Theories and laws are different categories of things.
A law is an observation that's so reliable that you assume it's always going to happen. For example, the law of gravity says that if you drop something on Earth, it will accelerate toward the ground at approximately 9.8 m/s^2. That law says nothing about why things fall (at all, or at that rate) when you drop them, it just says that they do. There's no proof for that, other than the fact that billions of people have been dropping things for thousands of years and the same thing happens every time.
A theory is an explanation for observed facts. A theory of gravity attempts to explain why things fall, for example "matter emits gravitons" or "matter distorts the shape of spacetime". You can disprove a theory by observing something that contradicts it, and you can add weight to a theory by observing things that it predicts you'll observe, but no matter how much evidence you find, it'll always be a theory.
(Similarly, creationists like to point out that evolution is "just a theory", but besides the fact that they're conflating the scientific meaning of "theory" with the layman's definition, it's also not true. The fact -- or law -- of evolution is that genetic distribution changes over time; we can observe that in fossil beds, mutating viruses, isolated islands, and basically all around us. The theory of evolution attempts to explain why that happens.)
if you want to encourage people to create movies, you need to pay them. people do not work for free. what part of this theory confuses you?
Actually, as a Slashdotter, you ought to know that lots of people do work for free. But that's beside the point, because people don't need copyright in order to get paid.
Anyone who doesn't work to work for free can simply refuse to work until someone has agreed to pay him for his time; that's what happens in every other industry that doesn't have something like copyright to prop up an inefficient, unnatural business model. What part of this very common economic arrangement confuses you?
Free speech/press. Not that those were ever absolute, but copyright restricts them even further: copyright law introduces entire classes of facts that you are not allowed to share with other people.
I mean "data". Files, numbers, abstract patterns, some of which encode Hollywood movies, or songs, or software. Copyright is a way of pretending that you can own a pattern, or limit access to a number, and since that's not now numbers naturally work, it requires all sorts of draconian measures to enforce -- you have to restrict communication in order to have copyright.
Take a look at the link I posted to the organization I financially support. You will see that one of our activities is opposing copyright term extension in Europe, briefing MEPs and the media on the subject.
I'm glad you contribute to that, sincerely, even as an American. I'm not trying to get personal, I just don't think pirates (or piracy proponents) deserve the blame you've given them.
As to "bloated copyright industries" why do you omit the many small labels and artists and writers and game producers and others who also depend on copyright to be able to sell their work for whatever price they can find accords with public desire for their work?
The artists don't depend on copyright. Their present business model does.
It's based on treating information as if it were a consumable product, like candy bars to be copied and sold in millions of identical packages. That's not a natural or efficient way to treat it, and that's why we have draconian laws, DRM fiascoes, constant lawsuits and so on.
The Internet has provided the first opportunity in a long time to subvert giant music labels by letter artists connect to their public directly and en masse. And you want to take that opportunity away from them?
Not at all. I want to give them an even greater opportunity to connect to their public directly and en masse -- by working for their fans.
Musicians aren't factories churning out identical copies of music, they're performers and writers who do a project and then move on to the next one. What they provide isn't a good, it's a service. And most people who provide services for a living get paid based on how valuable their skills are and how long they work, not how many widgets they move.
The internet makes it possible for communities to fund large projects: look at online political fundraising, or even open source software (funded in programmer-hours). You don't need copyright when your fans can commission you to make the original recording.
Wide-spread piracy provides a powerful justification for attempts to stop it. And I don't know of any methods of stopping it that don't have the rights of innocent people stepped on as collateral damage, or that don't allow an opening for the government to insert a little scope-creep for political purposes.
I do: legalize what the pirates are doing. Abolish copyright.
"Piracy proponents" aren't provoking these measures; the bloated copyright-based industries are. Try directing your anger at the people who are pushing for more and more restrictions on communication and technology, not the people who want to share information and be left alone.
If Jailbreaking required breaking out the terminal and doing arcane things, I would not raise it as a point. But it's as easy as installing an application, literally anyone can do so, and there's no danger in doing so
If this guide is accurate, it's a little more involved than that. Certainly more complicated, and scarier for the average user, than what you need to do to enable an Android phone to run non-Market apps (4 clicks - no need to even hook it up to a computer).
It's simply disingenuous to pretend that iPhone is on the same level as Android when it comes to running arbitrary software. Yes, technically you can do it if you put in the effort, but it's not a trivial process, and you have to violate the intentions and recommendations of the manufacturer/carrier (and, allegedly, copyright law) to do it.
You can't even write native apps (well you technically can, but its not supported)
You can use JNI, which is documented but not yet part of the SDK; a native SDK is in the works. There's even an official forum for native development.
Manpower is the limiting factor in Android's development, and if you'd like to help work on it, the code is out there and I'm sure your efforts would be welcome. Try that with iPhone or even Windows Mobile.
But you have to jailbreak your iPhone to use those, a step which many people are unwilling to take (and which is, shall we say, not encouraged by the manufacturer or carrier).
You don't have to root your G1 to download an app from outside the Android Market. You only have to click a check box and open the browser.
It's one thing to use dongles for expensive business apps that are typically run on dedicated workstations (CAD, etc.). But it's something else to use them for games - a typical gaming PC might have a dozen or more games installed on it. If you install a USB dongle for each one, not only are the power requirements going to add up, but you're going to look ridiculous with a two-foot-long chain of dongles hanging off your PC.
I've never understood people's belief that they have the right to someone else's work be it music, videos, games, software or whatever. [...] If you don't want to pay for it, you shouldn't have it.
And I've never understood people's belief that they have the right to tell someone else which sequences of bits they can or can't send and receive over the internet. If you don't want me to use my internet connection for the purposes I choose, you should start paying my cable bill; as long as I'm paying the bills, I should be the one to make the decisions.
A lot of people don't know what Firewire is, sure. They buy the cheap laptop thinking it doesn't matter. But then they scratch their heads and complain when it tasks an order of magnitude longer for their files to copy to a device.
No kidding. You should see the look on my friends' faces when I plug their USB hard drives, USB thumb drives, and USB cell phones into my Firewire port! I don't even have to start copying to blow their minds!
I'm sure it'd be even more impressive if I tried it with a Firewire thumb drive or a Firewire cell phone. If I could find any, that is.
I could really care less if I could have bought a "PC" for $500.00. I do high end video editing and a lot of virtualization as well. I use every 800 Firewire bit of my 17" MBP and am very happy with the purchase.
That's fine. Of course you could be doing high end video editing, virtualization, and Firewire on a PC too, for a fraction of the cost... but if money is no object to you, knock yourself out!
As long as you realize that your experience isn't typical: most people do care how much money they spend, and would rather save $500-$1000 getting a system that still meets their needs.
The point is that everything goes together smoothly and reliably. [...] Macintosh systems are much more stable than Dell's latest "Let's Cobble Cheap Crap Together" special.
That's what Apple would like you to think, but in my experience it's a myth. My Mac laptop has crashed as often, per hour of use, as my Windows desktop -- which I really did cobble together from cheap crap, and which is running a much wider variety of software.
More specifically, it's because young people can't vote. For a politician, there's not much downside to piling on more and more oppressive regulations on young people, because you can't get their votes anyway.
On the other hand, overprotective and prudish parents do vote. So do elderly people who see every cultural change as a threat to their memories.
A diagnostic test is useful for finding a cure, though. When doing research, it helps to know who actually has the disease and be able to measure whether it's getting better or worse.
[USB mass storage support] Might be nice. But I think we'll never see it. Opens up too many avenues for hackery of too many kinds. I wouldn't hang my hopes on this.
Hackery? No, not really. Just let people use some portion of the phone's storage as a USB drive. You don't have to expose the system files, if that's what you're worried about.
I understand why people want it. But it's really a bad idea on a device like this. That is, fully unrestricted multitasking is.
And yet it seems like this is already supported by so many other smartphones. Why can't Apple do what they do?
But [separating "app" from "daemon"] is hard to explain to developers, and hard to explain to consumers. Hackers will rail against how restrictive this is compared to what they're used to. Many "regular people" won't understand what's going on unless the message around it is crafted *very* carefully. I think from some standpoints this could be made to work, but I'm not sure enabling it would end up being a win.
I think this is way too pessimistic.
Look at Android, where apps are divided into not two but four different types of components, in order for the system to start and stop them as needed. Developers adapted easily enough, and consumers can't even tell the difference. You don't need to know that the Last.fm app is divided into "activities" and "services" unless you're writing the Last.fm app. From a user's perspective, all you see is that your stream keeps playing in the background while you're doing something else.
Sometimes [MMS] works, sometimes it doesn't work, and sometimes it translates it to a normal text message with a link to a web site that lets you view the multimedia.
And yet people still use MMS, even though it's imperfect. People know its limitations and still want to be able to use it on their iPhones. What's the holdup?
Consider this. Today, using some handsets, you can send MMS messages where the media is a MIDI file. What do you think would happen to that if an iPhone received it?
Um... it would get played through some sort of MIDI synthesizer? QuickTime can do that. What do you think happens when your Mac receives a MIDI file as an email attachment?
No offense, but these are some pretty weak excuses. Other phones already support all these features. The problem isn't that the features are impossible to implement, but that Apple refuses to implement them.
As opposed to the bloodsucking leeches in sweatpants that can't think up their own guitar riffs or lyrics, and so they use someone else's? Or the bloodsucking leeches that are too cool to pay for any of the entertainment they want? Those kind of leeches?
Er, no. See, leeches in real life are little critters that suck blood out of bigger critters. They nourish themselves at someone else's expense, hence the metaphorical use.
"Bloodsucking leeches in suits" makes sense in reference to someone who sues musicians, because he's enriching himself at the musician's expense: if he prevails in court, that musician will have to pay a hefty settlement. The dude in the suit gets richer as a direct result of the musician becoming poorer.
But it doesn't make sense to call the musicians themselves "leeches", because they're not removing the original content. If you mash up 50 YouTube videos to make a song, the original 50 videos are still there for anyone to watch. You're not enriching yourself at someone else's expense, you're just building a new work on top of the existing works you see around you -- and the term for someone who does that is "artist".
And also prohibited from demanding ID. Unfortunately, a lot of businesses just don't seem to care about following the merchant guidelines they agreed to.
BTW, don't bother reporting them to your bank, call Visa directly: 1-800-VISA-911.
That's why the Apple cards could be forged. They basically don't know the card number exists until activation.
Yes, exactly, assuming that by "activation" you mean redemption.
That's the flaw in their plan. When you give them a gift card number, they don't bother to ask "does this number actually belong to a real gift card that we manufactured and sold", they only ask "does the algorithm say this number is valid". Once the algorithm stops being a secret, the system falls apart.
It's not much of a hassle to "manage one massive database for every card". Even if we generously posit that they need to track 1 billion cards, storing 100 bytes of data for each one, that's still only ~100 GB: the storage cost is trivial, and a billion-row database hardly makes Oracle flinch. There's no reason that every gift card vendor shouldn't be tracking the numbers of the cards they manufacture, and any who don't are begging to get burned the same way Apple is.
Go to any place (grocery store, convenience store, etc.) that sells gift cards or phone cards. Read the packaging on the cards and notice that it says the cards have no value until they're activated at the register. Now buy one of the cards and watch the register activate it; you'll probably see a serial number or such on your receipt. If you're feeling lucky, try stealing one of the cards and then using it; you'll find that it has no value.
This system is meant to protect against shoplifting: there's no point in stealing cards that can't be used. It also has the side effect of preventing people from generating their own gift card numbers.
(You can still attack the system by writing down a bunch of card numbers from the rack and waiting a few days/weeks for someone else to buy them. But you have to use the cards in the window between the time they're activated and the time they're used up.)
If they track everything before shipping it out, then they have to manage one massive database for every card. Add in a second database to manage everything that's been redeemed and then make the two have to sync with each other... headaches.
And yet that's how every other gift card works! Apple thought they could get away with cutting corners. Now they're seeing why everyone else doesn't.
You're just being obtuse because you do not want to admit that parents are morally obligated to raise their children and that entails making decisions for them.
Not quite. It entails making decisions that the children are unable to make for themselves. It does not entail overriding the decisions that they are able to make.
I've never heard you give a specific age at which children should have the right to make their own 'life decisions' because you know that picking any indicator, or any age is going to be just as arbitrary as 18 is.
Yes, any age would be just as arbitrary as 18. Age limits are a poor way to do anything: in every case where some right or responsibility is segregated by age, age is merely a stand-in for some other quality that people are too lazy to measure directly (or for one that can't be measured directly because it doesn't really exist).
But it's not true that other indicators are equally arbitrary. For example, if you want to know whether someone is a competent driver, the score on his driving test is a much more accurate indicator than the date on his birth certificate. (The legal driving age serves mainly to keep minors dependent on others and to cover up for poorly designed driving tests.)
If you think 18 year olds have a quality that 17 year olds lack, then hypothesize a way to detect it and test your hypothesis to see if you're right. If you find it, then voila, you can get rid of the age limit and use a test that has some basis in science instead. If you can't come up with a way to measure the presence of this quality, though, maybe it's all in your imagination.
So your position that "children should not have to go to school if they don't want to" is unsupportable.
What, because babies can't make decisions, you think older children and teenagers can't either?
I think you skipped a step somewhere. Babies don't go to school. Babies can barely express their desires at all, and certainly can't articulate the reasoning behind them. Older children and teenagers are a different story.
If you want to continue discussing this, you will have to state "Yes, parents are required to make decisions for their babies" in your next post and we can go from there.
Hey, I'll go one step further. Parents are also required to make decisions for their older children, spouses, and other dependents, who become incapacitated (coma, etc.). But again, making a decision on behalf of someone who's incapable of deciding for himself is quite different from ignoring the decision he makes and substituting your own judgment.
Your point is a good one: everyone is incapable of deciding anything for themselves as a newborn; at some point they gain that ability; and later they may lose it again, temporarily or permanently.
The problem is, not everyone gains it at the same time. Age is a pretty bad indicator of whether or not someone has gained it. It looks like a great indicator as long as you only consider extremes (babies vs. adults), but in the middle, it's woefully inaccurate. You might as well set a weight limit or a height limit while you're at it: someone who weighs 200 lbs is almost certainly better at making decisions than someone who weighs 20 lbs, too, but good luck generalizing that.
So how do you know? Well, maybe you could start by looking at a person's actions. If a child says "I don't want to go to school because I'm bored there and I'd rather spend the day fishing", that's a decision. He made it, and the fact that he made it is proof that he was able to make it (since, you know, people don't manage to do things that are impossible). You might not agree with his decision, but you don't have to; it's not about you.
Slashdot Mirror
Theories and laws are different categories of things.
A law is an observation that's so reliable that you assume it's always going to happen. For example, the law of gravity says that if you drop something on Earth, it will accelerate toward the ground at approximately 9.8 m/s^2. That law says nothing about why things fall (at all, or at that rate) when you drop them, it just says that they do. There's no proof for that, other than the fact that billions of people have been dropping things for thousands of years and the same thing happens every time.
A theory is an explanation for observed facts. A theory of gravity attempts to explain why things fall, for example "matter emits gravitons" or "matter distorts the shape of spacetime". You can disprove a theory by observing something that contradicts it, and you can add weight to a theory by observing things that it predicts you'll observe, but no matter how much evidence you find, it'll always be a theory.
(Similarly, creationists like to point out that evolution is "just a theory", but besides the fact that they're conflating the scientific meaning of "theory" with the layman's definition, it's also not true. The fact -- or law -- of evolution is that genetic distribution changes over time; we can observe that in fossil beds, mutating viruses, isolated islands, and basically all around us. The theory of evolution attempts to explain why that happens.)
if you want to encourage people to create movies, you need to pay them. people do not work for free.
what part of this theory confuses you?
Actually, as a Slashdotter, you ought to know that lots of people do work for free. But that's beside the point, because people don't need copyright in order to get paid.
Anyone who doesn't work to work for free can simply refuse to work until someone has agreed to pay him for his time; that's what happens in every other industry that doesn't have something like copyright to prop up an inefficient, unnatural business model. What part of this very common economic arrangement confuses you?
What freedoms did we give up?
Free speech/press. Not that those were ever absolute, but copyright restricts them even further: copyright law introduces entire classes of facts that you are not allowed to share with other people.
By 'information' do you mean 'hollywood movies'?
I mean "data". Files, numbers, abstract patterns, some of which encode Hollywood movies, or songs, or software. Copyright is a way of pretending that you can own a pattern, or limit access to a number, and since that's not now numbers naturally work, it requires all sorts of draconian measures to enforce -- you have to restrict communication in order to have copyright.
Take a look at the link I posted to the organization I financially support. You will see that one of our activities is opposing copyright term extension in Europe, briefing MEPs and the media on the subject.
I'm glad you contribute to that, sincerely, even as an American. I'm not trying to get personal, I just don't think pirates (or piracy proponents) deserve the blame you've given them.
As to "bloated copyright industries" why do you omit the many small labels and artists and writers and game producers and others who also depend on copyright to be able to sell their work for whatever price they can find accords with public desire for their work?
The artists don't depend on copyright. Their present business model does.
It's based on treating information as if it were a consumable product, like candy bars to be copied and sold in millions of identical packages. That's not a natural or efficient way to treat it, and that's why we have draconian laws, DRM fiascoes, constant lawsuits and so on.
The Internet has provided the first opportunity in a long time to subvert giant music labels by letter artists connect to their public directly and en masse. And you want to take that opportunity away from them?
Not at all. I want to give them an even greater opportunity to connect to their public directly and en masse -- by working for their fans.
Musicians aren't factories churning out identical copies of music, they're performers and writers who do a project and then move on to the next one. What they provide isn't a good, it's a service. And most people who provide services for a living get paid based on how valuable their skills are and how long they work, not how many widgets they move.
The internet makes it possible for communities to fund large projects: look at online political fundraising, or even open source software (funded in programmer-hours). You don't need copyright when your fans can commission you to make the original recording.
Wide-spread piracy provides a powerful justification for attempts to stop it. And I don't know of any methods of stopping it that don't have the rights of innocent people stepped on as collateral damage, or that don't allow an opening for the government to insert a little scope-creep for political purposes.
I do: legalize what the pirates are doing. Abolish copyright.
"Piracy proponents" aren't provoking these measures; the bloated copyright-based industries are. Try directing your anger at the people who are pushing for more and more restrictions on communication and technology, not the people who want to share information and be left alone.
If Jailbreaking required breaking out the terminal and doing arcane things, I would not raise it as a point. But it's as easy as installing an application, literally anyone can do so, and there's no danger in doing so
If this guide is accurate, it's a little more involved than that. Certainly more complicated, and scarier for the average user, than what you need to do to enable an Android phone to run non-Market apps (4 clicks - no need to even hook it up to a computer).
It's simply disingenuous to pretend that iPhone is on the same level as Android when it comes to running arbitrary software. Yes, technically you can do it if you put in the effort, but it's not a trivial process, and you have to violate the intentions and recommendations of the manufacturer/carrier (and, allegedly, copyright law) to do it.
You can't even write native apps (well you technically can, but its not supported)
You can use JNI, which is documented but not yet part of the SDK; a native SDK is in the works. There's even an official forum for native development.
Manpower is the limiting factor in Android's development, and if you'd like to help work on it, the code is out there and I'm sure your efforts would be welcome. Try that with iPhone or even Windows Mobile.
But you have to jailbreak your iPhone to use those, a step which many people are unwilling to take (and which is, shall we say, not encouraged by the manufacturer or carrier).
You don't have to root your G1 to download an app from outside the Android Market. You only have to click a check box and open the browser.
No, no, no.
It's one thing to use dongles for expensive business apps that are typically run on dedicated workstations (CAD, etc.). But it's something else to use them for games - a typical gaming PC might have a dozen or more games installed on it. If you install a USB dongle for each one, not only are the power requirements going to add up, but you're going to look ridiculous with a two-foot-long chain of dongles hanging off your PC.
I've never understood people's belief that they have the right to someone else's work be it music, videos, games, software or whatever. [...] If you don't want to pay for it, you shouldn't have it.
And I've never understood people's belief that they have the right to tell someone else which sequences of bits they can or can't send and receive over the internet. If you don't want me to use my internet connection for the purposes I choose, you should start paying my cable bill; as long as I'm paying the bills, I should be the one to make the decisions.
I guess that makes us even.
A lot of people don't know what Firewire is, sure. They buy the cheap laptop thinking it doesn't matter. But then they scratch their heads and complain when it tasks an order of magnitude longer for their files to copy to a device.
No kidding. You should see the look on my friends' faces when I plug their USB hard drives, USB thumb drives, and USB cell phones into my Firewire port! I don't even have to start copying to blow their minds!
I'm sure it'd be even more impressive if I tried it with a Firewire thumb drive or a Firewire cell phone. If I could find any, that is.
I could really care less if I could have bought a "PC" for $500.00. I do high end video editing and a lot of virtualization as well. I use every 800 Firewire bit of my 17" MBP and am very happy with the purchase.
That's fine. Of course you could be doing high end video editing, virtualization, and Firewire on a PC too, for a fraction of the cost... but if money is no object to you, knock yourself out!
As long as you realize that your experience isn't typical: most people do care how much money they spend, and would rather save $500-$1000 getting a system that still meets their needs.
The point is that everything goes together smoothly and reliably. [...] Macintosh systems are much more stable than Dell's latest "Let's Cobble Cheap Crap Together" special.
That's what Apple would like you to think, but in my experience it's a myth. My Mac laptop has crashed as often, per hour of use, as my Windows desktop -- which I really did cobble together from cheap crap, and which is running a much wider variety of software.
Exactly.
More specifically, it's because young people can't vote. For a politician, there's not much downside to piling on more and more oppressive regulations on young people, because you can't get their votes anyway.
On the other hand, overprotective and prudish parents do vote. So do elderly people who see every cultural change as a threat to their memories.
A diagnostic test is useful for finding a cure, though. When doing research, it helps to know who actually has the disease and be able to measure whether it's getting better or worse.
The government controlling every bit of people's lives isn't going to cure stupid.
Then it's a good thing no one is suggesting that the government should control every bit of people's lives, huh?
[USB mass storage support] Might be nice. But I think we'll never see it. Opens up too many avenues for hackery of too many kinds. I wouldn't hang my hopes on this.
Hackery? No, not really. Just let people use some portion of the phone's storage as a USB drive. You don't have to expose the system files, if that's what you're worried about.
I understand why people want it. But it's really a bad idea on a device like this. That is, fully unrestricted multitasking is.
And yet it seems like this is already supported by so many other smartphones. Why can't Apple do what they do?
But [separating "app" from "daemon"] is hard to explain to developers, and hard to explain to consumers. Hackers will rail against how restrictive this is compared to what they're used to. Many "regular people" won't understand what's going on unless the message around it is crafted *very* carefully. I think from some standpoints this could be made to work, but I'm not sure enabling it would end up being a win.
I think this is way too pessimistic.
Look at Android, where apps are divided into not two but four different types of components, in order for the system to start and stop them as needed. Developers adapted easily enough, and consumers can't even tell the difference. You don't need to know that the Last.fm app is divided into "activities" and "services" unless you're writing the Last.fm app. From a user's perspective, all you see is that your stream keeps playing in the background while you're doing something else.
Sometimes [MMS] works, sometimes it doesn't work, and sometimes it translates it to a normal text message with a link to a web site that lets you view the multimedia.
And yet people still use MMS, even though it's imperfect. People know its limitations and still want to be able to use it on their iPhones. What's the holdup?
Consider this. Today, using some handsets, you can send MMS messages where the media is a MIDI file. What do you think would happen to that if an iPhone received it?
Um... it would get played through some sort of MIDI synthesizer? QuickTime can do that. What do you think happens when your Mac receives a MIDI file as an email attachment?
No offense, but these are some pretty weak excuses. Other phones already support all these features. The problem isn't that the features are impossible to implement, but that Apple refuses to implement them.
The G1 has USB charging and line-out.
As opposed to the bloodsucking leeches in sweatpants that can't think up their own guitar riffs or lyrics, and so they use someone else's? Or the bloodsucking leeches that are too cool to pay for any of the entertainment they want? Those kind of leeches?
Er, no. See, leeches in real life are little critters that suck blood out of bigger critters. They nourish themselves at someone else's expense, hence the metaphorical use.
"Bloodsucking leeches in suits" makes sense in reference to someone who sues musicians, because he's enriching himself at the musician's expense: if he prevails in court, that musician will have to pay a hefty settlement. The dude in the suit gets richer as a direct result of the musician becoming poorer.
But it doesn't make sense to call the musicians themselves "leeches", because they're not removing the original content. If you mash up 50 YouTube videos to make a song, the original 50 videos are still there for anyone to watch. You're not enriching yourself at someone else's expense, you're just building a new work on top of the existing works you see around you -- and the term for someone who does that is "artist".
And also prohibited from demanding ID. Unfortunately, a lot of businesses just don't seem to care about following the merchant guidelines they agreed to.
BTW, don't bother reporting them to your bank, call Visa directly: 1-800-VISA-911.
That's why the Apple cards could be forged. They basically don't know the card number exists until activation.
Yes, exactly, assuming that by "activation" you mean redemption.
That's the flaw in their plan. When you give them a gift card number, they don't bother to ask "does this number actually belong to a real gift card that we manufactured and sold", they only ask "does the algorithm say this number is valid". Once the algorithm stops being a secret, the system falls apart.
It's not much of a hassle to "manage one massive database for every card". Even if we generously posit that they need to track 1 billion cards, storing 100 bytes of data for each one, that's still only ~100 GB: the storage cost is trivial, and a billion-row database hardly makes Oracle flinch. There's no reason that every gift card vendor shouldn't be tracking the numbers of the cards they manufacture, and any who don't are begging to get burned the same way Apple is.
Go to any place (grocery store, convenience store, etc.) that sells gift cards or phone cards. Read the packaging on the cards and notice that it says the cards have no value until they're activated at the register. Now buy one of the cards and watch the register activate it; you'll probably see a serial number or such on your receipt. If you're feeling lucky, try stealing one of the cards and then using it; you'll find that it has no value.
This system is meant to protect against shoplifting: there's no point in stealing cards that can't be used. It also has the side effect of preventing people from generating their own gift card numbers.
(You can still attack the system by writing down a bunch of card numbers from the rack and waiting a few days/weeks for someone else to buy them. But you have to use the cards in the window between the time they're activated and the time they're used up.)
If they track everything before shipping it out, then they have to manage one massive database for every card. Add in a second database to manage everything that's been redeemed and then make the two have to sync with each other... headaches.
And yet that's how every other gift card works! Apple thought they could get away with cutting corners. Now they're seeing why everyone else doesn't.
You're just being obtuse because you do not want to admit that parents are morally obligated to raise their children and that entails making decisions for them.
Not quite. It entails making decisions that the children are unable to make for themselves. It does not entail overriding the decisions that they are able to make.
I've never heard you give a specific age at which children should have the right to make their own 'life decisions' because you know that picking any indicator, or any age is going to be just as arbitrary as 18 is.
Yes, any age would be just as arbitrary as 18. Age limits are a poor way to do anything: in every case where some right or responsibility is segregated by age, age is merely a stand-in for some other quality that people are too lazy to measure directly (or for one that can't be measured directly because it doesn't really exist).
But it's not true that other indicators are equally arbitrary. For example, if you want to know whether someone is a competent driver, the score on his driving test is a much more accurate indicator than the date on his birth certificate. (The legal driving age serves mainly to keep minors dependent on others and to cover up for poorly designed driving tests.)
If you think 18 year olds have a quality that 17 year olds lack, then hypothesize a way to detect it and test your hypothesis to see if you're right. If you find it, then voila, you can get rid of the age limit and use a test that has some basis in science instead. If you can't come up with a way to measure the presence of this quality, though, maybe it's all in your imagination.
So your position that "children should not have to go to school if they don't want to" is unsupportable.
What, because babies can't make decisions, you think older children and teenagers can't either?
I think you skipped a step somewhere. Babies don't go to school. Babies can barely express their desires at all, and certainly can't articulate the reasoning behind them. Older children and teenagers are a different story.
If you want to continue discussing this, you will have to state "Yes, parents are required to make decisions for their babies" in your next post and we can go from there.
Hey, I'll go one step further. Parents are also required to make decisions for their older children, spouses, and other dependents, who become incapacitated (coma, etc.). But again, making a decision on behalf of someone who's incapable of deciding for himself is quite different from ignoring the decision he makes and substituting your own judgment.
Your point is a good one: everyone is incapable of deciding anything for themselves as a newborn; at some point they gain that ability; and later they may lose it again, temporarily or permanently.
The problem is, not everyone gains it at the same time. Age is a pretty bad indicator of whether or not someone has gained it. It looks like a great indicator as long as you only consider extremes (babies vs. adults), but in the middle, it's woefully inaccurate. You might as well set a weight limit or a height limit while you're at it: someone who weighs 200 lbs is almost certainly better at making decisions than someone who weighs 20 lbs, too, but good luck generalizing that.
So how do you know? Well, maybe you could start by looking at a person's actions. If a child says "I don't want to go to school because I'm bored there and I'd rather spend the day fishing", that's a decision. He made it, and the fact that he made it is proof that he was able to make it (since, you know, people don't manage to do things that are impossible). You might not agree with his decision, but you don't have to; it's not about you.