That's one carrier. Samsung (for instance) sells a version of the Galaxy S for all four major US carriers, and even though the AT&T version is crippled, that didn't stop them from making un-crippled versions for the other three. Microsoft and their partners could do the same if that were really the concern.
Microsoft cant allow side-loading in its current form because it would cause major backlash from carrier partners concerned about things not otherwise permitted (e.g. tethering) as well as from vendors releasing paid software in the marketplace concerned about piracy.
That doesn't make any sense, because those carriers all have Android phones already. Where were the concerns about side-loading when they added those?
Scenario #1 is basically Android. Scenario #2 is basically iPhone. If you want to know which scenario most people want, check out the latest market share reports.
No, I'm explaining why services such as power, phone, cable, water, sewer, and gas are commonly considered "natural monopolies".
That isn't something I or the other parent poster made up for this thread, it's a widely held belief, and this is the reasoning behind it: duplicating all that infrastructure leads to unnecessary costs and not only for the customers who use it. Would you like to try to understand that, or would you rather reject it and remain confused about why so many people disagree with you?
Any weather that is bad enough to bring down a data line is going to be so much worse of a hazard than the data line itself, that it is irrelevent. [...] Television is completely deliverable via wireless. There are two nationwide companies that offer TV service to virtually every home in the country [...]
Two things that trees commonly do are (1) knock over power lines when there's a storm and (2) obstruct the view of the sky. Perhaps you live in a part of the country where trees are uncommon, so you might just need to take my word for it, but there are plenty of areas where satellite TV is impractical and areas where downed lines are common.
By your logic, we should already be requiring the cable and/or phone companies to be removing their lines.
No, there are clear benefits to having at least some wires in place: cable and phone systems aren't just capable of reaching areas that satellite can't, they're also capable of delivering features that satellite can't (e.g. satellite internet can't compete with cable internet).
But there are also clear benefits to minimizing the number of such wires. It's easy to weigh the benefits of the first set of wires against the costs and conclude that having those wires is a good thing. It's much harder to come to the same conclusion about the tenth set of wires.
Given that you are just making things up (as I don't believe for a second that cable television has been available in your area for 100 years), you clearly understand that I am right, and just don't want to admit.
Given statements like this, you are clearly an arrogant ass.
Running wires on poles does obstruct traffic. Those wires don't string themselves; the phone/cable/power company pulls up in a big truck that takes up half the street to install them.
When there's a storm and the wind or the trees knock down the lines, the downed lines themselves pose a hazard and an inconvenience, and then the company comes back to fix them and takes up half the street again.
It's a mild inconvenience when there's only one company doing it. It'd be a much greater inconvenience with a dozen companies. If you don't think that happens enough for people to notice, well, I guess that says something about the part of the country you live in: not everyone is lucky enough to have such calm weather. My mom has to deal with downed lines at least once a year.
As for planning ahead by installing underground conduits, it would've been nice if local governments had foreseen the need for that 100 years ago when much of this infrastructure was being set up. Unfortunately, they didn't, and installing those conduits would be a massive expense (not to mention the inconvenience of tearing up every road to install them).
People don't care how many wires are running for the most part.
Not the number of wires per se, but they do care about secondary effects, like how often their streets are obstructed or their sidewalks dug up by yet another phone company installing yet another set of lines.
It's not about the physical limit on how much wire you can fit in a given space. It's about the limit on how much wire people want running into their homes and along public streets. A dozen phone companies running parallel sets of wires is inefficient, inconvenient, unattractive and possibly unsafe.
The key is not copyrightable, since it contains no creative content (it was generated mostly-randomly by a program) and is a functional requirement of the system (any compatible implementation would have to use the same key). See also the Lexmark case, where even a program that was written by a human author was deemed uncopyrightable because it was required, in that exact form, for the system to operate.
Someone should alert the local police in Eau Claire, WI that this asshole is impersonating Michael Kristopeit on the internet and trying to get slashdotters to come to poor Michael's house.
You do not have to renew your contract but you do pay the same price (except Tmo) and if you switch carriers you appear to have to pay the same fees.
No. You might pay an activation fee to the new carrier ($30 or so), but you won't pay an early termination fee (usually $150 or more) to the old carrier. That's the main (only?) advantage of being out of the contract.
I'm not chopping up by debit MasterCard since it's also my ATM card, but I have moved all my automated payments to Amex and will no longer be using MasterCard for any purchases. (As a bonus, Amex also has much better cash back rewards.)
I was disappointed when I heard that MasterCard had cut off payments to WikiLeaks (as reported at http://news.cnet.com/8301-31921_3-20024776-281.html), claiming it is participating in "illegal activity" even though WikiLeaks hasn't been charged or convicted of anything, and even though WikiLeaks's actions have been substantially no different than those of the New York Times, the Guardian, and other news sites that distributed the same material.
Now I see that MasterCard is also siding with the music and movie cartels in their war on technology (http://news.cnet.com/8301-31001_3-20025879-261.html), cutting off payments to web sites accused of file sharing, and lending support to the so-called "Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act" which would grant the government the power to censor web sites without a trial.
It seems that every time I swipe my MasterCard, I'm funding an assault on freedom of speech.
December 19, 2010, was the last time I used my MasterCard -- and it will be the last time I use *any* MasterCard, or Cirrus, or Maestro, or anything related. In fact, I almost want to boycott Audi and the Olympics just for having similar logos.
I have three other charge networks to choose from, not to mention online payment systems and EFT. Comparing MasterCard to those, I see no advantages and two huge downsides. Goodbye.
Now that Retrode is sold out, how would you recommend making ROM files from one's cartridges?
I would recommend not making your own ROM files. Whatever cartridges you have, someone else has already ripped them and put them online, so just download them. You'll end up with exactly the same files as if you'd done it yourself, so there are no moral or ethical arguments to be made against it, and the legal risk is infinitesimal.
I have never seen a practical example of how this could work for popular entertainment. Does anyone seriously think that a large number of people would put up the money up front for an author to write a novel, or to create a big-budget movie, or perform and create an album, without any assurance of what the end product is going to be?
It's not much different from what's already happening on sites like Kickstarter and Sellaband.
It's true that there's no assurance of what the end product is going to be, but that's true of every service, and it generally doesn't stop people from paying for services. Before you get a haircut, or get your house painted, or get your heart operated on, you don't know how it's going to turn out. Various industries deal with that uncertainty in different ways that have been hashed out over the centuries, and I see no reason why artists and authors couldn't do the same.
And of course, it would be to my advantage not to join in paying for it, because if there's no copyright I'll get it for free if someone else puts up the money.
Well, right: if someone else puts up the money. You're gambling that they will.
If you don't really care whether or not a book is written, then you have no reason to pay for it. Maybe others will fund it, because they care more than you do, and you'll get to read it for free. Or maybe they won't, and you won't get to read it, but you don't really care anyway so that's fine.
If you do care, then you have a reason to contribute, because you want to avoid the scenario where it doesn't get funded and you don't get to read it.
In other words, this model decreases the production of works that people don't really care about, and it guarantees a fair income for authors who produce works that people do care about. Those both seem like good things.
So your big solution is to move the problem one degree of separation from the artist, to a patron, who is then faced with the same problem of unauthorized reproduction?
No, my solution is to abandon the idea of selling copies at monopoly prices. Not just for the author, but for everybody.
The "patron" doesn't have to deal with the "problem" of unauthorized reproduction, because he isn't treating the author's work as an investment that must be recouped.
Instead, he's treating it as a service that benefits him directly, by giving him a new story to read. In fact, the "patron" is likely to be a group of hundreds or thousands of people who all benefit directly from the author's work -- essentially the same group of people who buy copies today.
Unauthorized distribution isn't a problem for them, because they're not paying for exclusivity, they're paying for the benefit they receive themselves. Just like how it isn't a problem if your neighbor's property value goes up after you improve your own property -- you're paying for the benefit that you personally receive from those improvements.
You still haven't explained why you should not own your own work.
"Work" isn't a thing that anyone can own. You can't own work any more than you can own friendship or color or numbers: owning such things is a meaningless concept.
What you can own is stuff. You can own a typewriter, or a pen, or a book. But you can't own the weight of the typewriter, or the color of the pen, or the arrangement of words in the book. Those are ideas, not stuff.
Putting labor into something doesn't necessarily mean you own everything that results from it. When you grow a tomato, you own it because you already owned the soil, seeds, and water that became that tomato. But if you cut a piece of string to a certain length, that doesn't mean you now "own" that length; and if you arrange words in a certain order and call it a story, that doesn't mean you now "own" that sequence of words. You own the string and the stack of papers, but you don't own every intangible attribute of those things.
When you claim ownership of an idea, what that really means is you're claiming partial ownership of everyone else's stuff: "I own this story, so I get to decide whether you can use your printer to print the same words". It's no more reasonable than saying "I own this string, so I get to decide whether you can use your scissors to cut the same length".
Or how anyone will have money to buy your work if no one can own anything.
You seem to have grossly misunderstood what I'm saying. Of course people can own things. They just can't own ideas.
The 60s are over my friend. "From each according to their abilities, to each according to their need" has been pretty well discredited as a recipe for getting anything done.
Agreed. I don't know why you're pointing that out, though, since it has absolutely no relation to my comment.
I'm talking about hiring someone to perform a service, and paying him a mutually agreeable price for it in a voluntary free-market transaction. It's a tried and true recipe for getting things done. Nothing revolutionary about it, comrade.
But we also know that someone giving away your material for free PRECLUDES revenue.
No, that's not true.
It precludes one specific revenue model: the one where you do a bunch of writing up front, for free, and then hope to make money later by selling copies for much more than it costs you to make each copy, which you may be able to do thanks to your government-enforced monopoly. That model doesn't work if someone else is out there undercutting your monopoly prices.
But that model is basically just gambling, anyway. Most participants won't make enough to justify their expenses, some will break even or turn a modest profit, and a lucky few will strike it rich -- but you won't know which group you fall into until long after the work is done. You just have to put in a lot of unpaid work and cross your fingers. Is that really the model we ought to encourage artists and authors to use?
There's a more sensible model that isn't threatened by free distribution, and it happens to be the same model that people in nearly every other industry have relied on for centuries: it's the one where you just get paid for working. You find a customer, or a group of customers, who benefits from the work you do (whether it's fixing cars, painting houses, or writing books), and then you exchange your labor for their money. They pay you to write a book, you write it and provide a single copy, and then the transaction is over; distribution of any further copies is their problem, not yours. If you want to continue to be a professional writer, you find some more customers and offer to write a second book.
You get a guaranteed source of revenue: you know exactly how much they're willing to pay, and if you don't think that amount is worth the time you'd have to spend writing, you can turn them down and move on to something more profitable. You don't have that tiny chance of striking it rich, but you don't have the much bigger chance of going broke, either. You just get reliable, fair compensation for your time. And if you really want to gamble, you can take that money to the casino.
If copyright were abolished, all code would effectively be BSD-licensed (albeit without the requirement to include copyright/licensing notices which would no longer be relevant). Don't fall for the idea that open source needs copyright to survive: the main effect of open source licenses is to give back the freedoms that copyright law took away in the first place.
So if I write a book or a song or something I have to give it to you for free because it's *your* culture?
No one has ever suggested that, in any of these copyright threads. That idea is nothing but a straw man created by copyright apologists who can't stand to participate in a real discussion.
If you write a book, you don't have to lift a finger to help anyone get a copy after that. We're just asking that you keep your nose out of their business: don't try to prevent them from exercising their own speech/property rights by, for example, reading the book to their friends.
It's not a great idea to use the standard rich text control for syntax highlighting anyway... you should probably be using a highlighting editor control like Scintilla. The rich text control has always sucked, IME.
sorry, that was immature, but the Apple stuff is innovative, solid, and amazing.
No, it really isn't.
At best, Apple products are "innovative" in the way that Halo was "innovative": by combining second-best implementations of many features that have already been implemented separately (and usually better) in other devices. But that's not real innovation; that's a Greatest Hits album.
If you are still not convinced, go down to your local OfficeMax and spend some time with a droid tablet or try to edit AVCHD Video on WIndows 7 PC.
Do you have any more to add to that statement? For example, is there any reason to think an Android tablet wouldn't offer the same advantages over the iPad that Android phones already offer over the iPhone? Have you actually encountered problems using video editors on Windows? Or are you just blustering?
Really, I am not an Apple fan-boy. I am just really busy and need my technology to work NOW!
If you think the only way to get your technology to work NOW! is to buy from Apple, then yes, you are an Apple fanboy.
Seconded. Windows Forms is easy to learn, powerful enough to use for most GUI work, and if you stick to the classes that work in Mono, it's cross-platform with little if any changes required.
The hard drive makes it less portable than an iPad(drop it and it's toast; drop an ipad and it's dinged).
I think you mean "drop an iPad and it's shattered". All that glass is a liability.
My work T410 gets 3 hours under optimal conditions.
That's unfortunate, but might I suggest taking another look at the laptop market? It's really not hard to find one that'll run twice as long. I bought mine off the shelf at Best Buy (an HP Pavilion), and it lasts for 6+ hours of actual use.
I can run Pages, Notes, and god knows how many productivity apps from the app store,
You can run watered-down mobile versions of productivity apps that support a subset of features of their relevant document types. That's a far cry from actually being able to run Office 2010 (or even OpenOffice) and fully view/edit every part of the documents you're collaborating on.
my last two netbooks couldn't burn CDs either,
Neither can my coffee maker, but so what? Who's talking about netbooks?
and the lack of flash is a feature.
Keep telling yourself that.
Let's stop this stupid meme of the iPad is for consumption only. it's bullshit.
Let's stop this stupid meme of "the iPad is a business tool". It's bullshit. Just because it's only 90% useless in an office doesn't mean it belongs there.
When I'm using a notebook or other portable, the keyboard always comes with me. Portables with similar sized screens tend not to get 10 hours of battery life. Laptops... not so much, unless we're talking about a cheap netbook with a giant battery, then, i'm going to *need* an external keyboard anyway, and the track pad is definitely going to suck.
My 15" laptop gets over 6 hours on a charge, doesn't burn my crotch, and cost about as much as a 64GB iPad.
Do I always have to carry the keyboard with me? Sure. But like I said, it's still no less portable than an iPad: they both need a bag. IMO, the important divisions of portability are "attaches to my body" vs. "fits in my pocket" vs. "fits in a bag" vs. "fits in a suitcase" vs. "too big to travel with".
Is 6 hours less than 10? Sure. But seriously, how often are you away from a power outlet for more than 6 but less than 10 hours?
There's very little I can't do on an iPad that I can do on a laptop, like burn a hole in my crotch.
Or run productivity/development apps, or view Flash sites, or carry files from one place to another, or play/burn CDs and DVDs...
Opera Mini does all the heavy lifting on the server. The client that runs on the phone hardly qualifies as a browser core: it doesn't parse HTML or run JavaScript.
(Even the server+client system barely qualifies as a modern browser. Opera Mini is really an alternative to the crappy minibrowsers built into dumbphones, not to full-featured smartphone browsers.)
Slashdot Mirror
That's one carrier. Samsung (for instance) sells a version of the Galaxy S for all four major US carriers, and even though the AT&T version is crippled, that didn't stop them from making un-crippled versions for the other three. Microsoft and their partners could do the same if that were really the concern.
Microsoft cant allow side-loading in its current form because it would cause major backlash from carrier partners concerned about things not otherwise permitted (e.g. tethering) as well as from vendors releasing paid software in the marketplace concerned about piracy.
That doesn't make any sense, because those carriers all have Android phones already. Where were the concerns about side-loading when they added those?
Scenario #1 is basically Android. Scenario #2 is basically iPhone. If you want to know which scenario most people want, check out the latest market share reports.
Android just overtook iPhone in U.S. market share. That's how.
You are looking for problems that don't exist.
No, I'm explaining why services such as power, phone, cable, water, sewer, and gas are commonly considered "natural monopolies".
That isn't something I or the other parent poster made up for this thread, it's a widely held belief, and this is the reasoning behind it: duplicating all that infrastructure leads to unnecessary costs and not only for the customers who use it. Would you like to try to understand that, or would you rather reject it and remain confused about why so many people disagree with you?
Any weather that is bad enough to bring down a data line is going to be so much worse of a hazard than the data line itself, that it is irrelevent.
[...]
Television is completely deliverable via wireless. There are two nationwide companies that offer TV service to virtually every home in the country [...]
Two things that trees commonly do are (1) knock over power lines when there's a storm and (2) obstruct the view of the sky. Perhaps you live in a part of the country where trees are uncommon, so you might just need to take my word for it, but there are plenty of areas where satellite TV is impractical and areas where downed lines are common.
By your logic, we should already be requiring the cable and/or phone companies to be removing their lines.
No, there are clear benefits to having at least some wires in place: cable and phone systems aren't just capable of reaching areas that satellite can't, they're also capable of delivering features that satellite can't (e.g. satellite internet can't compete with cable internet).
But there are also clear benefits to minimizing the number of such wires. It's easy to weigh the benefits of the first set of wires against the costs and conclude that having those wires is a good thing. It's much harder to come to the same conclusion about the tenth set of wires.
Given that you are just making things up (as I don't believe for a second that cable television has been available in your area for 100 years), you clearly understand that I am right, and just don't want to admit.
Given statements like this, you are clearly an arrogant ass.
Running wires on poles does obstruct traffic. Those wires don't string themselves; the phone/cable/power company pulls up in a big truck that takes up half the street to install them.
When there's a storm and the wind or the trees knock down the lines, the downed lines themselves pose a hazard and an inconvenience, and then the company comes back to fix them and takes up half the street again.
It's a mild inconvenience when there's only one company doing it. It'd be a much greater inconvenience with a dozen companies. If you don't think that happens enough for people to notice, well, I guess that says something about the part of the country you live in: not everyone is lucky enough to have such calm weather. My mom has to deal with downed lines at least once a year.
As for planning ahead by installing underground conduits, it would've been nice if local governments had foreseen the need for that 100 years ago when much of this infrastructure was being set up. Unfortunately, they didn't, and installing those conduits would be a massive expense (not to mention the inconvenience of tearing up every road to install them).
People don't care how many wires are running for the most part.
Not the number of wires per se, but they do care about secondary effects, like how often their streets are obstructed or their sidewalks dug up by yet another phone company installing yet another set of lines.
It's not about the physical limit on how much wire you can fit in a given space. It's about the limit on how much wire people want running into their homes and along public streets. A dozen phone companies running parallel sets of wires is inefficient, inconvenient, unattractive and possibly unsafe.
The key is not copyrightable, since it contains no creative content (it was generated mostly-randomly by a program) and is a functional requirement of the system (any compatible implementation would have to use the same key). See also the Lexmark case, where even a program that was written by a human author was deemed uncopyrightable because it was required, in that exact form, for the system to operate.
Someone should alert the local police in Eau Claire, WI that this asshole is impersonating Michael Kristopeit on the internet and trying to get slashdotters to come to poor Michael's house.
You do not have to renew your contract but you do pay the same price (except Tmo) and if you switch carriers you appear to have to pay the same fees.
No. You might pay an activation fee to the new carrier ($30 or so), but you won't pay an early termination fee (usually $150 or more) to the old carrier. That's the main (only?) advantage of being out of the contract.
I'm not chopping up by debit MasterCard since it's also my ATM card, but I have moved all my automated payments to Amex and will no longer be using MasterCard for any purchases. (As a bonus, Amex also has much better cash back rewards.)
I'm also emailing several relevant addresses the following letter:
Now that Retrode is sold out, how would you recommend making ROM files from one's cartridges?
I would recommend not making your own ROM files. Whatever cartridges you have, someone else has already ripped them and put them online, so just download them. You'll end up with exactly the same files as if you'd done it yourself, so there are no moral or ethical arguments to be made against it, and the legal risk is infinitesimal.
I have never seen a practical example of how this could work for popular entertainment. Does anyone seriously think that a large number of people would put up the money up front for an author to write a novel, or to create a big-budget movie, or perform and create an album, without any assurance of what the end product is going to be?
It's not much different from what's already happening on sites like Kickstarter and Sellaband.
It's true that there's no assurance of what the end product is going to be, but that's true of every service, and it generally doesn't stop people from paying for services. Before you get a haircut, or get your house painted, or get your heart operated on, you don't know how it's going to turn out. Various industries deal with that uncertainty in different ways that have been hashed out over the centuries, and I see no reason why artists and authors couldn't do the same.
And of course, it would be to my advantage not to join in paying for it, because if there's no copyright I'll get it for free if someone else puts up the money.
Well, right: if someone else puts up the money. You're gambling that they will.
If you don't really care whether or not a book is written, then you have no reason to pay for it. Maybe others will fund it, because they care more than you do, and you'll get to read it for free. Or maybe they won't, and you won't get to read it, but you don't really care anyway so that's fine.
If you do care, then you have a reason to contribute, because you want to avoid the scenario where it doesn't get funded and you don't get to read it.
In other words, this model decreases the production of works that people don't really care about, and it guarantees a fair income for authors who produce works that people do care about. Those both seem like good things.
So your big solution is to move the problem one degree of separation from the artist, to a patron, who is then faced with the same problem of unauthorized reproduction?
No, my solution is to abandon the idea of selling copies at monopoly prices. Not just for the author, but for everybody.
The "patron" doesn't have to deal with the "problem" of unauthorized reproduction, because he isn't treating the author's work as an investment that must be recouped.
Instead, he's treating it as a service that benefits him directly, by giving him a new story to read. In fact, the "patron" is likely to be a group of hundreds or thousands of people who all benefit directly from the author's work -- essentially the same group of people who buy copies today.
Unauthorized distribution isn't a problem for them, because they're not paying for exclusivity, they're paying for the benefit they receive themselves. Just like how it isn't a problem if your neighbor's property value goes up after you improve your own property -- you're paying for the benefit that you personally receive from those improvements.
You still haven't explained why you should not own your own work.
"Work" isn't a thing that anyone can own. You can't own work any more than you can own friendship or color or numbers: owning such things is a meaningless concept.
What you can own is stuff. You can own a typewriter, or a pen, or a book. But you can't own the weight of the typewriter, or the color of the pen, or the arrangement of words in the book. Those are ideas, not stuff.
Putting labor into something doesn't necessarily mean you own everything that results from it. When you grow a tomato, you own it because you already owned the soil, seeds, and water that became that tomato. But if you cut a piece of string to a certain length, that doesn't mean you now "own" that length; and if you arrange words in a certain order and call it a story, that doesn't mean you now "own" that sequence of words. You own the string and the stack of papers, but you don't own every intangible attribute of those things.
When you claim ownership of an idea, what that really means is you're claiming partial ownership of everyone else's stuff: "I own this story, so I get to decide whether you can use your printer to print the same words". It's no more reasonable than saying "I own this string, so I get to decide whether you can use your scissors to cut the same length".
Or how anyone will have money to buy your work if no one can own anything.
You seem to have grossly misunderstood what I'm saying. Of course people can own things. They just can't own ideas.
The 60s are over my friend. "From each according to their abilities, to each according to their need" has been pretty well discredited as a recipe for getting anything done.
Agreed. I don't know why you're pointing that out, though, since it has absolutely no relation to my comment.
I'm talking about hiring someone to perform a service, and paying him a mutually agreeable price for it in a voluntary free-market transaction. It's a tried and true recipe for getting things done. Nothing revolutionary about it, comrade.
But we also know that someone giving away your material for free PRECLUDES revenue.
No, that's not true.
It precludes one specific revenue model: the one where you do a bunch of writing up front, for free, and then hope to make money later by selling copies for much more than it costs you to make each copy, which you may be able to do thanks to your government-enforced monopoly. That model doesn't work if someone else is out there undercutting your monopoly prices.
But that model is basically just gambling, anyway. Most participants won't make enough to justify their expenses, some will break even or turn a modest profit, and a lucky few will strike it rich -- but you won't know which group you fall into until long after the work is done. You just have to put in a lot of unpaid work and cross your fingers. Is that really the model we ought to encourage artists and authors to use?
There's a more sensible model that isn't threatened by free distribution, and it happens to be the same model that people in nearly every other industry have relied on for centuries: it's the one where you just get paid for working. You find a customer, or a group of customers, who benefits from the work you do (whether it's fixing cars, painting houses, or writing books), and then you exchange your labor for their money. They pay you to write a book, you write it and provide a single copy, and then the transaction is over; distribution of any further copies is their problem, not yours. If you want to continue to be a professional writer, you find some more customers and offer to write a second book.
You get a guaranteed source of revenue: you know exactly how much they're willing to pay, and if you don't think that amount is worth the time you'd have to spend writing, you can turn them down and move on to something more profitable. You don't have that tiny chance of striking it rich, but you don't have the much bigger chance of going broke, either. You just get reliable, fair compensation for your time. And if you really want to gamble, you can take that money to the casino.
If copyright were abolished, all code would effectively be BSD-licensed (albeit without the requirement to include copyright/licensing notices which would no longer be relevant). Don't fall for the idea that open source needs copyright to survive: the main effect of open source licenses is to give back the freedoms that copyright law took away in the first place.
So if I write a book or a song or something I have to give it to you for free because it's *your* culture?
No one has ever suggested that, in any of these copyright threads. That idea is nothing but a straw man created by copyright apologists who can't stand to participate in a real discussion.
If you write a book, you don't have to lift a finger to help anyone get a copy after that. We're just asking that you keep your nose out of their business: don't try to prevent them from exercising their own speech/property rights by, for example, reading the book to their friends.
Others can use your ideas, but cannot simply duplicate your work.
Characters and settings are ideas, but just look at the legal trouble surrounding the unofficial Harry Potter encyclopedia.
It's not a great idea to use the standard rich text control for syntax highlighting anyway... you should probably be using a highlighting editor control like Scintilla. The rich text control has always sucked, IME.
sorry, that was immature, but the Apple stuff is innovative, solid, and amazing.
No, it really isn't.
At best, Apple products are "innovative" in the way that Halo was "innovative": by combining second-best implementations of many features that have already been implemented separately (and usually better) in other devices. But that's not real innovation; that's a Greatest Hits album.
If you are still not convinced, go down to your local OfficeMax and spend some time with a droid tablet or try to edit AVCHD Video on WIndows 7 PC.
Do you have any more to add to that statement? For example, is there any reason to think an Android tablet wouldn't offer the same advantages over the iPad that Android phones already offer over the iPhone? Have you actually encountered problems using video editors on Windows? Or are you just blustering?
Really, I am not an Apple fan-boy. I am just really busy and need my technology to work NOW!
If you think the only way to get your technology to work NOW! is to buy from Apple, then yes, you are an Apple fanboy.
Seconded. Windows Forms is easy to learn, powerful enough to use for most GUI work, and if you stick to the classes that work in Mono, it's cross-platform with little if any changes required.
The hard drive makes it less portable than an iPad(drop it and it's toast; drop an ipad and it's dinged).
I think you mean "drop an iPad and it's shattered". All that glass is a liability.
My work T410 gets 3 hours under optimal conditions.
That's unfortunate, but might I suggest taking another look at the laptop market? It's really not hard to find one that'll run twice as long. I bought mine off the shelf at Best Buy (an HP Pavilion), and it lasts for 6+ hours of actual use.
I can run Pages, Notes, and god knows how many productivity apps from the app store,
You can run watered-down mobile versions of productivity apps that support a subset of features of their relevant document types. That's a far cry from actually being able to run Office 2010 (or even OpenOffice) and fully view/edit every part of the documents you're collaborating on.
my last two netbooks couldn't burn CDs either,
Neither can my coffee maker, but so what? Who's talking about netbooks?
and the lack of flash is a feature.
Keep telling yourself that.
Let's stop this stupid meme of the iPad is for consumption only. it's bullshit.
Let's stop this stupid meme of "the iPad is a business tool". It's bullshit. Just because it's only 90% useless in an office doesn't mean it belongs there.
When I'm using a notebook or other portable, the keyboard always comes with me. Portables with similar sized screens tend not to get 10 hours of battery life. Laptops ... not so much, unless we're talking about a cheap netbook with a giant battery, then, i'm going to *need* an external keyboard anyway, and the track pad is definitely going to suck.
My 15" laptop gets over 6 hours on a charge, doesn't burn my crotch, and cost about as much as a 64GB iPad.
Do I always have to carry the keyboard with me? Sure. But like I said, it's still no less portable than an iPad: they both need a bag. IMO, the important divisions of portability are "attaches to my body" vs. "fits in my pocket" vs. "fits in a bag" vs. "fits in a suitcase" vs. "too big to travel with".
Is 6 hours less than 10? Sure. But seriously, how often are you away from a power outlet for more than 6 but less than 10 hours?
There's very little I can't do on an iPad that I can do on a laptop, like burn a hole in my crotch.
Or run productivity/development apps, or view Flash sites, or carry files from one place to another, or play/burn CDs and DVDs...
Opera Mini does all the heavy lifting on the server. The client that runs on the phone hardly qualifies as a browser core: it doesn't parse HTML or run JavaScript.
(Even the server+client system barely qualifies as a modern browser. Opera Mini is really an alternative to the crappy minibrowsers built into dumbphones, not to full-featured smartphone browsers.)