It isn't that EULA's aren't valid contracts, it's that you can legally use the software in any way that isn't restricted by copyright law without agreeing to the EULA. No, you can't. You don't have a license without consenting to the license agreement. Please cite an authority that makes you think otherwise and it will be easier to address your troubling interpretation.
"Legal acquisition" is predicated on licensure. It is an incomplete analysis to suggest that copyright trumps a license consideration. As elsewhere in property and contracts, parties are free to attach any conditions precedent to entering into an agreement (here, conveyance of a copy) that do not themselves break the law. I am able to grant property to you on the condition that you not use it for a specific purpose--that is distinct from the basic theory of ownership, but it is permitted because it is a valid, legal contraction. Assent by performance is further envisaged in mass transactions and all sorts of contracts, so the common myth that a contract must be signed and witnessed is flatly untrue. If we make a contract a condition precedent to the granting of a license (in such unambiguous terms as "BY USING THIS SOFTWARE YOU AGREE"), you do not come into legal possession of the copy until after that agreement takes place.
What you're really arguing is that "EULAs are not valid contracts", and you're probably right about that. Well, no, that's not right. They absolutely are valid contracts as a class. No court has ever said otherwise. Certain EULAs, and certain provisions contained in those specific EULAs, are invalid. You know the whole rumble about mandatory arbitration clauses? They're not categorically unlawful, and though they have been stricken down, it does not mean that the associated service contracts are invalid, or that the process of creating them is invalid, or that mandatory arbitration is unlawful.
Apple will of course claim that that is exactly what the EULA is for. No, a EULA establishes which rights are being transferred from the owner to the licensee and under what conditions those rights operate. If the condition is that you not use it for commercial purposes, that's fine. If the condition is that you don't install it on a non-Dell computer, that's fine. Since Apple is an OEM, Apple Stores are OEM resellers, and the OS itself is OEM, you don't have the retail-OEM distinction you do with Windows. Since you don't have products from two different companies, you don't have the bundling problem you do with Windows.
The condition is valid, and there's not a court that would say otherwise. What OP's friends probably said is that there's no court that would enforce the provision where someone has paid for their copy (and limiting the hypothetical to exactly those facts--i.e. no copyright violation, no commercial reselling, etc.). This is because Apple got paid, and the user is not expecting anything further from Apple--no support, no promise of ongoing compatibility, etc. There's no harm to make it worthwhile.
There is a HUGE difference between a court declining to enforce a contract and a court declaring a contract invalid. It's one that people outside the law don't often fully appreciate.
Frankly, finding a minimized window on the Dock is much more difficult than finding one in XP/Vista, primarily because the icons are small and unlabeled until you mouse over them. Okay, but the application's icon is superimposed on the live preview, which makes it just as effective as in Windows, where you click on an application group to expand a list of windows. In Windows, your mouse movement is vertical. In OS X, it's horizontal. It's not actually more work.
Granted, you may be the type that prefers application windows to spread out over the taskbar and benefit from title recognition. Other people are more visual, and the live preview is more effective at recalling which window they want based on its colors and layout. Again, it's not less effective, it just has different priorities. As most users are more visually-oriented, the layout makes more sense.
That still doesn't address why a user would want to have more than a few minimized windows anyway. OS X is designed to have multiple floating windows. Minimization is a tool to get rid of distracting windows or something you don't have a foreseeable need to interact with. It's related to the same complaints of Windows users that there is no "maximize" button. There isn't supposed to be. Windows aren't supposed to take over the whole screen for no good reason. They're supposed to live on the desktop and be interactive (drag and drop, cross reference, translucency, etc.) with one another.
If you're not a multimodal user and you prefer one window and all the others put away, you're going to prefer the Windows approach. But it's not a result of one or the other having deficiencies--it's simply a matter of a different approach to workflow. It's not supposed to be like Windows. In many ways, it's supposed to be exactly the opposite. I understand if that puts you out of a comfort box, but it's not a failing of the Dock to accomplish its goals. It's a failing of the Dock to be a task-oriented UI element.
Like creating a Dock for Windows, I'm sure there are third-party applications for the Mac that will give you a taskbar.
Sure. And the ability to put Windows application links directly on the taskbar (in the Quick Launch area or whatever it's called) didn't show up until Windows 98. The ability to condense applications to a single button in the taskbar didn't show up until XP.
Things evolve over time to address weaknesses. Are you really going to say that a solution is inadequate because it didn't exist before it existed? I don't think that's your intent, but that's the effect of your comment.
That's application status information. Just like the mail counters, the Adium message indicators, Toast status indicators, and the other unobtrusive information it contains, the Dock. It's not task-oriented, but rather application-oriented.
The Dock is an application switcher/launcher, but not a task switcher. You can subdivide it two ways--an All Windows Exposé for a one-key direct shot, or you can switch to a busy application and then use Application Windows Exposé for more effective task switching within an application--far superior to a pop-up list (e.g. when you're working with 15 files in Photoshop or 10 palettes in a drafting application).
It is more or less the opposite of Windows priorities. It's not a good taskbar because it's not supposed to be. To do so would be redundant.
it was a pain just navigating between windows with the Dock. How?
I'm really curious, because I have never understood the origin of the animosity. Exposé is what you use for window switching, and it's far more effective than a taskbar or Cmd-Tab. The Dock is a very effective application launcher and switcher (especially coupled with Application Windows Exposé) and a pretty convenient storage space for minimized windows. It provides better information (Toast status updates, Adium message indicators, mail counters, "action needed" bounces or spins, etc.).
I like it quite a bit, and I like the Leopard one, too, and Stacks. If Stacks had a "Menu" view option to be more in line with the "old" style everyone is so accustomed to (and allowed custom icons), it'd be nothing at all to complain about.
I attempted to define the "discomfort" as a tort -- I.E., a tort is what would bring on punitive damages. You responded by saying that the case itself was a tort, and that "discomfort" was defined as punitive damages. Now, my interpretation of this lead me to believe that you were mislead about the definition of a tort O reviser of history! You already admitted my correct analysis about the term in question being damages. "Discomfort" IS NOT A TORT. The matter of the "tort being the lawsuit" (which can only occur if you invert my sentence) is not, nor has it ever been, at issue. Again, you continue trying to correct an elaboration that was accurate at square one and just won't shut up about it. You are not a lawyer. You did not respond properly to the OP. You lack a fundamental understanting of the terminology (based on your incorrect response of "tort" when the word is "damages"; your assessment of the cause of action being negligence; your lack of precision evidence by your utter fabrication of a quote to respond to; your ongoing failure to parse a basic English sentence). You are wrong and trying to create a distinction (and thus an issue) where there is none. It really is not difficult to figure out.
I'd rather like to know why the suit is a civil wrong. Just as in the three preceding posts, your tenuous grasp of syntax has led you astray. This case is a tort does not mean that the tort is the lawsuit. Even if that were syntactically valid (and it's not), it would not be semantically possible--a document cannot be a tort. That should be your very first clue that you're parsing the sentence incorrectly.
One final time: NP VP NP(Obj.) The case is a tort (expanded to a senseless degree: the classification of the case is a tortious injury arising under a breach of K; this one case is of class "tort") The car is a sedan (this one car in question is of class "sedan") The shelf is red (this one shelf is of class "red") The frame is a rectangle (this frame is of class "rectangle")
It is not, as you continue trying to insist without reason, logic, or linguistic justification: *The tort is a lawsuit (this one tort is of type "lawsuit")
telling you exactly what you had said that confused me. No, that's not what you did. Like a jackass armchair lawyer, you ONCE AGAIN tried to restate and correct something you do not fully understand. You did not indicate that you were confused. You did not ask for an elaboration. You substituted (AGAIN) a faulty analysis unilaterally, representing it as correct, where it was not. You are not qualified to make such a correction, particularly since you can't back it up semantically, syntactically, or rationally.
My blood pressure is perfectly normal. Your attempt to define tort was an ill-fated attempt for your original comment to be correct, when in fact you had neither read nor understood the post to which you were responding. You then further alleged that the cause of action was negligence. You were then, and continue to be, incorrect. My statement is not what prompted you to define tort--you're the one who brought the word up incorrectly.
I think it's just precious that you're still scrambling for any footing at all. You've got none. Your "epic flaw" is that you just can't read or comprehend either English or law.
The suit is a tort. NP VP NP(obj).
You're the only person on the face of the earth struggling to find a construction where an alternative analysis has merit. It's not working, even a little. If I had said "the tort is the suit" you'd have a point. But alas. No such luck for you.
Add "is" to the list of words you should look up, buddy.
The suit is a tort. The car is a sedan. The shelf is red. All shelves are not red, all cars are not sedans, and all suits are not torts.
Cause and effect has nothing to do with it. What would be the point of a tautological sentence? It's quite clear, and you continue to attempt in vain to correct something just so you can be right SOMEWHERE. It just isn't working for you, no matter how hard it is for you to accept. You don't know what negligence means, or tort, or damages, or "is"--and you can't be bothered to read a post before you errantly respond to it and can't be bothered to get an actual quote to put in your quotation marks. Your ship has gone far beyond taking water; you're sunk.
Enforcing laws that people don't believe in doesn't work Curiously, the people do believe in the laws. There's little controversial about copyright outside of Slashdot. The only thing that even raises eyebrows is the severity of the penalty, which, again, is something that would be easily addressed if people like you didn't exist in sizeable quantity.
The "people" aren't you.
Something like 2/3rds of the US has downloaded music illegally at some point in time. So? Something like 99% of the US has technically infringed on copyright, just like the same number have violated traffic laws. They didn't suddenly start caring about every one-off music download on the face of the earth, contrary to popular groupthink here. The RIAA has chosen some crappy targets, but to think that harmful infringement is not occurring by P2P users is equally false in comparison to the argument that P2P is killing the music industry.
Yes. You're failing to make a distinction. If you can't be relied upon to exercise any degree of precision in selecting your quotes, can't be relied upon for any of your analysis or even basic working definitions, it shouldn't be surprising that you can't parse sentences, either.
The case is a tort. The lawsuit is a tort, i.e. the car is a sedan.
And before you even bother trying to respond, please think critically about the quote you simply made up. And then just walk away and save yourself further embarrassment.
I think I cleared that up already. No need to be a snide prick. Then perhaps you should think twice about trying to correct someone on an issue you clearly are not qualified to discuss. Your first comment was an attempt to be helpful, but your subsequent attempt to correct a superior elaboration was an ill-advised move. I submit the following:
I saw reference to harm in a civil case, and my go-to word was "Tort." I had never considered that the word may not apply to the rationale for punitive damages. The world would be a better place if people just let other people who know what they're talking about answer questions. Wikipedia links and a less than half-baked understanding of terms and issues rarely goes over well.
Dear Mr. Wikipedia (who should look up negligence next time), The word is still damages, not a tort. The tort is breach of contract; it is not discomfort, or emotional distress, or pain and suffering, or, good grief, negligence. Please DO consider what you were responding to:
"If a company cause you damages, they will usually be forced to pay for the damages" There's the tort, except OP should have said "harm" instead of "damages" in both instances, but doesn't seem to be a native English speaker, so no foul there.
The rest of the sentence, from reimbursement for legal fees to compensatory damages for actual losses to punitive damages for causing the tortious injury all refers to the restitution (here, remuneration) offered by civil litigation: the award of damages.
The "discomfort" here is not a separate tort, but a result of the burden of having to litigate one's rights, and the company is forced to pay punitive damages to dissuade it from not resolving these situations under its contract terms. It is not a "pain and suffering" or "emotional distress" award because the defendant had to go to court--in fact, it has nothing to do with the plaintiff at all, which is why OP couldn't find the appropriate word. "Discomfort" is not a tort.
I think that most people (and all accountants) would consider the bank only made $3 on the transaction, not $100. Your example is not on point. The bank does not assume ownership of the $100. It's still your money. They only generated $3 in revenue because that's the only money that changed hands. Deposits in a bank aren't revenue for their business.
After some fixed costs (taxes, rent, etc.), I'm free to do pretty much what I please with it How is that different than a business? They have benefits to pay into (health, retirement), capital costs (leases, utilities, landscaping), outstanding debts (loans, though Apple in particular has no debt), and the fixed costs of the parts and other budgeted items. What's left over is their net profit, just like what's left from your bills at the end of the year is yours.
You make your salary, a company "makes" its revenue. It was a misleading and ambiguous verb to use in the headline, but this is Slashdot, so it's par for the course.
Getting to within 10% of the cost of goods sounds fantastic to me. Within 20-25% still sounds not bad. It's a lot better than a total guess, which seems to be what you're suggesting. (gross margins of between 20 and 50 %). Except that it's not. A range of 20% is no better than a total guess, and a range of 10%, while narrowing the gross margin gap by about a third, does not exceed "total guess" for net profit (which ultimately is the only one that matters). In what way do you consider it superior to a total guess?
An error of 20% on a parts bill will move you from one end of the gross margin scale to the other. In other words, the error of the estimated cost rarely does any better than the standard margins on products. Then there is absolutely no guidance whatsoever on net profit figures, which are what really matter. The company itself can be assessed, but it's pure folly to try to do it for individual products.
Let's take a product. Retail price $100, iSuppli guess: $58 for parts. That's 42% gross profit, and we will use your conservative and overly generous 10% range for accuracy. The possible gross margins range from 47% to 36%. What does this mean? That they fall in the normal range of 20 to 50%. What did we learn? Nothing. We already knew it was almost certainly going to be in that range, and regardless of where it falls, it's unremarkable because it's the normal range. The only place it would be noteworthy would be if iSuppli found figures grossly outside that range (e.g. 75% or 5%), and that basically never happens.
What do you gain by knowing that the product is within a normal range of markup? The "smaller iSuppli margin" product could easily be the bigger-margin cash cow, and an attempt to minimize the pocket-lining of corporations can't be undertaken with the information iSuppli supplies, if you'll pardon the pun.
When your margin of error covers the most of the basic spread of possibilities, you're not providing a service. Trying to peg it down to some quasi-accurate Ouija-board figure without any real knowledge gets us nowhere useful. iSuppli rarely, if ever, has provided anything better than a 20% range on a 20% range, which means it has never demonstrated or even rationally suggested that any given product is a better "value" than any other. It relies on faulty analysis for people to make that claim and gives them a quasi-factual, half-true basis to do so. This can only cause harm.
The entire system is highly variable from company to company, and even among products from a single company. Without details, it is impossible to get any accuracy beyond a massive range. Gross profits are usually 20 to 50 percent. Net profits for self-sustaining (i.e. not loss-leaders) products are usually 5 to 20 percent. Anyone offering you any level of accuracy beyond that without specific documentation is lying.
You believed the "$18 per month" without investigating where it came from. I don't see where this is the case. I accepted the premise of the figures for the sake of being internally consistent and staying within the parameters of the parent post.
Nothing I said differs one iota based on the dollar amount that actually comes in. Parent argued the "math" was wrong (while accepting the $831 total as a given) because it didn't account for what Apple pays out.
It's completely irrelevant whether it's $831 or $798 or whether it's all from AT&T or part from accessory makers or Google or wherever else. The point is that revenue is not profit, and neither is revenue minus bare component costs.
If I have a store, I "make" $10 every time I sell a $10 item. I also have bills to pay, including the $7 wholesale bill for the product itself. At the end of the month, I might have made $100,000, but I pay out $85,000. So I might walk away with 20 or 30 cents.
Let me put it this way: you "make" whatever your salary is. Does that mean you keep it all? Of course not, or *everyone* would be millionaires.
Absolutely. Don't forget Yahoo and the mail deal (and, it seems, the Weather widget). The difference with these is that it's probably a flat figure per unit or simply a flat figure simply amortized over some figure (units sold so far, units expected to be sold, the first x units). We don't really know whether any companies apart from AT&T have a deal with Apple, so it's equally possible that there has been no money from Google or Yahoo and that AT&T is indeed the only other source of revenue, or that if a deal has been struck, it's on a broad corporate scale and not calculated for the iPhone specifically.
What is the value in utterly unreliable numbers? It provides absolutely no insight--products cost substantially less for the pieces than the finished good and retail price. Shocking!
Without being able to get within 20% in some cases of the actual materials cost, it doesn't inform any conclusion about the product. The general gross margin range they report is 25-50%--practically that entire variation is within their margin of error in reporting the figures in the first place. Thus, the assessments, apart from being nerd porn, are perfectly vacuous.
I think most people can figure out that almost nothing is sold without a gross margin of at least 20%, and that 50% isn't terribly uncommon either. Unless iSuppli shows up with a 75% margin one day, there's nothing useful about it.
No, it wouldn't. The whole case is a tort. The legal term would be damages, punitive damages in particular, and they're not awarded here because it's a contract issue.
You wouldn't get a windfall from this case in the US, either. I assume the reference in this thread is to the filesharing fine, but that is a case involving statutory damages--the law itself specifies a minimum and a maximum award simply for breaking the condition precedent. Thus copyright holders are entitled to large sums of money simply for the act of violating it. These damages are a result of a time when most copyright infringement cases were large-scale, direct operations. In modern times, those big-scale cases still exist, but we also have smaller scale infringement and large scale (but indirect) infringement. Those two different modes should be codified with different and lesser statutory damages.
This wouldn't be too hard to accomplish, except for the adversarial nature of copyright infringers. Just perusing Slashdot will show people determined to cause intentional harm and to refuse to abide by the law no matter what. In such a condition, the other side has a clear legal superiority to have their interests protected against a hostile public, and so the astronomical damages will stay without modification. The law will not and cannot distinguish the hostility as a result of the big labels being bastards. Slashdot does absolutely nothing to help the situation and provides the industry with most of the fodder it needs to prevent reform.
They're not reasonable figures, though, is the entire problem.
When they don't have data on a particular component, they use something they deem to be relatively similar. They extrapolate an approximate price based on what they feel is an appropriate price at a given (assumed) volume level. They never seem to account for time or place of purchase, either, which can be significant factors in volatile markets. For example, they used a run of the mill touchscreen price for the iPhone, without multitouch and without the daylight-readable backlighting.
Each step of the game is an approximation adding further error to the calculation, and by the end, they almost invariably end up at a "cost" figure that is below reality, sometimes significantly. I have some experience in various litigation involving some of the products they've assessed, and based on what we get in discovery, iSuppli's numbers are, in comparison, highly conservative and geared toward getting the highest possible gross profit rather than providing the most accurate figure. They generate the biggest stir when people think that actual manufacture costs peanuts, so it makes sense from their perspective, but it does a disservice to everyone.
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Linux isn't a vendor. Which distribution is the third largest?
"Legal acquisition" is predicated on licensure. It is an incomplete analysis to suggest that copyright trumps a license consideration. As elsewhere in property and contracts, parties are free to attach any conditions precedent to entering into an agreement (here, conveyance of a copy) that do not themselves break the law. I am able to grant property to you on the condition that you not use it for a specific purpose--that is distinct from the basic theory of ownership, but it is permitted because it is a valid, legal contraction. Assent by performance is further envisaged in mass transactions and all sorts of contracts, so the common myth that a contract must be signed and witnessed is flatly untrue. If we make a contract a condition precedent to the granting of a license (in such unambiguous terms as "BY USING THIS SOFTWARE YOU AGREE"), you do not come into legal possession of the copy until after that agreement takes place.
The condition is valid, and there's not a court that would say otherwise. What OP's friends probably said is that there's no court that would enforce the provision where someone has paid for their copy (and limiting the hypothetical to exactly those facts--i.e. no copyright violation, no commercial reselling, etc.). This is because Apple got paid, and the user is not expecting anything further from Apple--no support, no promise of ongoing compatibility, etc. There's no harm to make it worthwhile.
There is a HUGE difference between a court declining to enforce a contract and a court declaring a contract invalid. It's one that people outside the law don't often fully appreciate.
Granted, you may be the type that prefers application windows to spread out over the taskbar and benefit from title recognition. Other people are more visual, and the live preview is more effective at recalling which window they want based on its colors and layout. Again, it's not less effective, it just has different priorities. As most users are more visually-oriented, the layout makes more sense.
That still doesn't address why a user would want to have more than a few minimized windows anyway. OS X is designed to have multiple floating windows. Minimization is a tool to get rid of distracting windows or something you don't have a foreseeable need to interact with. It's related to the same complaints of Windows users that there is no "maximize" button. There isn't supposed to be. Windows aren't supposed to take over the whole screen for no good reason. They're supposed to live on the desktop and be interactive (drag and drop, cross reference, translucency, etc.) with one another.
If you're not a multimodal user and you prefer one window and all the others put away, you're going to prefer the Windows approach. But it's not a result of one or the other having deficiencies--it's simply a matter of a different approach to workflow. It's not supposed to be like Windows. In many ways, it's supposed to be exactly the opposite. I understand if that puts you out of a comfort box, but it's not a failing of the Dock to accomplish its goals. It's a failing of the Dock to be a task-oriented UI element.
Like creating a Dock for Windows, I'm sure there are third-party applications for the Mac that will give you a taskbar.
Sure. And the ability to put Windows application links directly on the taskbar (in the Quick Launch area or whatever it's called) didn't show up until Windows 98. The ability to condense applications to a single button in the taskbar didn't show up until XP.
Things evolve over time to address weaknesses. Are you really going to say that a solution is inadequate because it didn't exist before it existed? I don't think that's your intent, but that's the effect of your comment.
That's application status information. Just like the mail counters, the Adium message indicators, Toast status indicators, and the other unobtrusive information it contains, the Dock. It's not task-oriented, but rather application-oriented.
The Dock is an application switcher/launcher, but not a task switcher. You can subdivide it two ways--an All Windows Exposé for a one-key direct shot, or you can switch to a busy application and then use Application Windows Exposé for more effective task switching within an application--far superior to a pop-up list (e.g. when you're working with 15 files in Photoshop or 10 palettes in a drafting application).
It is more or less the opposite of Windows priorities. It's not a good taskbar because it's not supposed to be. To do so would be redundant.
I'm really curious, because I have never understood the origin of the animosity. Exposé is what you use for window switching, and it's far more effective than a taskbar or Cmd-Tab. The Dock is a very effective application launcher and switcher (especially coupled with Application Windows Exposé) and a pretty convenient storage space for minimized windows. It provides better information (Toast status updates, Adium message indicators, mail counters, "action needed" bounces or spins, etc.).
I like it quite a bit, and I like the Leopard one, too, and Stacks. If Stacks had a "Menu" view option to be more in line with the "old" style everyone is so accustomed to (and allowed custom icons), it'd be nothing at all to complain about.
One final time:
NP VP NP(Obj.)
The case is a tort (expanded to a senseless degree: the classification of the case is a tortious injury arising under a breach of K; this one case is of class "tort")
The car is a sedan (this one car in question is of class "sedan")
The shelf is red (this one shelf is of class "red")
The frame is a rectangle (this frame is of class "rectangle")
It is not, as you continue trying to insist without reason, logic, or linguistic justification:
*The tort is a lawsuit (this one tort is of type "lawsuit") telling you exactly what you had said that confused me. No, that's not what you did. Like a jackass armchair lawyer, you ONCE AGAIN tried to restate and correct something you do not fully understand. You did not indicate that you were confused. You did not ask for an elaboration. You substituted (AGAIN) a faulty analysis unilaterally, representing it as correct, where it was not. You are not qualified to make such a correction, particularly since you can't back it up semantically, syntactically, or rationally.
My blood pressure is perfectly normal. Your attempt to define tort was an ill-fated attempt for your original comment to be correct, when in fact you had neither read nor understood the post to which you were responding. You then further alleged that the cause of action was negligence. You were then, and continue to be, incorrect. My statement is not what prompted you to define tort--you're the one who brought the word up incorrectly.
I think it's just precious that you're still scrambling for any footing at all. You've got none. Your "epic flaw" is that you just can't read or comprehend either English or law.
The suit is a tort. NP VP NP(obj).
You're the only person on the face of the earth struggling to find a construction where an alternative analysis has merit. It's not working, even a little. If I had said "the tort is the suit" you'd have a point. But alas. No such luck for you.
Thanks for playing!
Add "is" to the list of words you should look up, buddy.
The suit is a tort. The car is a sedan. The shelf is red. All shelves are not red, all cars are not sedans, and all suits are not torts.
Cause and effect has nothing to do with it. What would be the point of a tautological sentence? It's quite clear, and you continue to attempt in vain to correct something just so you can be right SOMEWHERE. It just isn't working for you, no matter how hard it is for you to accept. You don't know what negligence means, or tort, or damages, or "is"--and you can't be bothered to read a post before you errantly respond to it and can't be bothered to get an actual quote to put in your quotation marks. Your ship has gone far beyond taking water; you're sunk.
Clearly, you're either a child or a moron.
The "people" aren't you. Something like 2/3rds of the US has downloaded music illegally at some point in time. So? Something like 99% of the US has technically infringed on copyright, just like the same number have violated traffic laws. They didn't suddenly start caring about every one-off music download on the face of the earth, contrary to popular groupthink here. The RIAA has chosen some crappy targets, but to think that harmful infringement is not occurring by P2P users is equally false in comparison to the argument that P2P is killing the music industry.
Yes. You're failing to make a distinction. If you can't be relied upon to exercise any degree of precision in selecting your quotes, can't be relied upon for any of your analysis or even basic working definitions, it shouldn't be surprising that you can't parse sentences, either.
The case is a tort. The lawsuit is a tort, i.e. the car is a sedan.
Thanks for playing.
And before you even bother trying to respond, please think critically about the quote you simply made up. And then just walk away and save yourself further embarrassment.
No, it's the cause of action. It *is* the lawsuit. The suit is a tort. Nice try, though.
How?
Dear Mr. Wikipedia (who should look up negligence next time),
The word is still damages, not a tort. The tort is breach of contract; it is not discomfort, or emotional distress, or pain and suffering, or, good grief, negligence. Please DO consider what you were responding to:
"If a company cause you damages, they will usually be forced to pay for the damages" There's the tort, except OP should have said "harm" instead of "damages" in both instances, but doesn't seem to be a native English speaker, so no foul there.
The rest of the sentence, from reimbursement for legal fees to compensatory damages for actual losses to punitive damages for causing the tortious injury all refers to the restitution (here, remuneration) offered by civil litigation: the award of damages.
The "discomfort" here is not a separate tort, but a result of the burden of having to litigate one's rights, and the company is forced to pay punitive damages to dissuade it from not resolving these situations under its contract terms. It is not a "pain and suffering" or "emotional distress" award because the defendant had to go to court--in fact, it has nothing to do with the plaintiff at all, which is why OP couldn't find the appropriate word. "Discomfort" is not a tort.
You are most definitely not a lawyer.
You make your salary, a company "makes" its revenue. It was a misleading and ambiguous verb to use in the headline, but this is Slashdot, so it's par for the course.
An error of 20% on a parts bill will move you from one end of the gross margin scale to the other. In other words, the error of the estimated cost rarely does any better than the standard margins on products. Then there is absolutely no guidance whatsoever on net profit figures, which are what really matter. The company itself can be assessed, but it's pure folly to try to do it for individual products.
Let's take a product. Retail price $100, iSuppli guess: $58 for parts. That's 42% gross profit, and we will use your conservative and overly generous 10% range for accuracy. The possible gross margins range from 47% to 36%. What does this mean? That they fall in the normal range of 20 to 50%. What did we learn? Nothing. We already knew it was almost certainly going to be in that range, and regardless of where it falls, it's unremarkable because it's the normal range. The only place it would be noteworthy would be if iSuppli found figures grossly outside that range (e.g. 75% or 5%), and that basically never happens.
What do you gain by knowing that the product is within a normal range of markup? The "smaller iSuppli margin" product could easily be the bigger-margin cash cow, and an attempt to minimize the pocket-lining of corporations can't be undertaken with the information iSuppli supplies, if you'll pardon the pun.
When your margin of error covers the most of the basic spread of possibilities, you're not providing a service. Trying to peg it down to some quasi-accurate Ouija-board figure without any real knowledge gets us nowhere useful. iSuppli rarely, if ever, has provided anything better than a 20% range on a 20% range, which means it has never demonstrated or even rationally suggested that any given product is a better "value" than any other. It relies on faulty analysis for people to make that claim and gives them a quasi-factual, half-true basis to do so. This can only cause harm.
The entire system is highly variable from company to company, and even among products from a single company. Without details, it is impossible to get any accuracy beyond a massive range. Gross profits are usually 20 to 50 percent. Net profits for self-sustaining (i.e. not loss-leaders) products are usually 5 to 20 percent. Anyone offering you any level of accuracy beyond that without specific documentation is lying.
Nothing I said differs one iota based on the dollar amount that actually comes in. Parent argued the "math" was wrong (while accepting the $831 total as a given) because it didn't account for what Apple pays out.
It's completely irrelevant whether it's $831 or $798 or whether it's all from AT&T or part from accessory makers or Google or wherever else. The point is that revenue is not profit, and neither is revenue minus bare component costs.
Actually, "makes" seems to signify REVENUE to me.
If I have a store, I "make" $10 every time I sell a $10 item. I also have bills to pay, including the $7 wholesale bill for the product itself. At the end of the month, I might have made $100,000, but I pay out $85,000. So I might walk away with 20 or 30 cents.
Let me put it this way: you "make" whatever your salary is. Does that mean you keep it all? Of course not, or *everyone* would be millionaires.
Absolutely. Don't forget Yahoo and the mail deal (and, it seems, the Weather widget). The difference with these is that it's probably a flat figure per unit or simply a flat figure simply amortized over some figure (units sold so far, units expected to be sold, the first x units). We don't really know whether any companies apart from AT&T have a deal with Apple, so it's equally possible that there has been no money from Google or Yahoo and that AT&T is indeed the only other source of revenue, or that if a deal has been struck, it's on a broad corporate scale and not calculated for the iPhone specifically.
What is the value in utterly unreliable numbers? It provides absolutely no insight--products cost substantially less for the pieces than the finished good and retail price. Shocking!
Without being able to get within 20% in some cases of the actual materials cost, it doesn't inform any conclusion about the product. The general gross margin range they report is 25-50%--practically that entire variation is within their margin of error in reporting the figures in the first place. Thus, the assessments, apart from being nerd porn, are perfectly vacuous.
I think most people can figure out that almost nothing is sold without a gross margin of at least 20%, and that 50% isn't terribly uncommon either. Unless iSuppli shows up with a 75% margin one day, there's nothing useful about it.
No, it wouldn't. The whole case is a tort. The legal term would be damages, punitive damages in particular, and they're not awarded here because it's a contract issue.
You wouldn't get a windfall from this case in the US, either. I assume the reference in this thread is to the filesharing fine, but that is a case involving statutory damages--the law itself specifies a minimum and a maximum award simply for breaking the condition precedent. Thus copyright holders are entitled to large sums of money simply for the act of violating it. These damages are a result of a time when most copyright infringement cases were large-scale, direct operations. In modern times, those big-scale cases still exist, but we also have smaller scale infringement and large scale (but indirect) infringement. Those two different modes should be codified with different and lesser statutory damages.
This wouldn't be too hard to accomplish, except for the adversarial nature of copyright infringers. Just perusing Slashdot will show people determined to cause intentional harm and to refuse to abide by the law no matter what. In such a condition, the other side has a clear legal superiority to have their interests protected against a hostile public, and so the astronomical damages will stay without modification. The law will not and cannot distinguish the hostility as a result of the big labels being bastards. Slashdot does absolutely nothing to help the situation and provides the industry with most of the fodder it needs to prevent reform.
They're not reasonable figures, though, is the entire problem.
When they don't have data on a particular component, they use something they deem to be relatively similar. They extrapolate an approximate price based on what they feel is an appropriate price at a given (assumed) volume level. They never seem to account for time or place of purchase, either, which can be significant factors in volatile markets. For example, they used a run of the mill touchscreen price for the iPhone, without multitouch and without the daylight-readable backlighting.
Each step of the game is an approximation adding further error to the calculation, and by the end, they almost invariably end up at a "cost" figure that is below reality, sometimes significantly. I have some experience in various litigation involving some of the products they've assessed, and based on what we get in discovery, iSuppli's numbers are, in comparison, highly conservative and geared toward getting the highest possible gross profit rather than providing the most accurate figure. They generate the biggest stir when people think that actual manufacture costs peanuts, so it makes sense from their perspective, but it does a disservice to everyone.