50 mph speed difference. Huge difference.
I couldn't disagree more. When I'm forced to use my gf's Mac for anything (by which I mean anything) I am utterly lost. In fairness, her Mac is the first real exposure to OS X I ever had, but we've been together for four years. I've been swearing at her computer for that entire time.
My grandchildren did better than you at the age of nine. I needed to explain two things to them: 1. On granddad's computer, the Internet is called "Safari". 2. On granddad's computer, Word is called "AppleWorks". That's all they needed to know.
I was thinking the same thing, but the problem here is twofold. (1) Their religion has a very deep-seeded intolerance for making fun of their god. Or even trying to draw his face for that matter.
Muslims are not to draw pictures of Mohammed because he (quite reasonably) feared that some people would get confused and pray to Mohammed instead of Allah, and would forget that Mohammed was just the messenger, whereas Allah is the "real thing". So drawing a caricature of Mohammed would be obviously insulting, like drawing a caricature of the Queen of England would be insulting to some, but the real bad thing would be a muslim making a picture of Mohammed, hanging it on his wall and starting to pray to it. That's what the "no pictures" thing is really about.
Obviously that needs a bit of brain to understand, and the truly thoughtless religious types are often lacking that.
Umm. I wouldn't be opposed to them taxing the _profits_, not gross sales. Particularly if they let me deduct the losses when I sell something for less than I paid for it a month ago.
That would be what they will be doing. The point is that if you have $20,000 gross revenue then you have to tell them so they can calculate your taxable profits and tax you on them. Or possibly find out that you had no taxable profits. Like if you bought a car for $100,000 and sell it a year later for $60,000, you then have to report your sales, but you are not going to be taxed on anything.
What's to stop someone from having multiple eBay / PayPal accounts? Will keeping each of them under $20k or 200 transactions prevent reporting?
I don't know how the US IRS works; in the countries that I know that kind of action, when found out, would make you enemies in the IRS. And that is not a good idea, since nobody in the whole world is hundred percent correct in all their tax affairs, and by pulling a stunt like this you would make it obvious that any incorrectness on your part is not an innocent mistake but an attempt at tax evasion.
If you sell a car for $25,000 on ebay, it would have to be reported, even if you are just selling your personal vehicle for less than you paid for it.
Obviously you won't have to pay any income tax.
I was mostly considering the "reduced damages" part. A million dollars was probably almost nothing for Harrison, especially since it was also a fairly small portion of the money he made from his infringing work, so that may actually be a reduced amount. If you're a small, independent musician, a million dollars is probably enough to bankrupt you, so you can hardly call it reduced damages.
Only a small portion of the song melody was copied, the majority wasn't. And lots of records were sold because it was George Harrison singing, and more because it was George Harrison playing guitar, and I reckon that the number of records sold because someone thought it was a new recording of a song they knew was very, very close to zero.
If the law said the maximum was "$100 per infringed work" or "three times the retail price of the infringed work", then although it still could add up to a lot for multiple infringements, it wouldn't be "cruel and unsual". Instead, the number is $30K per work for non-willful infringement, which is grossly excessive for something that retails for $1 and would add around $0.30 to the copyright holder's pocket.
There is nothing with the maximum. Let's say a record company decided to make a CD with Michael Jackson's greatest hits just after he died without having the copyright, assuming that it would sell lots, and the copyright holder wouldn't be able to sue anymore. $150,000 per infringed work could be quite reasonable. The problem is that making a song available for downloading on the internet, where statistically the number of downloads is ONE (with a P2P program where you have to share music to be able to download on the average every song is copied _from_ your computer as often as it is copied _to_ your computer, which would be once), lets the RIAA argue that millions _could_ download the song when in reality only _one person_ does on the average, so the punishment is much much too close to the maximum.
Consider this: Jammie Thomas, 24 songs = 1.92 million dollars. Psystar, MacOS X, ONE operating system, $30,000. The problem is not the maximum, the problem is the ridiculous percentage of the maximum that the RIAA asks for.
the DMCA sets statutory damages for software piracy
It's sad when people don't know what they are talking about. DMCA is about software piracy _when an effective copy protection scheme was circumvented_. So unless you can point to some copy protection scheme that Apple circumvented, the DMCA says nothing. Statutory damages are between $750 to $30,000 _per title_ unless the FSF can show _willful infringement_ on Apple's part. So $30,000 is the limit. One the other hand, according to Wikipedia "defendants who can show that they were "not aware and had no reason to believe" they were infringing copyright may have the damages reduced to $200 per work".
And as Psystar found out, Apple has better lawyers than Jammie Thomas had.
Yeah. Since Amazon doesn't hold a controlling share of the digital music market, they're free to do that. Apple isn't.
Apple doesn't have a "controlling share" in the digital music market, they only have about 25%. Amazon has quite a large share itself, both from music downloads and CDs (you know what the D in CD stands for? It doesn't stand for digital, but the music on a CD _is_ digital). But the OP expressed himself badly: It is not Amazon who is restricting competition, it is whoever sells music to Amazon at a price that is so low they can sell music for less than Apple has to pay for it, and still make a profit. And Apple is basically saying to the music industry: When you sell music to someone else so cheap that we can't compete with their prices, then we won't do any free advertisements for that music.
No the fuck it didn't. The iPad proved that people will buy anything if it's had enough Apple hype ladled onto it. I think the new wave of Windows 7 and Android tablets will show that in short order. Sadly, breathless hype is a speciality of Apple disciples, and so we'll be hearing about how revolutionary the iPad is long after everyone who actually wanted a real tablet computer has bought one and is happily at home using it.
I noticed your post was modded up as "Insightful". It makes me wonder why the rating menu doesn't have a "completely of his rocker" entry.
Where did you find any "breathless hype"? I haven't seen any. I have seen plenty of information what the iPad does - it is basically a huge iPod Touch and by being huge it suddenly becomes very useful. It has applications that are easy to call up and many of them look very nice and they all are very easy to use. Have you ever used the word "ladled" and "disciples" anywhere except in connection with Apple products? What is going on in your sad little mind that Apple outselling a Windows-based product makes you choose strange words like that?
Someone more clever than me wrote: "I couldn't figure out what would be the killer application for the iPad. Now I know: The killer feature is: It is _no computer_". People don't want a "real tablet computer". 70 percent of all people who bought a netbook or laptop never wanted a "computer" in the first place.
Actually it's quite bad and goes against the basic principles of the free market and a free society in general. If I want to write my own software to do something using my own skills alone I should be able to do it. These patents are totally nonsensical
So what exactly is it that you have the skills to do? Make an implementation of h.264, which means you only have to work your way through 200 pages of spec, concentrated but with not one spark of inventiveness required? You aren't allowed to do that without a patent license, because the hard work (the h.264 spec) is covered by all these patents. Or do you mean create a different spec for video compression, work it all out and come up with something that does decent compression, without copying what others have done before you? My respect if you can do that, and patent law won't stop you.
Think about it this way, there are a number of ways to create an image, you can use ink, CRT, LCD, LED, etc. but with patents like the patent pool that MPEG-LA has, they have a patent for a "technology to display an image" with the result of being an etch-a-sketch, if I want to make a CRT, I still have to pay them money because it is "technology to display an image" despite me not even using their technology at all.
Bloody nonsense. MPEG-LA has lots of patents for "technology to effectively compress and decompress video data using the h.264 format". You don't have to pay them anything for video compression. You pay them for video compression using _their_ h.264 format. And the patent pool that people are complaining about makes sure that you can call _one_ place and get a license to all nine hundred seventy six patents that you need for one patent, instead of having to negotiate with three dozen different companies. The patents are there, whether they are pooled or not, but the pooling makes it much easier to license things.
There's no such thing as "exactly" with software patents. Most of them are so broad and hopeless, they claim ideas, not specific implementations. Most software patents do not state and present any actual software that is being patented - i.e. no code, and no algorithm. In fact, it wouldn't make sense for them to list any actual code to patent because copyright already gives them a far greater protection than patents would.
And all that doesn't apply to h.264, because you get the spec which tells you _exactly_ to the most excruciatingly tiny detail everything you need to know to implement it, plus the provide a sample implementation that actually works (although not very quick). And all these people complaining here how far reaching software patents are, Nero uses h.264 - exactly the one video compression format that all these patents are originally intended for. This is like a company making an exact replica of an iPad and complaining how unfair it is that Apple has all these touchscreen patents. h.264 and MPEG-LA are one of the very few examples of patents actually used the way they are supposed to be used; people developing stuff that has real value and wanting their reward for it.
his makes no sense to me -- that would seem to imply the most likely thing to end up on the SSD is my swap partition, which is the last thing I want on SSD. Yeah, read would be faster, but the wear would be awful. Maybe I'm missing something. I'd probably be happier if it just exposed the 4GB as a different partition...
Let's do a bit of math. Let's say we are writing 100 MB/second, 24/7, 365 days a year. A year has about 30 million seconds, so we write about 3 million GB. Since the drive has 4 GB, every byte is written 750,000 times. That should be no problem at all, I'd expect the drive to last a few years at that rate. And nobody writes 100 MB/second 24/7.
But could we just say that if you spend significant amounts of time writing to your swap file, then you don't need a hybrid drive, but more RAM?
Foxconn has over 400,000 employees. The suicide rate in China was ~13 out of 100,000. So that means Foxconn has a suicide rate (if the year continues on this pace) that is less than half of the country average.
Suicide rate in the USA was 12.3 out of 100,000 in 2006; total of about 33,000 suicides; that's the latest numbers. It's amazing with Apple; first we were told that an iPhone costs $2000 (because obviously we have to add all the phone contracts to the purchase price; strange that nobody did that with any other phone), then it is the amazing exploding iPods (which, strange enough, were all damaged from the outside), now it is all the suicide at Foxconn, which are obviously Apple's fault, even though Foxconn produces for all the computer manufacturers, and the suicide rate is actually far below both Chinese and US average.
What's wrong with that? Shouldn't a person be allowed to sell his device at the price he wants to?
As a result, the average amount of money spent by users would be less than the average amount of money paid to Apple. In other words, Apple gets less than people are paying, and people pay more than Apple charges. It is in the interest of the scalper, but not in the interest of Apple or the user. Since Apple has no obligation to these parasites, it is best to keep them away from the business.
Here's my suggested strategy for the MPAA:
1. Buy out all the hard drive manufacturers.
2. Pressure ISPs into providing truly unlimited downloads.
3. Secretly seed loads of torrents with 1080p copies of all the movies they can find.
4. Wait for the geeks to run out of disk storage and buy TB after TB of disk space.
5. Profit!
Jobs is going to end up (if not already) looking like a real jerk in this whole case. He just needs to swallow his pride and leave well enough alone. Apple will gain nothing by taking revenge on these people. And it is revenge. Sad.
The thief, Brian Hogan, was asked by his friends to return the phone, because the loss would likely destroy the career of Gray Powell. His answer: "Sucks for him. He lost his phone. Shouldn't have lost his phone." So to Brian Hogan I would say "Sucks for you. You stole the phone. Shouldn't have stolen the phone".
Please tell how you would go about putting a value on a prototype.
Well, Gizmodo paid $8500 for a _stolen_ prototype, opening them up for all kinds of risks. How much would Apple have received if they had started an auction for one iPhone prototype to the highest bidder? There were offers from other outfits for $10,000 (which were retracted when these guys figured out the phone was stolen). So obviously Apple had no intention to sell that prototype, but they could easily have sold it for say $20,000 to $50,000.
Or lets say Apple has a big event when the next iPhone is released, and one lucky journalist in the audience wins a real iPhone prototype (no trade secret anymore because it is the event of the actual release, just the rarity). You could probably sell that prototype for a few thousand.