I have to disagree. If Paystar had reversed engineered OSX, ie completely written it from scratch without taking a single bit from Apple, then you would have the scenario that you present. Paystar took bits (actually most of them) straight from Apple. This isn't a reverse engineer situation, so your analogy is not "structurally closer"
This has nothing to do with phones that have built in GPS. All cell tower positions are very accurately measured, and any cell phone in range can be triangulated against these known coordinates. http://electronics.howstuffworks.com/gps-phone.htm
If copyright infringement *WAS* the same as theft, we wouldn't need a special law dealing with it - it could be covered by theft laws. The fact that it isn't should tell you something.
No it does not tell me something. Laws sometimes are added to clarify existing laws. For example, we had laws stating that using a lethal weapon to kill someone is illegal. Those laws have specific punishments, as opposed to the punishment for accidentally killing some. Yet, we now have laws that specify that killing someone with a car can be considered to be use of a lethal weapon (still have to show intent, just like with a gun). Adding the laws stating that using a car to kill someone is the same as using a lethal weapon doesn't mean that a car is different from a gun when used for the deliberate intent of killing someone. It means that someone used a car to deliberately kill someone and then had a lawyer try to weasel out of the stricter punishment. In other words, the law was passed to clarify that though some might wish to be able to use a car to dispose of their nagging wife, they can't say "it's a car not a gun". likewise, the laws passed to clarify that copyright infringement is equivalent to theft comes from the fact that someone probably tired to rationalize their actions as not theft.
If I am giving away free cookies, one per person. They are free cookies, yet if someone walks up and say "hmm, these are free, so I'm not stealing if I take them all" they have stolen. And there is measurable loss
- everyone else who would have received a cookie, didn't.
- I will have to spend time explaining to everyone who expected a cookie why they won't get one.
I realize that this doesn't line up with the example of MS using GPL code, their taking hasn't reduced the available amount of GPL code. However, they are taking something (albeit free) and using it in a way that the owner did not approve of. Just because the owner didn't see monitory value in their property, does not mean that it had none. In the case of GPL code, the owners see value in making the source code available to all. And Microsoft is denying them that value.
And yes, I realize many will not understand, try substituting "car" for "cookie" in the above analogy.
Excluding the XBox, Microsoft did try to define a reference hardware platform in the '80s. The MSX http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MSX was built by several Japanese and European companies.
It's a subtle difference - but a company that wants to beat the competition is one that does not care about the product or the competition. A company that wants to make good products may or may not beat the competition, but if they do it is a side effect of excellence not a driving goal.
Microsoft internal emails show that they want to "win", and to do so they are willing to break laws. So far they have been shown that the benefits of their behavior (killing off competition, increasing revenue) far outweigh the costs they have to pay (several million to the remains of stacker and DR-DOS as example). In other words, they have found a "best way of beating out the competition" from their perspective only.
The other problem with storing braking energy in a mechanical form is that if there's an accident you have to build the system so that it can't release the energy. If you slam on your brakes to avoid a collision you don't want to keep the energy in your car. It would really suck to bring the speed of your car down only to have the pneumatics explode. For similar reasons I'm not a fan of using a flywheel for regenerative braking.
I disagree, we're not talking about the complexities of a language. We're talking about specifying a small subset of the facebook API that would be deemed "safe" and allow apps to run against that with low trust levels. And the full set of facebook APIs that would require an app to get users permission. They already have the API. They only need to segregate them into two piles. As for checking for exploits, they need to be doing that any way.
I'm not asking facebook to individually vet each app/survey. We've seen what the Apple App store is like... However, it wouldn't take faceboook that much effort to publish two APIs and let all the dumb surveys only have the ability to post on your wall once. Apps that wanted to be more sophisticated and do clever things with your personal data are few and far between, why are they the default access model?
I just don't get facebook apps. They all need to be given access to my personal data. Why does a survey need to access my personal data? Why do people allow this? Given the cavalier attitude towards protecting privacy and personal data, I'm not surprised to hear that scammers are finding fertile grounds. I wouldn't be surprised to find out (eventually) that some apps are deep data mining for phishers to profile targets better.
I'm sorry, but you are wrong! It is purely an American thing. Hell go to any casino in Monte Carlo and you will see nothing but Americans pissing away their money. /sarcasm
I guess I needed to watch the last 10 seconds or so... until then, the video showed fingers touching a surface which I assumed to be about the size of a keyboard, and I just assumed that it was the keyboard. I went back and watched the last bit and see what I was missing (did you feel the earth come to a momentary stop... someone on/. just WTFA).
Now I'm curious how they will manage to prevent me from accidentally brushing the pad with my palms while I'm typing. I already have this problem with my mac track pad, as I'm typing the cursor goes flying in weird directions. They have pressure sensitive abilities that may be able to help, I'm now more interested...
Right now this comes across as an interesting thought exercise. I think that FPS style games should be possible (where there's a will...) but I think that things like typing will be more less efficient than on a keyboard, which provides tactile feedback. And I spend more time typing than I do mousing and reorganizing windows. This isn't optimizing the 80% case. Since all the tech is available, they should be able to provide a real demo as opposed to animation mockups; then we'll see how typing and other real world problems fit in. Until proven wrong about slowing down the things that I do on a PC, I agree that this isn't for a desktop PC. The other question is, where else could this be used?
Put yourself in their shoes. You have a super power that has repeatedly made belligerent comments about you. That same super power decided it didn't like your neighbor and overthrew their government. Now imagine the roles were reversed. Lets say that Russia went in and overthrew the government of Honduras, all while making noises about not liking the USA. What would the USA do? (Hint, it was called the cold war and we built up an nuclear arsenal).
I might not care for the regime that is in place, but placing sanctions and talking about going to war with them means that they need electricity and to shore up their defenses.
I'm curious - Why does this get rated overrated? If you don't agree with me - post a rebuttal telling me where you think I'm wrong. But sweeping a thought that you don't like under the carpet is not constructive for anyone.
As many people have posted already, there is an API for developers. I use Missing Sync for Palm and BlackBerry, and they get me everything I have in iTunes and then some (calendar etc). What it doesn't get me is the one song that I bought that has FairPlay DRM. Now if Plam is trying to spoof itunes to thinking that a regular iPod is connected, then they will be getting DRM'ed songs onto the Pre. And this is most likely a problem for Apple. If someone writes a FairPlay player for the Pre, there is now a "hole" in the DRM scheme that Apple can not plug. We've seen in previous stories that Apple's DRM contract with the labels requires them to fix any problems within a certain amount of time.
As a parent who understands computers I have set my my daughter's account to only allow email, IM and web pages from white listed friends/sites. Most parents I know do not come close to feeling comfortable setting up a computer with those settings. It is not that they do not want to be parents, quite the contrary they are involved in their child's development. They actively take steps to guide their child, and purchasing software to restrict access to the internet is a reasonable step in that direction. I don't think that blaming the victim is a constructive argument.
I haven't tried a side by side comparison, so this comment isn't to disagree with your comparison, rather your methodology. Nintendo makes a component cable which costs $27 on Amazon. It is quite possible that your $3 cable cut more corners than Nintendo inflated their margins... It would be interesting to see side by side comparisons of a Wii with each cable.
No, the people were in the US, using US phone lines, that connected to offices in the US. From there they were redirected overseas, but having residents of the US call an office in the US can hardly be considered actions that didn't take place in the US.
Slashdot Mirror
I have to disagree. If Paystar had reversed engineered OSX, ie completely written it from scratch without taking a single bit from Apple, then you would have the scenario that you present. Paystar took bits (actually most of them) straight from Apple. This isn't a reverse engineer situation, so your analogy is not "structurally closer"
This has nothing to do with phones that have built in GPS. All cell tower positions are very accurately measured, and any cell phone in range can be triangulated against these known coordinates.
http://electronics.howstuffworks.com/gps-phone.htm
If copyright infringement *WAS* the same as theft, we wouldn't need a special law dealing with it - it could be covered by theft laws. The fact that it isn't should tell you something.
No it does not tell me something. Laws sometimes are added to clarify existing laws. For example, we had laws stating that using a lethal weapon to kill someone is illegal. Those laws have specific punishments, as opposed to the punishment for accidentally killing some. Yet, we now have laws that specify that killing someone with a car can be considered to be use of a lethal weapon (still have to show intent, just like with a gun). Adding the laws stating that using a car to kill someone is the same as using a lethal weapon doesn't mean that a car is different from a gun when used for the deliberate intent of killing someone. It means that someone used a car to deliberately kill someone and then had a lawyer try to weasel out of the stricter punishment. In other words, the law was passed to clarify that though some might wish to be able to use a car to dispose of their nagging wife, they can't say "it's a car not a gun".
likewise, the laws passed to clarify that copyright infringement is equivalent to theft comes from the fact that someone probably tired to rationalize their actions as not theft.
How can you steal something that's free?
If I am giving away free cookies, one per person. They are free cookies, yet if someone walks up and say "hmm, these are free, so I'm not stealing if I take them all" they have stolen. And there is measurable loss
- everyone else who would have received a cookie, didn't.
- I will have to spend time explaining to everyone who expected a cookie why they won't get one.
I realize that this doesn't line up with the example of MS using GPL code, their taking hasn't reduced the available amount of GPL code. However, they are taking something (albeit free) and using it in a way that the owner did not approve of. Just because the owner didn't see monitory value in their property, does not mean that it had none. In the case of GPL code, the owners see value in making the source code available to all. And Microsoft is denying them that value.
And yes, I realize many will not understand, try substituting "car" for "cookie" in the above analogy.
Excluding the XBox, Microsoft did try to define a reference hardware platform in the '80s. The MSX http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MSX was built by several Japanese and European companies.
It's a subtle difference - but a company that wants to beat the competition is one that does not care about the product or the competition. A company that wants to make good products may or may not beat the competition, but if they do it is a side effect of excellence not a driving goal.
Microsoft internal emails show that they want to "win", and to do so they are willing to break laws. So far they have been shown that the benefits of their behavior (killing off competition, increasing revenue) far outweigh the costs they have to pay (several million to the remains of stacker and DR-DOS as example). In other words, they have found a "best way of beating out the competition" from their perspective only.
The other problem with storing braking energy in a mechanical form is that if there's an accident you have to build the system so that it can't release the energy. If you slam on your brakes to avoid a collision you don't want to keep the energy in your car. It would really suck to bring the speed of your car down only to have the pneumatics explode. For similar reasons I'm not a fan of using a flywheel for regenerative braking.
I disagree, we're not talking about the complexities of a language. We're talking about specifying a small subset of the facebook API that would be deemed "safe" and allow apps to run against that with low trust levels. And the full set of facebook APIs that would require an app to get users permission. They already have the API. They only need to segregate them into two piles. As for checking for exploits, they need to be doing that any way.
I'm not asking facebook to individually vet each app/survey. We've seen what the Apple App store is like... However, it wouldn't take faceboook that much effort to publish two APIs and let all the dumb surveys only have the ability to post on your wall once. Apps that wanted to be more sophisticated and do clever things with your personal data are few and far between, why are they the default access model?
I just don't get facebook apps. They all need to be given access to my personal data. Why does a survey need to access my personal data? Why do people allow this? Given the cavalier attitude towards protecting privacy and personal data, I'm not surprised to hear that scammers are finding fertile grounds. I wouldn't be surprised to find out (eventually) that some apps are deep data mining for phishers to profile targets better.
why did you think that someone on slashdot would even know what to do with a sexbot, much less what to do with one "after"?
I'm sorry, but you are wrong! It is purely an American thing. Hell go to any casino in Monte Carlo and you will see nothing but Americans pissing away their money.
/sarcasm
I guess I needed to watch the last 10 seconds or so... until then, the video showed fingers touching a surface which I assumed to be about the size of a keyboard, and I just assumed that it was the keyboard. I went back and watched the last bit and see what I was missing (did you feel the earth come to a momentary stop... someone on /. just WTFA).
Now I'm curious how they will manage to prevent me from accidentally brushing the pad with my palms while I'm typing. I already have this problem with my mac track pad, as I'm typing the cursor goes flying in weird directions. They have pressure sensitive abilities that may be able to help, I'm now more interested...
Right now this comes across as an interesting thought exercise. I think that FPS style games should be possible (where there's a will...) but I think that things like typing will be more less efficient than on a keyboard, which provides tactile feedback. And I spend more time typing than I do mousing and reorganizing windows. This isn't optimizing the 80% case. Since all the tech is available, they should be able to provide a real demo as opposed to animation mockups; then we'll see how typing and other real world problems fit in. Until proven wrong about slowing down the things that I do on a PC, I agree that this isn't for a desktop PC. The other question is, where else could this be used?
And we were stock piling before then too... but look at the whole "domino theory" doctrine that drove the arms race.
Put yourself in their shoes. You have a super power that has repeatedly made belligerent comments about you. That same super power decided it didn't like your neighbor and overthrew their government. Now imagine the roles were reversed. Lets say that Russia went in and overthrew the government of Honduras, all while making noises about not liking the USA. What would the USA do? (Hint, it was called the cold war and we built up an nuclear arsenal).
I might not care for the regime that is in place, but placing sanctions and talking about going to war with them means that they need electricity and to shore up their defenses.
But then can I trust bad reviews - or are the large number of negative reviews just a byproduct of people testing the site's review process
I'm curious - Why does this get rated overrated? If you don't agree with me - post a rebuttal telling me where you think I'm wrong. But sweeping a thought that you don't like under the carpet is not constructive for anyone.
As many people have posted already, there is an API for developers. I use Missing Sync for Palm and BlackBerry, and they get me everything I have in iTunes and then some (calendar etc). What it doesn't get me is the one song that I bought that has FairPlay DRM. Now if Plam is trying to spoof itunes to thinking that a regular iPod is connected, then they will be getting DRM'ed songs onto the Pre. And this is most likely a problem for Apple. If someone writes a FairPlay player for the Pre, there is now a "hole" in the DRM scheme that Apple can not plug. We've seen in previous stories that Apple's DRM contract with the labels requires them to fix any problems within a certain amount of time.
Fangs... and here I thought a single short line didn't need previewing *hangs head in shame*
Better than a rabbit with large fans!
As a parent who understands computers I have set my my daughter's account to only allow email, IM and web pages from white listed friends/sites. Most parents I know do not come close to feeling comfortable setting up a computer with those settings. It is not that they do not want to be parents, quite the contrary they are involved in their child's development. They actively take steps to guide their child, and purchasing software to restrict access to the internet is a reasonable step in that direction. I don't think that blaming the victim is a constructive argument.
Another way to put it: a free market works when the consumers are educated about the entire cost of their purchase.
I haven't tried a side by side comparison, so this comment isn't to disagree with your comparison, rather your methodology. Nintendo makes a component cable which costs $27 on Amazon. It is quite possible that your $3 cable cut more corners than Nintendo inflated their margins... It would be interesting to see side by side comparisons of a Wii with each cable.
No, the people were in the US, using US phone lines, that connected to offices in the US. From there they were redirected overseas, but having residents of the US call an office in the US can hardly be considered actions that didn't take place in the US.