That's probably one of the most racist things I've ever read.
Then you must've lived a sheltered life. I've seen far more racist things... and far more ageist things than the quote I was responding to. I think I did a fairly good job of matching the level of racism in my comment with the level of ageism in cliffski's comment.
The difference is that I'm not actually a racist; I was making a point. But I believe cliffski actually is an ageist.
I wonder, where's your outrage over the ageism in cliffski's comment?
No, but unless you're advocating drivers licenses for 8 year olds and holding adults to the terms of contracts they signed when they were 12, you're just as guilty of "ageism" as the post you replied to.
Yes, I would be guilty of ageism if I thought an 8 year old who proved his ability to drive safely shouldn't be given a license, or a 12 year old shouldn't be allowed to sign contracts simply because of his age.
But I don't. I do, however, find it interesting that you assume I must share your ageist beliefs.
No, i'm saying that when you view a program with an ad bug or read a magazine with ads, the channel or magazine vendor gets ad revenue. Websites don't when you block the ads.
Er, does anyone still pay for ad views? I know Google only pays for ad clicks. I don't click on ads anyway, so all I'm doing by blocking them is saving some of Google's bandwidth.
Maybe it's different because children are a different group than blacks?
So are women. I guess it's OK to discriminate against women, then?
That whole set of traits -- not being alive very long, lack of impulse control, lack of socialization -- that aren't good descriptors of black adults as a group.
The first has nothing to do with being allowed into a restaurant or apartment, and the second two are stereotypes. Some individual kids might be unable to behave in a restaurant or apartment, but that's not true of kids in general.
But as long as we're allowing stereotypes, I've heard that black adults are noisy in movie theaters, and they also play loud rap music and get into gunfights. Are you saying I should have to put up with shouting and gunfights in the next row while I'm trying to watch a movie?
See how easy it is to argue for discrimination when you can just fabricate evidence that $GROUP can't behave appropriately in $SITUATION?
What about those advertising bugs that clutter the video during the show? Do you change the channel then?
No, because that would mean missing part of the show. But I still have the right to change the channel then, if I want to... or cover up the bottom of my TV with masking tape so I don't have to see the ad bugs... or use a device that removes them, if there is such a thing.
If a book had ads on every other page, you probably wouldn't read it, but people rarely have any problem with ads on every other page of a magazine (Even when you can get some books for $7 and some magazines for $7). What do you do when/if you read magazines?
I do my best to ignore the ads, because the alternatives are too much work and/or destroy the boob^H^H^H^Harticle on the other side of the page.
But again, I still have the right to cover those ads up if I want, or cut them out of the magazine. And if someone wanted to start a newsstand that sold magazines with the advertisements covered up, he'd be within his rights to do that, and I'd be within my rights to buy magazines from him.
Honestly, I'm not sure what point you're trying to make. Are you saying I should want to look at ads? Or that I'm a hypocrite for using technology to automatically strip ads from web pages, when I don't use an equivalent for TV and magazines because there is no equivalent?
If you feel entitled to read someone's content, why do you feel entitled to read it without ads?
Because it's being displayed on my computer.
TV stations are free to broadcast all the ads they want. But in turn, I'm free to change the channel during a commercial break, or mute the sound and go fix myself a drink, or record the show and watch it later by fast-forwarding through the ads. They decide what to send me; I decide what to accept from them.
Web site operators are free to put all the ads they want on their page. But again, I'm free to pick and choose what I want to pay attention to, or spend my time, bandwidth, and CPU power downloading and rendering.
If the web site operators have a problem with that, then they have a problem with the design of the web itself. When they start paying for my computer and internet connection, then they can tell me how to use it, but not before -- and they still can't tell me what to pay attention to.
I used to read a website where behind the banners, the author had a simple text graphic worked into the background with text along the lines of "If you can read this, you are hurting my ability to pay for the hosting of this site".
See, that's fine. Don't force anything on your users, just be honest with them.
How is that any different from being "sick of antisocial blacks screaming and shouting in movie theaters"? Do you think your personal prejudices justify legal/commercial discrimination?
I see this argument a lot, and it is as equally as mindless as the PR folks trotting out the "copying = theft" in such simple terms. At the end of the day it is still theft. It is dealing with lost revenue. That revenue has been taken from me and I can no longer use it.
False. It wasn't taken from you, and it's disingenuous to say "I can no longer use it", because you never had it in the first place. It was hypothetical, potential revenue: money that your customers might have given you. But until they actually decide to give it to you, it still belongs to them, not you, even if you really really wish they'd give it to you. You can't lose something that isn't yours.
This is like saying Roger Ebert "steals" money from movie theaters and studios when he gives a bad review. They were never entitled to that money anyway; it belongs to the customers, and it's up to those customers to decide whether they want to spend it.
I supply a product. You use it or take it without compensating me. You're a thief. Steal an apple, steal an idea, steal a game. Thief, thief, thief. You're hungry, I don't deserve to it, you want to play it for free. Still a thief, thief thief.
Why do people have such a hard time accepting this?
Because it's false.
Sure, you can find a dictionary definition of "steal" that applies to getting something for free without permission, but it misses the point. Why? Because even if you find a definition that allows you to say depriving the owner isn't a necessary component of stealing, it's still the component that makes stealing wrong.
Stealing isn't wrong because people get things they don't deserve. That happens all the time and no one bats an eye. Stealing is only wrong because it deprives the rightful owner of his property.
If someone told you your car had been "stolen", and you looked out in the driveway and saw it was still there, untouched, because it had actually only been copied, would you be angry at the thief? Or would you be annoyed at the person who wasted your time scaring you about a nonexistent theft?
Nope, not an employee, just a user. But considering how far you're stretching logic in a desperate attempt to avoid admitting that the iPhone isn't perfect, I'm starting to think you're actually related to Steve Jobs.
And of course there are other apps that would benefit from running in the background: Pandora or any other third-party music player (MIDI/Ogg/FLAC player, dynamic music generator), GPS or accelerometer recording (pedometer, navigation, tool to silence the ringer when you enter a theater)... if you can't think of more yourself, you must have no imagination at all. But trolls rarely do.
However, I think the default turd Logitech drivers set this up differently, where you push the scroll wheel to toggle scroll modes, instead of having it auto-sense by the force of your scroll. [...] The cool way I have it set up might be a feature of my driver, Steermouse.
On Windows, it's a standard feature of Logitech's drivers. You can also set different scroll modes for different applications.
What benefits are there to ensure that creators know ahead of time that there will be no means of ensuring at least the opportunity to recoup ones investment?
If you insist on sticking to the deprecated business model in which you record first and ask for money later, you can use the ransom model: "I've recorded a song. I'll release it once I've received $X."
Or you can ditch that model and move on to selling your labor - something that can't be copied or taken without your permission. "I have an idea for a song. I'll record and release it once I've received $X." And then if people don't want to pay, you don't have to invest your time in something that provides no return.
Copyright doesn't exist to protect corporate interests. It exists to protect authors... it's the same thing that keeps you from writing a book (or whatever), changing a few things, and publishing it under their name.
No, you don't need copyright for that. All you need is anti-fraud laws, because plagiarism is a form of fraud. Abolishing copyright wouldn't suddenly make it legal to lie to your customers.
Any open source license out there---GPL, BSD, Apache, MPL, CC, etc---are built on copyright.
Many of us believe that the most useful part of those licenses is the way they use copyright against itself, giving users (and other developers) back the rights that copyright law took away in the first place. Without copyright, there wouldn't be much need for those licenses; if someone didn't give you source code, you could freely reverse engineer it and distribute it yourself.
But, if you want to tell me that my works must also be unrestricted public domain works: well, you're doing exactly what you claim to be against.
Not really. If I tell you your works must be public domain, that doesn't actually force you to do anything, or restrict your freedom in any way. Copyright, on the other hand, does restrict the speech of everyone who doesn't have permission from the author to make copies.
I repeat: You are bitching because your portable device isn't a PC?!!
And I repeat: you think a device that can play Last.fm and check email at the same time is a PC, but a device that can play iTunes Radio and check email at the same time is just a phone?!!
Your response suggests you didn't read any of my comment at all. Are you trolling?
Strictly speaking, you don't need a cell phone at all. But as long as you're going to have a cell phone that checks email and plays Last.fm, it'd be nice if you could keep listening to Last.fm while you read an email, don't you think?
That's like bitching that your toaster doesn't butter your toast too.
If buttering toast were a standard feature on other brands of toaster, you'd have every right to bitch about the one brand of toaster that inexplicably couldn't do it -- especially if the manufacturer (and its apologists) claimed, against all evidence, that buttering toast was somehow impractical or undesirable.
It's a portable device. It's not meant to be a REAL computer.
You seem to have a funny definition of "portable device": something that's based on Unix, runs a browser, email client, music and video players, and thousands of third-party applications still counts... but only if you can't do more than one thing at a time? And apparently there's an exception when the second thing you're doing is sanctioned by Apple (since iTunes can play in the background)?
You're really reaching here. Portable devices aren't restricted to some arbitrary set of features. If it fits in your pocket, it's portable.
You're complaint is in the fact that it is architected to be a portable device instead of a computer. well DUH!
No, my complaint is in the fact that it's "architected" to be a weaker portable device than other portable devices.
Background processes are not some magical feature that only Real Computers can handle. Android and Windows Mobile manage it just fine. This is Apple's fault, plain and simple.
Doesn't the hot-swap trick work with all versions? That's how I softmodded my and my friend's Xboxen. I suspect it's no harder than using a hacked save file with a game - don't you need some extra hardware to get custom save files on there anyway?
What this whole situation shows is that "intellectual property" is still a good idea, if legislators hadn't completely distorted it. The pictures exploit the public image of Nikki Catsouras, they should be the property of her family.
No, "intellectual property" has no place here.
Assume for the sake of argument that we want to make it illegal to share grisly pictures of dead kids: we still don't need copyright or any other form of "intellectual property" in order to achieve that. We can just outlaw the act we want to outlaw. We don't need a general framework that allows people to own pictures, numbers, etc. like copyright does.
As an analogy, think about the slander and libel laws. We don't say "you own every harmful lie that someone might want to say about you"; we just make it illegal to say those things, and sidestep the question of whether they can be owned at all.
Repeat after me: "competition". A monopoly can charge whatever the market will bear. A healthy competitive industry will undercut each other until profit margins are as low as they can reasonably be taken.
Movies and games are monopoly products, thanks to copyright. If I don't like the price Microsoft is charging for Halo 3, I don't have the option to buy Halo 3 from someone else at a better price: I can either buy it at Microsoft's price or not buy it at all.
And since these are such matters of personal taste (and network effect), other products might not be able to substitute. That is, if I'm looking for Halo 3, I'm probably not going to settle for Animal Crossing instead -- maybe not even for another FPS.
What the matter with a good old fashioned stream? or podcast? Or iTunes Radio?
This answer suggests you don't know what Last.fm does, so let me explain. It's a service like Pandora that provides personalized streams, based on your musical preferences. You express those preferences by uploading play counts from your MP3 player, by rating streamed songs up and down as they're playing, or by entering the name of an artist whose sound you like.
Although it would be possible to provide some semblance of a personalized stream in a form that iTunes could play, it wouldn't be the same: no rating buttons, no skip button, no interface to select new artists to base a stream around. It would also require a reorganization on the server end which hasn't been necessary for any other platform.
Again, there are alternatives. You just want to list the one way to do things that uses a background process.
"Listen to something less dynamic instead" is, technically, an alternative. But not an acceptable one: you might as well say that phones without a full HTML browser have the "alternative" of using crappy WAP sites and ignoring the rest of the web. It's not a different way to do the same thing, it's a different thing to do when the thing you really want to do is unavailable.
Last.fm works great on Android; there's no reason iPhone users should have to settle for less.
You don't have to do it with a background process. There are tons of equally acceptable alternatives.
No... for some things, there really is no acceptable alternative to using a background process.
Who in their right mind is going to pay for a novel or song without the chance to see if it's any good or not, i.e. before it's created?
The same sort of person who agrees to pay a mechanic, maid, accountant, barber, doctor, lawyer, CEO, etc. without knowing if he's going to be satisfied with the work they do. That is, a person who realizes that he's paying for a service, and that this is the way services have always been sold.
And assuming somoene did, how would he stop anybody ripping him off?
I'm not sure what you mean. If I contribute $10 to the production of a song, who do I have to worry about "ripping me off"?
The musician who I gave the money to? I know who he is, I have a written contract, and if he doesn't hold up his end of the deal, I (and everyone else who contributed) will take him to court -- just like I would in any other case where someone didn't deliver a service I paid for.
A third party? How would that even work? Either the song gets produced, in which case I've gotten what I paid for, or it doesn't, in which case the musician has broken our contract. The only way a third party could interfere would be to kidnap the musician or something. Surely that's not what you're afraid of...?
Yup. Pretty much that, apart from a few amateurs who can support themselves some other way.
So you're suggesting that a population that was previously willing to spend money for entertainment would become unwilling overnight? Suddenly they'd rather mope around in boredom than pay an artist to create something new?
How odd. I suppose that might happen if a supervillain poisoned the world's water supply, or if aliens used some sort of brainwashing ray. But I don't see how it could happen in the real world.
Great Now all the farmers that grow corn are destitute.
Gee, I guess we should never make any sort of progress, because we can't ever let any jobs become obsolete.
Won't someone please think of the buggy whip makers who were put out of business by the automobile? How about the factory workers who lost their jobs to robots that can do the same work more efficiently?
Get real. If we find a way to produce food for free, that's an amazing benefit to all of humanity, not worth giving up just so a tiny fraction of humanity can keep extracting a profit from food production. Farmers can find something else to do, just like all the workers before them that were displaced by new technology.
They can no longer feed their families or keep a roof over their heads. But it's no biggie, you got your free corn.
Of course they can feed their families. Corn is free now, remember?
Just because many people (certainly not billions) do it, doesn't mean it's superior.
Perhaps not, but it does mean it's feasible, and that most potential problems you might bring up have already been solved, because people have been facing them for centuries.
And actually, I think "billions" is accurate... certainly hundreds of millions, in any case. More people earn a living by selling their labor than by selling objects.
The concept that the guy who made an album that 1000 people enjoyed should earn ~1000 more than the guy who made an album that one person enjoyed seems rational and intuitive to me.
Fair enough. It doesn't seem rational and intuitive to me, though, and I'm not alone. I don't see the sense in encouraging all artists and authors to treat their careers as a lottery, where most will lose money or barely break even, and only a few stars will turn a profit. I think it makes a lot more sense for them to know ahead of time whether they're going to get paid for their work, like almost everyone else does, so that the ones whose services aren't in demand can do something more profitable and productive.
Except the cars can be replicated at near-zero cost.
You're right, I got my analogies mixed up. Replace "car buyers" with "car drivers" and strike the part about "car manufacturers who want a more exciting product to sell". The point still stands, though.
So there is no incentive for a car buyer to pay the designer - they just wait and copy the first produced car.
That's circular logic. Where is this "first produced car" going to come from if no one has paid the designer? How can you produce a car from a design that doesn't exist?
You can't. There is no design to copy until someone pays the designer to create one. So if you want to drive a flashy new car, you're going to round up some like-minded friends and put your money together to pay for a new design... and then it won't matter how many copies you make.
There is no sensible economic model to support your fantasies.
Not true. In fact, it's the same economic model that billions of people in other industries already use. Selling your labor is a business model that has stood the test of time and cannot be cheated (except by forcing people into slavery).
So people have to know in *advance* how good the novel will be.
Do you have to know in advance how good a haircut is going to be, how well a mechanic will fix your car, how well a CEO will run your company, and so on?
Agreeing to pay someone for a service they'll perform in the future is hardly new. Billions of people earn a living that way.
Better yet, unknown authors have no way to charge money after they publish a book. They have to rely on charity.
Charity? No, they'll just have a harder time convincing people to pay them to write -- just like anyone else who's new in any field of work. They can compensate for their unknown status by lowering their prices, or releasing a portfolio of past work to build their reputation.
Ah yes, the classic counterpoint to my argument that I hear on Slashdot every time.
Frustrating, isn't it? Likewise, I've answered your question countless times on Slashdot, and it really puzzles me that people need me to provide the answer when, it seems to me, the answer is obvious if you give it a little thought.
Apart from commissioned works (which aren't really a viable business model), who, or what company, is going to pay someone $50,000 for a car design if they cannot recoup that $50,000 by selling more than one copy of the car?
Anyone who benefits from the existence of new car designs. Mainly, this means people who want the cars for their own use: they don't need to recoup their costs, they just want the new designs. But there might also be third parties who benefit indirectly (e.g. aftermarket parts makers who can recoup their investment by selling new lines of parts).
Slashdot Mirror
That's probably one of the most racist things I've ever read.
Then you must've lived a sheltered life. I've seen far more racist things... and far more ageist things than the quote I was responding to. I think I did a fairly good job of matching the level of racism in my comment with the level of ageism in cliffski's comment.
The difference is that I'm not actually a racist; I was making a point. But I believe cliffski actually is an ageist.
I wonder, where's your outrage over the ageism in cliffski's comment?
No, but unless you're advocating drivers licenses for 8 year olds and holding adults to the terms of contracts they signed when they were 12, you're just as guilty of "ageism" as the post you replied to.
Yes, I would be guilty of ageism if I thought an 8 year old who proved his ability to drive safely shouldn't be given a license, or a 12 year old shouldn't be allowed to sign contracts simply because of his age.
But I don't. I do, however, find it interesting that you assume I must share your ageist beliefs.
No, i'm saying that when you view a program with an ad bug or read a magazine with ads, the channel or magazine vendor gets ad revenue. Websites don't when you block the ads.
Er, does anyone still pay for ad views? I know Google only pays for ad clicks. I don't click on ads anyway, so all I'm doing by blocking them is saving some of Google's bandwidth.
Maybe it's different because children are a different group than blacks?
So are women. I guess it's OK to discriminate against women, then?
That whole set of traits -- not being alive very long, lack of impulse control, lack of socialization -- that aren't good descriptors of black adults as a group.
The first has nothing to do with being allowed into a restaurant or apartment, and the second two are stereotypes. Some individual kids might be unable to behave in a restaurant or apartment, but that's not true of kids in general.
But as long as we're allowing stereotypes, I've heard that black adults are noisy in movie theaters, and they also play loud rap music and get into gunfights. Are you saying I should have to put up with shouting and gunfights in the next row while I'm trying to watch a movie?
See how easy it is to argue for discrimination when you can just fabricate evidence that $GROUP can't behave appropriately in $SITUATION?
What about those advertising bugs that clutter the video during the show? Do you change the channel then?
No, because that would mean missing part of the show. But I still have the right to change the channel then, if I want to... or cover up the bottom of my TV with masking tape so I don't have to see the ad bugs... or use a device that removes them, if there is such a thing.
If a book had ads on every other page, you probably wouldn't read it, but people rarely have any problem with ads on every other page of a magazine (Even when you can get some books for $7 and some magazines for $7). What do you do when/if you read magazines?
I do my best to ignore the ads, because the alternatives are too much work and/or destroy the boob^H^H^H^Harticle on the other side of the page.
But again, I still have the right to cover those ads up if I want, or cut them out of the magazine. And if someone wanted to start a newsstand that sold magazines with the advertisements covered up, he'd be within his rights to do that, and I'd be within my rights to buy magazines from him.
Honestly, I'm not sure what point you're trying to make. Are you saying I should want to look at ads? Or that I'm a hypocrite for using technology to automatically strip ads from web pages, when I don't use an equivalent for TV and magazines because there is no equivalent?
If you feel entitled to read someone's content, why do you feel entitled to read it without ads?
Because it's being displayed on my computer.
TV stations are free to broadcast all the ads they want. But in turn, I'm free to change the channel during a commercial break, or mute the sound and go fix myself a drink, or record the show and watch it later by fast-forwarding through the ads. They decide what to send me; I decide what to accept from them.
Web site operators are free to put all the ads they want on their page. But again, I'm free to pick and choose what I want to pay attention to, or spend my time, bandwidth, and CPU power downloading and rendering.
If the web site operators have a problem with that, then they have a problem with the design of the web itself. When they start paying for my computer and internet connection, then they can tell me how to use it, but not before -- and they still can't tell me what to pay attention to.
I used to read a website where behind the banners, the author had a simple text graphic worked into the background with text along the lines of "If you can read this, you are hurting my ability to pay for the hosting of this site".
See, that's fine. Don't force anything on your users, just be honest with them.
How is that any different from being "sick of antisocial blacks screaming and shouting in movie theaters"? Do you think your personal prejudices justify legal/commercial discrimination?
I see this argument a lot, and it is as equally as mindless as the PR folks trotting out the "copying = theft" in such simple terms. At the end of the day it is still theft. It is dealing with lost revenue. That revenue has been taken from me and I can no longer use it.
False. It wasn't taken from you, and it's disingenuous to say "I can no longer use it", because you never had it in the first place. It was hypothetical, potential revenue: money that your customers might have given you. But until they actually decide to give it to you, it still belongs to them, not you, even if you really really wish they'd give it to you. You can't lose something that isn't yours.
This is like saying Roger Ebert "steals" money from movie theaters and studios when he gives a bad review. They were never entitled to that money anyway; it belongs to the customers, and it's up to those customers to decide whether they want to spend it.
I supply a product. You use it or take it without compensating me. You're a thief. Steal an apple, steal an idea, steal a game. Thief, thief, thief. You're hungry, I don't deserve to it, you want to play it for free. Still a thief, thief thief.
Why do people have such a hard time accepting this?
Because it's false.
Sure, you can find a dictionary definition of "steal" that applies to getting something for free without permission, but it misses the point. Why? Because even if you find a definition that allows you to say depriving the owner isn't a necessary component of stealing, it's still the component that makes stealing wrong.
Stealing isn't wrong because people get things they don't deserve. That happens all the time and no one bats an eye. Stealing is only wrong because it deprives the rightful owner of his property.
If someone told you your car had been "stolen", and you looked out in the driveway and saw it was still there, untouched, because it had actually only been copied, would you be angry at the thief? Or would you be annoyed at the person who wasted your time scaring you about a nonexistent theft?
Nope, not an employee, just a user. But considering how far you're stretching logic in a desperate attempt to avoid admitting that the iPhone isn't perfect, I'm starting to think you're actually related to Steve Jobs.
And of course there are other apps that would benefit from running in the background: Pandora or any other third-party music player (MIDI/Ogg/FLAC player, dynamic music generator), GPS or accelerometer recording (pedometer, navigation, tool to silence the ringer when you enter a theater)... if you can't think of more yourself, you must have no imagination at all. But trolls rarely do.
However, I think the default turd Logitech drivers set this up differently, where you push the scroll wheel to toggle scroll modes, instead of having it auto-sense by the force of your scroll. [...] The cool way I have it set up might be a feature of my driver, Steermouse.
On Windows, it's a standard feature of Logitech's drivers. You can also set different scroll modes for different applications.
What benefits are there to ensure that creators know ahead of time that there will be no means of ensuring at least the opportunity to recoup ones investment?
If you insist on sticking to the deprecated business model in which you record first and ask for money later, you can use the ransom model: "I've recorded a song. I'll release it once I've received $X."
Or you can ditch that model and move on to selling your labor - something that can't be copied or taken without your permission. "I have an idea for a song. I'll record and release it once I've received $X." And then if people don't want to pay, you don't have to invest your time in something that provides no return.
Copyright doesn't exist to protect corporate interests. It exists to protect authors... it's the same thing that keeps you from writing a book (or whatever), changing a few things, and publishing it under their name.
No, you don't need copyright for that. All you need is anti-fraud laws, because plagiarism is a form of fraud. Abolishing copyright wouldn't suddenly make it legal to lie to your customers.
Any open source license out there---GPL, BSD, Apache, MPL, CC, etc---are built on copyright.
Many of us believe that the most useful part of those licenses is the way they use copyright against itself, giving users (and other developers) back the rights that copyright law took away in the first place. Without copyright, there wouldn't be much need for those licenses; if someone didn't give you source code, you could freely reverse engineer it and distribute it yourself.
But, if you want to tell me that my works must also be unrestricted public domain works: well, you're doing exactly what you claim to be against.
Not really. If I tell you your works must be public domain, that doesn't actually force you to do anything, or restrict your freedom in any way. Copyright, on the other hand, does restrict the speech of everyone who doesn't have permission from the author to make copies.
I repeat: You are bitching because your portable device isn't a PC?!!
And I repeat: you think a device that can play Last.fm and check email at the same time is a PC, but a device that can play iTunes Radio and check email at the same time is just a phone?!!
Your response suggests you didn't read any of my comment at all. Are you trolling?
You need a background process for that?
Strictly speaking, you don't need a cell phone at all. But as long as you're going to have a cell phone that checks email and plays Last.fm, it'd be nice if you could keep listening to Last.fm while you read an email, don't you think?
That's like bitching that your toaster doesn't butter your toast too.
If buttering toast were a standard feature on other brands of toaster, you'd have every right to bitch about the one brand of toaster that inexplicably couldn't do it -- especially if the manufacturer (and its apologists) claimed, against all evidence, that buttering toast was somehow impractical or undesirable.
It's a portable device. It's not meant to be a REAL computer.
You seem to have a funny definition of "portable device": something that's based on Unix, runs a browser, email client, music and video players, and thousands of third-party applications still counts... but only if you can't do more than one thing at a time? And apparently there's an exception when the second thing you're doing is sanctioned by Apple (since iTunes can play in the background)?
You're really reaching here. Portable devices aren't restricted to some arbitrary set of features. If it fits in your pocket, it's portable.
You're complaint is in the fact that it is architected to be a portable device instead of a computer. well DUH!
No, my complaint is in the fact that it's "architected" to be a weaker portable device than other portable devices.
Background processes are not some magical feature that only Real Computers can handle. Android and Windows Mobile manage it just fine. This is Apple's fault, plain and simple.
Doesn't the hot-swap trick work with all versions? That's how I softmodded my and my friend's Xboxen. I suspect it's no harder than using a hacked save file with a game - don't you need some extra hardware to get custom save files on there anyway?
What this whole situation shows is that "intellectual property" is still a good idea, if legislators hadn't completely distorted it. The pictures exploit the public image of Nikki Catsouras, they should be the property of her family.
No, "intellectual property" has no place here.
Assume for the sake of argument that we want to make it illegal to share grisly pictures of dead kids: we still don't need copyright or any other form of "intellectual property" in order to achieve that. We can just outlaw the act we want to outlaw. We don't need a general framework that allows people to own pictures, numbers, etc. like copyright does.
As an analogy, think about the slander and libel laws. We don't say "you own every harmful lie that someone might want to say about you"; we just make it illegal to say those things, and sidestep the question of whether they can be owned at all.
Repeat after me: "competition". A monopoly can charge whatever the market will bear. A healthy competitive industry will undercut each other until profit margins are as low as they can reasonably be taken.
Movies and games are monopoly products, thanks to copyright. If I don't like the price Microsoft is charging for Halo 3, I don't have the option to buy Halo 3 from someone else at a better price: I can either buy it at Microsoft's price or not buy it at all.
And since these are such matters of personal taste (and network effect), other products might not be able to substitute. That is, if I'm looking for Halo 3, I'm probably not going to settle for Animal Crossing instead -- maybe not even for another FPS.
What the matter with a good old fashioned stream? or podcast? Or iTunes Radio?
This answer suggests you don't know what Last.fm does, so let me explain. It's a service like Pandora that provides personalized streams, based on your musical preferences. You express those preferences by uploading play counts from your MP3 player, by rating streamed songs up and down as they're playing, or by entering the name of an artist whose sound you like.
Although it would be possible to provide some semblance of a personalized stream in a form that iTunes could play, it wouldn't be the same: no rating buttons, no skip button, no interface to select new artists to base a stream around. It would also require a reorganization on the server end which hasn't been necessary for any other platform.
Again, there are alternatives. You just want to list the one way to do things that uses a background process.
"Listen to something less dynamic instead" is, technically, an alternative. But not an acceptable one: you might as well say that phones without a full HTML browser have the "alternative" of using crappy WAP sites and ignoring the rest of the web. It's not a different way to do the same thing, it's a different thing to do when the thing you really want to do is unavailable.
Last.fm works great on Android; there's no reason iPhone users should have to settle for less.
You don't have to do it with a background process. There are tons of equally acceptable alternatives.
No... for some things, there really is no acceptable alternative to using a background process.
It can get email notifications and text and IM. you don't need to be running multithreaded daemons on a blackberry or iphone anyway.
Push notifications aren't a complete substitute for background apps.
For example, you still can't listen to third-party music programs like Last.fm while you're doing anything else with the phone.
Who in their right mind is going to pay for a novel or song without the chance to see if it's any good or not, i.e. before it's created?
The same sort of person who agrees to pay a mechanic, maid, accountant, barber, doctor, lawyer, CEO, etc. without knowing if he's going to be satisfied with the work they do. That is, a person who realizes that he's paying for a service, and that this is the way services have always been sold.
And assuming somoene did, how would he stop anybody ripping him off?
I'm not sure what you mean. If I contribute $10 to the production of a song, who do I have to worry about "ripping me off"?
The musician who I gave the money to? I know who he is, I have a written contract, and if he doesn't hold up his end of the deal, I (and everyone else who contributed) will take him to court -- just like I would in any other case where someone didn't deliver a service I paid for.
A third party? How would that even work? Either the song gets produced, in which case I've gotten what I paid for, or it doesn't, in which case the musician has broken our contract. The only way a third party could interfere would be to kidnap the musician or something. Surely that's not what you're afraid of...?
Yup. Pretty much that, apart from a few amateurs who can support themselves some other way.
So you're suggesting that a population that was previously willing to spend money for entertainment would become unwilling overnight? Suddenly they'd rather mope around in boredom than pay an artist to create something new?
How odd. I suppose that might happen if a supervillain poisoned the world's water supply, or if aliens used some sort of brainwashing ray. But I don't see how it could happen in the real world.
Great Now all the farmers that grow corn are destitute.
Gee, I guess we should never make any sort of progress, because we can't ever let any jobs become obsolete.
Won't someone please think of the buggy whip makers who were put out of business by the automobile? How about the factory workers who lost their jobs to robots that can do the same work more efficiently?
Get real. If we find a way to produce food for free, that's an amazing benefit to all of humanity, not worth giving up just so a tiny fraction of humanity can keep extracting a profit from food production. Farmers can find something else to do, just like all the workers before them that were displaced by new technology.
They can no longer feed their families or keep a roof over their heads. But it's no biggie, you got your free corn.
Of course they can feed their families. Corn is free now, remember?
Just because many people (certainly not billions) do it, doesn't mean it's superior.
Perhaps not, but it does mean it's feasible, and that most potential problems you might bring up have already been solved, because people have been facing them for centuries.
And actually, I think "billions" is accurate... certainly hundreds of millions, in any case. More people earn a living by selling their labor than by selling objects.
The concept that the guy who made an album that 1000 people enjoyed should earn ~1000 more than the guy who made an album that one person enjoyed seems rational and intuitive to me.
Fair enough. It doesn't seem rational and intuitive to me, though, and I'm not alone. I don't see the sense in encouraging all artists and authors to treat their careers as a lottery, where most will lose money or barely break even, and only a few stars will turn a profit. I think it makes a lot more sense for them to know ahead of time whether they're going to get paid for their work, like almost everyone else does, so that the ones whose services aren't in demand can do something more profitable and productive.
Except the cars can be replicated at near-zero cost.
You're right, I got my analogies mixed up. Replace "car buyers" with "car drivers" and strike the part about "car manufacturers who want a more exciting product to sell". The point still stands, though.
So there is no incentive for a car buyer to pay the designer - they just wait and copy the first produced car.
That's circular logic. Where is this "first produced car" going to come from if no one has paid the designer? How can you produce a car from a design that doesn't exist?
You can't. There is no design to copy until someone pays the designer to create one. So if you want to drive a flashy new car, you're going to round up some like-minded friends and put your money together to pay for a new design... and then it won't matter how many copies you make.
There is no sensible economic model to support your fantasies.
Not true. In fact, it's the same economic model that billions of people in other industries already use. Selling your labor is a business model that has stood the test of time and cannot be cheated (except by forcing people into slavery).
So people have to know in *advance* how good the novel will be.
Do you have to know in advance how good a haircut is going to be, how well a mechanic will fix your car, how well a CEO will run your company, and so on?
Agreeing to pay someone for a service they'll perform in the future is hardly new. Billions of people earn a living that way.
Better yet, unknown authors have no way to charge money after they publish a book. They have to rely on charity.
Charity? No, they'll just have a harder time convincing people to pay them to write -- just like anyone else who's new in any field of work. They can compensate for their unknown status by lowering their prices, or releasing a portfolio of past work to build their reputation.
Ah yes, the classic counterpoint to my argument that I hear on Slashdot every time.
Frustrating, isn't it? Likewise, I've answered your question countless times on Slashdot, and it really puzzles me that people need me to provide the answer when, it seems to me, the answer is obvious if you give it a little thought.
Apart from commissioned works (which aren't really a viable business model), who, or what company, is going to pay someone $50,000 for a car design if they cannot recoup that $50,000 by selling more than one copy of the car?
Anyone who benefits from the existence of new car designs. Mainly, this means people who want the cars for their own use: they don't need to recoup their costs, they just want the new designs. But there might also be third parties who benefit indirectly (e.g. aftermarket parts makers who can recoup their investment by selling new lines of parts).