'' One example was a store that had a line of paintbrushes and was selling too many of the cheapest paintbrushes. Solution for store? Discontinue the cheapest paintbrush, since the customers tend to buy the paintbrushes at the same time as the paint and therefore won't shop around. This benefits no one but the store. ''
The problem is that customers are not stupid, and eventually they realise that there is likely a reason why you can't get cheap paintbrushes at this store. So either they just realise that this store only sells expensive paintbrushes, and try a different store for their next purchase, or worse, they figure out that the store doesn't sell cheap paintbrushes on purpose to make them buy more expensive ones that they need, and then the customer is really pissed off.
'' The First-sale doctrine, which is both case and codified law, says otherwise. ''
I think with music with DRM the situation is similar to the situation when you bought wallpaper: You are allowed to resell it, but it is difficult once the wallpaper is on the wall, and the manufacturer doesn't need to help you.
'' You say this as a joke, but sadly it is actually very true: a lot of people who did poorly at math (often because of poor teachers early on) develop a belief that mathematics is useless as a defense mechanism -- they don't need to be good at math, so it doesn't matter that they are bad at it. ''
True story: A guy who delivers (sometimes heavy) furniture told me this: Say you deliver a wardrobe which is exactly 3m wide. And the wall in the living room is exactly 4.50m, and the housewife wants the wardrobe exactly in the middle of the wall. So he calculates 4.50m - 3m = 1.5m, divides by 2, that is 75 cm, so he measures 75 cm from one side of the wall and that is where he puts the wardrobe. He has collegues who can't do that. They put the wardrobe roughly in the middle. Then they measure both gaps. If one gap is smaller, they move the wardrobe a bit to the other direction, measure again until both gaps are close enough.
'' Anyone else seeing reasonable doubt flying out the window with this crap decision?. The slope just got one HELL of bit more slippery! ''
Absolutely not. There _was_ reasonable doubt whether or not he was guilty. That's why the police got a search warrant. The expected outcome was (a) finding evidence that he was indeed guilty or (b) finding no evidence, which meant a good chance that someone sitting outside his house in his car did the downloading.
A third, less likely but possible outcome is that the police find evidence for a completely different crime. That evidence _can_ be used as long as the original search warrant was justified. Well, that is just tough.
Example: You killed somebody and the dead body is in your kitchen. If the police enter your house without a search warrant, they can't use the dead body as evidence against you.
Now if you have an open WAP, and some criminal uses it for his own evil purposes, and the police track it down to your IP address, then this isn't enough evidence to convict you, but it is enough evidence to get a search warrant. Once they are inside the house and find the dead body in the kitchen, they can get you for murder - even if you can prove that you have nothing at all to do with the crime that they got a search warrant for.
That's why I gave up on ink-jet printers and went with a laser. It's only b/w, but I've bought toner exactly once over the past three years. When I need a color print, I send it to Kinkos. It's not the most convenient thing in the world, but I print in color so infrequently that it really doesn't make any difference to me. If I needed to print in color frequently, I'd probably buy a color laser. Ink jet is just a huge ripoff as far as I'm concerned.
Same here. I gave my color printer away when it didn't let me print a black and white page because the color cartridge was empty (and it got empty very quickly because you had to clean the heads if the printer wasn't used for two days). I had two full b/w cartridges but no color cartridge, and I couldn't print. A £50 Samsung printer with the usual half empty trial cartridge lasted for two years, and £15 toner refill has been working for another two years so far. It has never failed, it just prints.
'' Why run a web-app on a meager embedded system? Why not just run applications that are designed around the system's form and constraints and use minimal overhead? ''
Who says the iPhone is a "meager embedded system"? Dual ARM processors, each in my experience about as powerful as an 800 MHz P4, 8 GB harddisk space including about half a GB for the OS, running the worlds leading OS. That is not "meager".
What about reading groklaw for a few months (and please refrain from posting there, because you don't have a clue about the way the law works).
You would then know that "pleading the 5th" in a deposition will get you into real deep shit trouble.
On the other hand, a deposition with 24 hours notice is laughable. After all, you need time to let your lawyer examine the deposition, who then needs time to complain to the court if something is wrong, which can then ask the deposing lawyers why the deposition should go ahead, who will then report back to the court, which takes its time to make a decision whether the deposition should be held, which will be given to your lawyer, who tells you, and then you need time to prepare for the deposition (you are supposed to answer their questions truthfully and to know the answers in the first place, so you need to be prepared), and then you need to arrange for travel and so on, so 24 hours notice is just cutting it a little bit fine.
'' That would make sense if they were only supporting IE6, but they are supporting IE5.0+, which means IE5, IE5.5, IE6, and (presumably) IE7. That is already four browsers, and they are browsers that cannot easily be installed on the same computer at the same time, making them even more difficult to test. ''
Macintosh Pro, plenty of RAM, Parallels software, and install four copies of windows:-)
'' More likely, the developer made a schedule estimate for IE support, and an estimate for IE and FF support. Then someone decided that they didn't want to pay that much for supporting firefox. ''
In other words, you have a clueless developer.
You should make an estimate for a site that works on a standard conforming browser, then add a small percentage for working around IE bugs.
I visited one website that wouldn't run without Flash for Windows. Now I have Flash installed on my Macintosh, and for all I know it works just fine. Of course it isn't Flash for Windows. The idiots directed my to a site where I could download Flash for Windows. I am quite sure that downloading it on a Macintosh will not help one bit. Bloody idiots.
I always imagine some idiot coder saying "these Mac users are stoopid, they spend much too much on their overpriced computers, we don't want them as customers".
'' You have set up a device that broadcasts its existence and nature in the clear, and that is automatically granting access to its resources to anyone who asks. ''
How does this bullshit get modded as "insightful"? Reality check, man. The guy got convicted. Proves that you are wrong.
His ignorance is not your problem. Your ignorance when you access his network without permission (and the router, being an inanimate object, is not capable of giving you permission), and your stupidity if you get caught, that is your problem.
'' Until music is rented as "All I can eat" I will continue to own my music in the form of CDs, ripping them to my format of choice for my player of choice. ''
I would just say that if music is rented and expires once you stop paying, "all you can eat" is quite pointless. Let me correct that: "All you can download" is pointless. "All you can listen to" should be easy.
'' But Archos don't have 'status' appeal. Sad isn't it that conforming looks sell more. ''
I don't know if it has so much to do with "conforming". The new iPod Shuffle does just look quite nice, and so does the Nano, and the iPhone. The other music stuff from Apple looks acceptable, but there is a lot of stuff out there that I wouldn't want to be seen with. Just my opinion.
And yes, looks count. Buying an iPod because it says "iPod" on the package is stupid. Buying it because you like the way it works or because you trust the brandname isn't stupid. And buying it because it looks good isn't stupid either.
'' Yes the media companies would love this, but there are far greater technical barriers to this than the current system. To do this, Apple would have to develop a different way of securing and authenticating the files. Roughlydrafted went into detail how FairPlay works and why there is no subscription service. Besides technical reasons, Apple has always argued against it on principle as it was anti-consumer. ''
Well, roughlydrafted is (1) the ultimate Mac fanboy, and (2) not at all stupid and often has good arguments. Being a fanboy, they will surely have found very good arguments why Apple cannot support a subscription (rental) service for iTunes & iPod. Doesn't mean they are right, though. However, one thing with Steve Jobs is that he doesn't care one bit what he said yesterday. He will go on and on and on how bad subscription is until the day Apple introduces it, and then everything is different. Of course it is actually possible that subscription is really no good and Apple will never introduce it...
The biggest problem that existing subscription services have is that they don't work with the iPod. That is 80% of the possible market gone. Apple won't have that problem. The situation for Apple is different: The money they would make with subscriptions is negligible for them, and they would lose some music sales as well. What counts for them is: How many iPods do we sell more?
I think someone at Apple has a spreadsheet with a calculation of expected profit of introducing subscription service, taking into account all the risks and the problem that it would be very hard to cancel such a service if it doesn't work well. And that spreadsheet is updated every quarter, and if the end result is sufficiently positive then we'll get subscriptions.
It also seems that companies like EMI start figuring out that what really matters is how much money they make; how many illegal copies are made doesn't matter. Their new strategy on iTMS is going to help selling complete albums, and I'd think a combination of subscription + rebate on purchases would also drive sales really well.
'' like, $5000 per person. That's only "regressive" in socialist-speak. ''
I agree one hundred percent. We also fix the amount of income to $40,000 per person per year. Surely if the amount of money someone has available doesn't matter for the amount of tax they pay, then the amount and value of the work they do doesn't matter for the income.
'' This is EXACTLY what is wrong with our system. If you make money then you are a business or hobby and get taxed but if you lose money then it's a different game. You can't be a business and STILL have to pay taxes as they want to tax anything over $600. ''
You haven't thought this through. So you think anyone with a money losing business should be able to deduct their losses from tax. Well, apart from my normal job I run a few businesses. One business is selling reviews of CDs, DVDs and videogames. Had a lot of cost for buying all those CDs, DVDs and games, spent lots of time listening to the music and watching the DVDs, and didn't make one cent from selling the reviews. My second business as a restaurant reviewer makes losses as well, and so does my third business as a holiday resort reviewer.
'' I'm pretty sure that if you were selling stuff you had used rather than goods that were strictly inventory, you would have to claim the depreciated value of the stuff rather than what you originally paid for them. In the case of much of the stuff in your attic, this would be zero. ''
If you run a business, bought an item and used it for a few years, you probably deducted the deprecation from your profit. In that case you had tax benefits from the loss of value; obviously you should pay tax on the money you gained from the sale because your loss has become less. On the other hand, if you bought an item privately, you were never able to deduct any loss through deprecation from tax, so any profit is calculated from the original purchase price.
'' The print screen button already doesnt work for video most of the time in windows. You just get black where the video is suppose to be. ''
Quite likely because it is an overlay and not the screen buffer.
Re:the most important point to me is.....
on
100 Million iPods
·
· Score: 1
'' For a perfect conversion there should be total cancellation,that is, to give an example, if you add the inverted wave file to the original wav file there will be nothing left over. ''
For a perfect conversion that removed the inaudible phase shift information, there would be no match whatsoever to the original wav file, but you wouldn't hear any difference.
Re:Sold. But to whom?
on
100 Million iPods
·
· Score: 3, Informative
There are accounting rules for what sales Apple can count.
The rules are roughly: Apple can count an item as sold as soon as it leaves the company, AND Apple can be quite sure that the buyer will pay for it. If Walmart buys 100,000 iPods and has a contract that they have to pay for them no matter whether they sell them to end users or not, then Apple can count them as sold (even if Walmart can't shift them. Apple _has_ sold them). If Walmart buys 100,000 iPods and has a contract that they have to pay for those that they sell on to end users, and can return the others at any time, then Apple can count those as sold that Walmart has sold on.
If Apple sells 100,000 iPods to a seller that signed a contract that forces them to pay, but that seller goes bankrupt and Apple doesn't get the money, and doesn't get the iPods back, then I believe they can be counted as sold, and Apple's loss from bad debt is counted somewhere else in the books. I haven't heard of any such case.
'' Well there is a body of law around the concept of "constructive service", if you know about the case, know about the attempt to serve you, then you may be deemed to have been served. Similar is some ways to service by public notice, which is allowed in some cases. ''
However, in this case we are talking about SCO. They have a long, documented history of not telling the truth. So claims by SCO of having attempted to serve her, even letters to the court claiming that they attempted to serve her, don't mean a thing.
Most likely SCO is not trying to serve her at all. Second most likely, if they are trying to serve her, they are doing it with their usual incompetence and won't manage to find her. Third most likely, if they actually manage to find her and serve some papers on her, they will have messed up the papers.
In that case, PJ will probably find herself a lawyer, go through the papers very carefully, find where SCO has messed up, and send them a letter at the last possible time telling them with which legal requirements their paper does not conform. That is, unless the subpoena is so messed up that an answer is not necessary.
Slashdot Mirror
'' One example was a store that had a line of paintbrushes and was selling too many of the cheapest paintbrushes. Solution for store? Discontinue the cheapest paintbrush, since the customers tend to buy the paintbrushes at the same time as the paint and therefore won't shop around.
This benefits no one but the store. ''
The problem is that customers are not stupid, and eventually they realise that there is likely a reason why you can't get cheap paintbrushes at this store. So either they just realise that this store only sells expensive paintbrushes, and try a different store for their next purchase, or worse, they figure out that the store doesn't sell cheap paintbrushes on purpose to make them buy more expensive ones that they need, and then the customer is really pissed off.
'' The First-sale doctrine, which is both case and codified law, says otherwise. ''
I think with music with DRM the situation is similar to the situation when you bought wallpaper: You are allowed to resell it, but it is difficult once the wallpaper is on the wall, and the manufacturer doesn't need to help you.
'' Should have said:
Iff (if and only if) I suck at math, then so should everyone else. Fortunately, this conditional statement is wrong. ''
Speaking a different variant of the English language is excusable.
Not knowing that you are speaking a different variant is inexcusable.
Trying to correct people who use a different and equally correct version of the English language makes you look ignorant.
'' You say this as a joke, but sadly it is actually very true: a lot of people who did poorly at math (often because of poor teachers early on) develop a belief that mathematics is useless as a defense mechanism -- they don't need to be good at math, so it doesn't matter that they are bad at it. ''
True story: A guy who delivers (sometimes heavy) furniture told me this: Say you deliver a wardrobe which is exactly 3m wide. And the wall in the living room is exactly 4.50m, and the housewife wants the wardrobe exactly in the middle of the wall. So he calculates 4.50m - 3m = 1.5m, divides by 2, that is 75 cm, so he measures 75 cm from one side of the wall and that is where he puts the wardrobe. He has collegues who can't do that. They put the wardrobe roughly in the middle. Then they measure both gaps. If one gap is smaller, they move the wardrobe a bit to the other direction, measure again until both gaps are close enough.
Maths helps.
'' Anyone else seeing reasonable doubt flying out the window with this crap decision?. The slope just got one HELL of bit more slippery! ''
Absolutely not. There _was_ reasonable doubt whether or not he was guilty. That's why the police got a search warrant. The expected outcome was (a) finding evidence that he was indeed guilty or (b) finding no evidence, which meant a good chance that someone sitting outside his house in his car did the downloading.
A third, less likely but possible outcome is that the police find evidence for a completely different crime. That evidence _can_ be used as long as the original search warrant was justified. Well, that is just tough.
Example: You killed somebody and the dead body is in your kitchen. If the police enter your house without a search warrant, they can't use the dead body as evidence against you.
Now if you have an open WAP, and some criminal uses it for his own evil purposes, and the police track it down to your IP address, then this isn't enough evidence to convict you, but it is enough evidence to get a search warrant. Once they are inside the house and find the dead body in the kitchen, they can get you for murder - even if you can prove that you have nothing at all to do with the crime that they got a search warrant for.
That's why I gave up on ink-jet printers and went with a laser. It's only b/w, but I've bought toner exactly once over the past three years. When I need a color print, I send it to Kinkos. It's not the most convenient thing in the world, but I print in color so infrequently that it really doesn't make any difference to me. If I needed to print in color frequently, I'd probably buy a color laser. Ink jet is just a huge ripoff as far as I'm concerned.
Same here. I gave my color printer away when it didn't let me print a black and white page because the color cartridge was empty (and it got empty very quickly because you had to clean the heads if the printer wasn't used for two days). I had two full b/w cartridges but no color cartridge, and I couldn't print. A £50 Samsung printer with the usual half empty trial cartridge lasted for two years, and £15 toner refill has been working for another two years so far. It has never failed, it just prints.
'' Why run a web-app on a meager embedded system? Why not just run applications that are designed around the system's form and constraints and use minimal overhead? ''
Who says the iPhone is a "meager embedded system"? Dual ARM processors, each in my experience about as powerful as an 800 MHz P4, 8 GB harddisk space including about half a GB for the OS, running the worlds leading OS. That is not "meager".
'' Just plead the 5th and say nothing. ''
What about reading groklaw for a few months (and please refrain from posting there, because you don't have a clue about the way the law works).
You would then know that "pleading the 5th" in a deposition will get you into real deep shit trouble.
On the other hand, a deposition with 24 hours notice is laughable. After all, you need time to let your lawyer examine the deposition, who then needs time to complain to the court if something is wrong, which can then ask the deposing lawyers why the deposition should go ahead, who will then report back to the court, which takes its time to make a decision whether the deposition should be held, which will be given to your lawyer, who tells you, and then you need time to prepare for the deposition (you are supposed to answer their questions truthfully and to know the answers in the first place, so you need to be prepared), and then you need to arrange for travel and so on, so 24 hours notice is just cutting it a little bit fine.
'' That would make sense if they were only supporting IE6, but they are supporting IE5.0+, which means IE5, IE5.5, IE6, and (presumably) IE7. That is already four browsers, and they are browsers that cannot easily be installed on the same computer at the same time, making them even more difficult to test. ''
:-)
Macintosh Pro, plenty of RAM, Parallels software, and install four copies of windows
'' More likely, the developer made a schedule estimate for IE support, and an estimate for IE and FF support. Then someone decided that they didn't want to pay that much for supporting firefox. ''
In other words, you have a clueless developer.
You should make an estimate for a site that works on a standard conforming browser, then add a small percentage for working around IE bugs.
I visited one website that wouldn't run without Flash for Windows. Now I have Flash installed on my Macintosh, and for all I know it works just fine. Of course it isn't Flash for Windows. The idiots directed my to a site where I could download Flash for Windows. I am quite sure that downloading it on a Macintosh will not help one bit. Bloody idiots.
I always imagine some idiot coder saying "these Mac users are stoopid, they spend much too much on their overpriced computers, we don't want them as customers".
'' You have set up a device that broadcasts its existence and nature in the clear, and that is automatically granting access to its resources to anyone who asks. ''
How does this bullshit get modded as "insightful"? Reality check, man. The guy got convicted. Proves that you are wrong.
'' Why is his ignorance my problem? ''
His ignorance is not your problem. Your ignorance when you access his network without permission (and the router, being an inanimate object, is not capable of giving you permission), and your stupidity if you get caught, that is your problem.
'' How does one figure out if the AP is for public use or just someone who forgot to set it up properly? ''
Very simple. You knock on the owner's door and ask. If you can't find the owner, you should assume that you have no permission.
'' Until music is rented as "All I can eat" I will continue to own my music in the form of CDs, ripping them to my format of choice for my player of choice. ''
I would just say that if music is rented and expires once you stop paying, "all you can eat" is quite pointless. Let me correct that: "All you can download" is pointless. "All you can listen to" should be easy.
'' But Archos don't have 'status' appeal. Sad isn't it that conforming looks sell more. ''
I don't know if it has so much to do with "conforming". The new iPod Shuffle does just look quite nice, and so does the Nano, and the iPhone. The other music stuff from Apple looks acceptable, but there is a lot of stuff out there that I wouldn't want to be seen with. Just my opinion.
And yes, looks count. Buying an iPod because it says "iPod" on the package is stupid. Buying it because you like the way it works or because you trust the brandname isn't stupid. And buying it because it looks good isn't stupid either.
'' Yes the media companies would love this, but there are far greater technical barriers to this than the current system. To do this, Apple would have to develop a different way of securing and authenticating the files. Roughlydrafted went into detail how FairPlay works and why there is no subscription service. Besides technical reasons, Apple has always argued against it on principle as it was anti-consumer. ''
Well, roughlydrafted is (1) the ultimate Mac fanboy, and (2) not at all stupid and often has good arguments. Being a fanboy, they will surely have found very good arguments why Apple cannot support a subscription (rental) service for iTunes & iPod. Doesn't mean they are right, though. However, one thing with Steve Jobs is that he doesn't care one bit what he said yesterday. He will go on and on and on how bad subscription is until the day Apple introduces it, and then everything is different. Of course it is actually possible that subscription is really no good and Apple will never introduce it...
The biggest problem that existing subscription services have is that they don't work with the iPod. That is 80% of the possible market gone. Apple won't have that problem. The situation for Apple is different: The money they would make with subscriptions is negligible for them, and they would lose some music sales as well. What counts for them is: How many iPods do we sell more?
I think someone at Apple has a spreadsheet with a calculation of expected profit of introducing subscription service, taking into account all the risks and the problem that it would be very hard to cancel such a service if it doesn't work well. And that spreadsheet is updated every quarter, and if the end result is sufficiently positive then we'll get subscriptions.
It also seems that companies like EMI start figuring out that what really matters is how much money they make; how many illegal copies are made doesn't matter. Their new strategy on iTMS is going to help selling complete albums, and I'd think a combination of subscription + rebate on purchases would also drive sales really well.
'' like, $5000 per person. That's only "regressive" in socialist-speak. ''
I agree one hundred percent. We also fix the amount of income to $40,000 per person per year. Surely if the amount of money someone has available doesn't matter for the amount of tax they pay, then the amount and value of the work they do doesn't matter for the income.
'' This is EXACTLY what is wrong with our system. If you make money then you are a business or hobby and get taxed but if you lose money then it's a different game. You can't be a business and STILL have to pay taxes as they want to tax anything over $600. ''
You haven't thought this through. So you think anyone with a money losing business should be able to deduct their losses from tax. Well, apart from my normal job I run a few businesses. One business is selling reviews of CDs, DVDs and videogames. Had a lot of cost for buying all those CDs, DVDs and games, spent lots of time listening to the music and watching the DVDs, and didn't make one cent from selling the reviews. My second business as a restaurant reviewer makes losses as well, and so does my third business as a holiday resort reviewer.
'' I'm pretty sure that if you were selling stuff you had used rather than goods that were strictly inventory, you would have to claim the depreciated value of the stuff rather than what you originally paid for them. In the case of much of the stuff in your attic, this would be zero. ''
If you run a business, bought an item and used it for a few years, you probably deducted the deprecation from your profit. In that case you had tax benefits from the loss of value; obviously you should pay tax on the money you gained from the sale because your loss has become less. On the other hand, if you bought an item privately, you were never able to deduct any loss through deprecation from tax, so any profit is calculated from the original purchase price.
'' The print screen button already doesnt work for video most of the time in windows. You just get black where the video is suppose to be. ''
Quite likely because it is an overlay and not the screen buffer.
'' For a perfect conversion there should be total cancellation,that is, to give an example, if you add the inverted wave file to the original wav file there will be nothing left over. ''
For a perfect conversion that removed the inaudible phase shift information, there would be no match whatsoever to the original wav file, but you wouldn't hear any difference.
There are accounting rules for what sales Apple can count.
The rules are roughly: Apple can count an item as sold as soon as it leaves the company, AND Apple can be quite sure that the buyer will pay for it. If Walmart buys 100,000 iPods and has a contract that they have to pay for them no matter whether they sell them to end users or not, then Apple can count them as sold (even if Walmart can't shift them. Apple _has_ sold them). If Walmart buys 100,000 iPods and has a contract that they have to pay for those that they sell on to end users, and can return the others at any time, then Apple can count those as sold that Walmart has sold on.
If Apple sells 100,000 iPods to a seller that signed a contract that forces them to pay, but that seller goes bankrupt and Apple doesn't get the money, and doesn't get the iPods back, then I believe they can be counted as sold, and Apple's loss from bad debt is counted somewhere else in the books. I haven't heard of any such case.
'' Well there is a body of law around the concept of "constructive service", if you know about the case, know about the attempt to serve you, then you may be deemed to have been served. Similar is some ways to service by public notice, which is allowed in some cases. ''
However, in this case we are talking about SCO. They have a long, documented history of not telling the truth. So claims by SCO of having attempted to serve her, even letters to the court claiming that they attempted to serve her, don't mean a thing.
Most likely SCO is not trying to serve her at all.
Second most likely, if they are trying to serve her, they are doing it with their usual incompetence and won't manage to find her.
Third most likely, if they actually manage to find her and serve some papers on her, they will have messed up the papers.
In that case, PJ will probably find herself a lawyer, go through the papers very carefully, find where SCO has messed up, and send them a letter at the last possible time telling them with which legal requirements their paper does not conform. That is, unless the subpoena is so messed up that an answer is not necessary.