It's not so simple. Yeah, the CSR probably screwed up, since I think what s/he actually meant is that there were about 3 million iPhones *manufactured* according to most sources online. Still, we have no way of knowing how many people placed online orders yesterday, and sales were clearly quite strong in retail locations, though there are some left on Apple store shelves.
There may only be 233 million subscribers, but each and every day in 2006, 2.7 million phones were sold on average. 2007 numbers can reasonably be expected to be higher, and that the iPhone launch would be higher-than-average in volume isn't that far of a stretch. So it's entirely possible that 1 or 2 million iPhones were sold yesterday since it would probably be an otherwise-slow day for cell phone sales.
Once you get that high, whether it's 500,000 or 2 million, there's probably not an activation system in the world that could handle that gracefully. It also wouldn't make sense to invest in tremendously increased capacity for such a short spike time.
And I'll repeat again: 17 USC 106(1) and 17 USC 501(a) mean that copying along IS sufficient grounds for an infringement case. Find one. Cite a single case prosecuting for personal copying without distribution. We'll continue from there.
Simplest smart phone? Hmm, from what I read in the reviews it takes six steps to make a phone call. Yeah that's the simplest smart phone!... ROTFL.... Not the smartest reader, I see. A typical cell phone would take five steps using the same methods as the review, and the extra step is only because with a smart phone, you have to select "phone" somehow--something you don't have to do with a dedicated cell phone.
Here are the "six" steps: Turn on iPhone, unlock screen, "summon home screen" (whatever that means; it goes straight to the home screen when you turn it on, unless you've left it in your email or web browser, in which case you'd have to back up), choose Phone, choose person, dial.
Here are the steps of a normal cell phone: Turn on phone, unlock keypad, "summon home screen" (if you've left it in some other mode like the inept iPhone reviewer), choose person from address book, dial.
You saved one step comprising a single tap of the screen. Hardly an extra complication, and you can more than make up the time in the address book scrolling speed (Motorola, I'm looking at you).
Yes, in Title 17, Section (not paragraph) 106, paragraph 1. First, apologies for the typo. You are correct, I did mean section. Second, I'll repeat again that copying alone is not sufficient grounds for an infringement case. The definition: "Any person who distributes a phonorecord or a copy of a computer program (including any tape, disk, or other medium embodying such program) in violation of paragraph (1) is an infringer of copyright." Further, the act of personal copying cannot be prosecuted under the law unless that copying is not, in fact, personal. There is no legal method to acquire this information, unless there are some thought police roaming your streets.
Making a mix CD from a purchased CD is only permissible under the "fair use" doctrine you are so dismissive of. Making a mix CD is not permissible under Fair Use, and saying I'm dismissive of it is a gross mischaracterization. What I said was that fair use does not cover the sorts of uses Slashdotters seem to think it does. This is an excellent example--mix CDs are NOT FAIR USE. Where in 17 USC 107 do you see mix CDs being allowed by private individuals? Those rights come from *elsewhere*, including in no small part the AHRA. 17 USC 1008 explicitly exempts consumers from noncommercial uses, including mix tapes and creating a copy for use in an automobile. These and other examples of uses can be found both in case law and in the Congressional reports (available from any legal legislative history service, or directly from Congress).
Incorrect. Ownership of the copy gives me rights under 17 USC 109 and (in the case of computer programs) 17 USC 117. These are the rights to dispose of a particular copy, the right to run a computer program even if copies are made in the process, and the right to make a backup copy of a computer program. Which is it? You're claiming (falsely) that you have all rights except those reserved, yet you're claiming that the law grants you specific rights in sections 109 and 117. It doesn't work that way. Ownership of the copy gives you physical property rights to that copy, as I specified. There is no argument there. Disposal and backup are physical property rights. You claimed ownership of the copy gives you ownership to intellectual property rights. This is not the case.
On the contrary, I can sell the copy itself for any price I like, and profit by doing so How, exactly, is this contrary to what I stated in your right to sell the copy? Personal sales are not commercial profit, nor are they commercial use. You're not paying particularly close attention, it seems.
Exactly backwards. Copyright laws are all that _restrict_ my use of the material. Any use of the material which copyright does not restrict, or which falls under one of the exceptions to those restrictions, is legal without any license. Patently wrong. Copyright laws are certainly not *all* that restrict anything, because copyright laws are not the only relevant governance. If it were so, you'd have no ownership, because you're neglecting property laws, contracts, licensing, and the relevant portions of the commercial code, all of which have bearing on your use of a copyrighted work. Anything prohibiting a use falling under a specific exemption would be a term which would be expressly illegal, which stands tautologically true, as I originally stated. You're not actually countering anything here.
As the owner of a copy, I have all the rights except those reserved to the copyright holder by copyright law. No. You have all the physical property rights as the owner of the copy. You have none of the copyright ownership except what has been granted by law or by license or independent contractual agreement.
If you can't be bothered to read 17 USC 106, you've got no place in discussion of copyright. If you don't understand that chapter 106 does not stand alone, you have no business discussing law of any kind. Categorical prohibitions almost universally do not exist in law, and if you followed case law at all, you'd see that the kinds of infringement that are prosecuted are precisely the kinds intended. You'll have a hard time suing someone for a personal derivative work that remains private. Commercial impact must be demonstrated. You can't sue a kid for writing a 3-page story in his diary, because obtaining knowledge of that product would have to be done illegally, nullifying the procedure when coupled with the utter lack of commercial value.
For a personal use to be noninfringing, it either has to not be covered by 17 USC 106 -- meaning that no copies are made nor derivative works prepared -- or it has to be covered by one of the specific exceptions, such as fair use. Absolute crap. Copying is not prohibited by copyright. It's not there. You think it is, and you may have been lead to believe it is, but it's not. Cite a source otherwise. You keep jumping up and down on paragraph 106, not once citing it and certainly ignoring the wealth of other legal factors (the specifics of which depend on the example you choose). This isn't entirely surprising, because you can't cite what's not there.
Usually, I'm not a "licensee". I'm an owner of a copy. Wrong again. It's true that you are the owner of a copy, but that doesn't give you any legal status with regard to the copyright--your ownership of the copy is never the issue; you don't have ownership of the copyright and therefore pleading "ownership" in court is flatly rejected. You're free to resell the CD, destroy it, write on it, even make a mix CD from it. But you don't own any rights which allow you to profit commercially from it, to resell or rent copies, or to redistribute, because those rights are owned exclusively by the rightsholder, oddly enough. Copyright laws are a contract entered on your behalf by the government with the personal works of a third party. The form of that agreement is a license to use the material. Please make a distinction between "licensing" and "EULA" when making ill-formed statements. Any introductory law school course in theory of property should help clear this up for you. Your ownership of the copy does not inform your uses of the copyright except as specifically provided for by law. This is not a case merely of "if the law doesn't say I can't do it, then I can" because copyright is a "reverse" law--it's a permissive-flow of rights. Instead of you having all the rights except those forbidden by law, you as the customer have no rights except those granted by law or license. This is because it's not your work. If I create a painting, I am free to set whatever terms on its sale or use that are not forbidden by law.
This is the same as, say, an employment contract. There are labor laws and employment standards, but they're not all unbreakable. Many of them can be bypassed voluntarily by contractual agreement at hiring, and some of them can't. Reading the law alone is insufficient to make this determination. Employment contracts can stipulate anything not expressly forbidden by law. Copyright holders can make their goods available under any terms not prohibited by law. Those terms, even if they exceed the "standard" agreement, are not automatically invalid.
You didn't make a point of any consequence. Or had you forgotten what you wrote?
There is no point in arguing with a fool who thinks there are more "good" apps for Windows Mobile than apps for Apple products as a whole. It's an absurd and moronic statement, and nobody needs to be convinced of that but you--everyone else can see straight through it. Ergo, arguing with you is of no worth to me or to Slashdot.
In the US, MMS is used for overpriced picture mail. Just like not having 3G is not a major concern for the US GSM iPhone and just like not having an actual keyboard is only an imaginary problem, there's not a terribly huge point to it. If you send an MMS to my phone, it comes through as an email. I do not get MMS messages at all, though my phone physically supports them. If the iPhone works the same way, you're not missing anything.
Naturally, I expect the feature set to be revised for future launches, so that the people here with their panties in a twist over features that don't actually do anything in the US can wait for that model.
Yes we know from the review WSJ made. Wrong. Some kind of music ringtone management is coming.
Well i do con list every time i have to shelve 500 bucks for an item. Apparently reading comprehension is unreasonable to you as well. There's nothing wrong with a pro/con list--just don't fill it with bullshit.
Because that would be unreasonable. So it would fit in beautifully with most of the rest of that list. Thanks for making my point.
because it is a "friggin" phone and it should be able to communicate with other phones, not only with computers. gsm phones can do messaging for lots and lots of years and a brand new phone can't? ridiculous. MMS is a cute replacement for email from when cell phones couldn't get any form of Internet access. It's expensive, limited, and pointless. The iPhone can send and receive MMS over the web through the provider's email account (which is how MMS is handled now anyway--it's just a specially formatted email forwarded to your phone, while others are blocked).
sorry? my windows mobile phone has got a standard 3.5mm jack and i use my sennheiser headphones with it. Calling the HTC Universal a "phone" when it's bigger than a PDA is a bit misleading. Look at the other HTC products--nearly universally using 2.5mm jacks, not to mention Blackberries and Treos, the dominant products. Hooray, your fringe product has an actual headphone jack! I guess that means everyone else does too. Well, they don't.
it is a too much hyped electronic device which promises lots, but cannot do even the basic stuff. You have a puzzling definition of "can't" and "basic." That's a beautiful laundry list of nonsense, and if you'd recall the early days of Windows Mobile (back when it was still called CE) for phones, you couldn't do any of those things, either. All of the third-party crap you're whining about requires someone to make it. You're comparing a product with nearly a decade of people writing shitty apps with a few lucky hits to a product platform that hasn't even been released.
You don't pay for incoming calls on your land line. You don't pay for incoming cellular calls in Canada, South America, Asia, or Europe. The reason being that you didn't make the call and you're not choosing anything about it other than to answer, and you don't know how long that call will be or where it's coming from--you could be charged international rates for someone calling you, even though the number appears to be local, because they could be roaming.
It doesn't cost them anywhere near what they currently charge to connect the call, much less cost them double by making both ends pay. It's something the American cellular market invented to make more money and is unique to them.
Except that switching to them 'right now' would incur a cancellation fee ($175-200+) from the current carrier with whom you have a contract. So while you could switch to the hypothetical "new guys" without hidden fees, the old guys would still get you--and hidden fees and feet dragging about taking your current number with you can still cause headaches.
You're right, it doesn't make any sense to charge an activation fee, really, since it's a simple matter of activating the card in the computer system and handing over the service agreement. But it's a mistake to think that what US cellular providers do should make sense. We pay for incoming calls, all text messages, both directions, and nationwide long distance/no domestic roaming fees were a big deal when they became standard not that long ago. We're also assessed airtime for toll-free numbers and I had an amusing incident where checking my voicemail cost me nearly $4 (not a typo) per minute, because I was being triple-charged international rates because of how they route calls to voicemail numbers on a previous carrier.
Prior to that, if you were driving across the country and got handed off to a competitor's network, you were charged for your roaming per minute (40 cents/minute or even more was not uncommon), even though it was YOUR carrier's fault that their network didn't provide coverage, forcing you to piggyback on someone else's towers.
Last time I checked, sending an email to the person's handset number at the appropriate domain worked just as well.
I Gmail pictures to my phone all the time. I can also send an email from my phone's web browser to someone else's mobile number and they get the picture just fine, receiving it on their handset as an MMS message. You can test it yourself--1234567890@cingularme.com where the numbers are, of course, your 10-digit number. The only iPhone users who would need MMS would be those iPhone users without data plans. If my computer can MMS my phone via the web, the iPhone shouldn't have trouble, either.
What you would *like* to say is that AT&T's network sucks, therefore lack of HSDPA is a stupid reason to avoid the iPhone. These are synonymous, so I'm saying exactly what I mean to say. 3G on the iPhone *is* HSDPA. Lack of 3G is an excellent reason to avoid AT&T. It is not a reason to avoid the iPhone--even if the iPhone had the hardware, it wouldn't do any good. Even tossing in an EVDO-capable radio, which would open all the technical doors to a "real" 3G network, would do no good because there is no GSM carrier with EVDO. Still, I'm glad that you can finally see where I'm coming from and am satisfied ending the argument there.
Obviously my experience is anecdotal, but it didn't get modded up because I pulled it out of my ass. There are tens of thousands of frustrated users--check any of the "usual suspects" for cell phone boards and discussions. I don't know of any non-anecdotal, non-blog, non-forum poll collection of evidence to offer in support of this reality. The word from the horse's mouth in terms of what they offer is just about as good as what comes out of the horse's rear. We're talking cellular providers here, after all.
Believe me, there are some important upgrades to the iPhone I can't wait to see. I'm certainly not buying one of these. But until some other carrier picks it up or until AT&T gets off their asses and does something about their "3G" networks, it should have zero bearing on purchase plans. I have a feeling that Apple talked with then-Cingular about their data network and the 3G omission is intentional. Most HTC devices Cingular ships come with the 3G radio disabled last time I checked (my own device is T-Mobile, though I have service with both T-Mo and Cingular--for the record, T-Mo provides excellent service and call quality), requiring a hack to switch it back on. I'd even go so far as to bet that they're planning something along different lines, such as a direct skip to 4G rollouts or massive deployment of so-called "3.5G" technologies.
Basically. Cellular carriers charge an activation fee for new accounts here (usually $30-60) to set up the line; in other countries where I've lived, I've sometimes been charged a fee for the SIM card, which amounts to the same thing (but usually closer to $15 in value). It is in part how they recoup the cost of the "free" phones they give away (putting the rest into the subscription costs spread over the length of the inescapable contract). Occasionally, they will have special sales where they don't charge an activation fee, usually for holiday rushes or to pump up end-of-quarter numbers.
and none of which change the fact that the iPhone would be a much more compelling purchase if you could browse the web with 3G as you can on competing phones Precisely. Putting a 3G radio in the iPhone would not bring that into reality, ergo, it's a meaningless feature at the moment.
Firstly, that figure is wrong. Cingular had HSDPA to over 10% of the population two years ago, 10% of the population is not 10% of the country. If they blanketed all of California with 3G and nowhere else, more than 10% of the population would have access--but it wouldn't really be meaningful as a national market. People in the iPhone's key markets tend to move around a lot.
A reasonable person would say "If I have HSDPA coverage in my home area, or if I expect it in the next year or two, I shouldn't spend $600 now on a phone without HSDPA" Having experience with HSDPA in my "home area," I could care less. The speeds and connectivity are not substantially better than GPRS, and in fact I often have to switch to GPRS manually to keep connections from timing out. This is in San Francisco and Palo Alto, which are pretty major markets. The infrastructure doesn't provide the same performance as international implementations. So once again, we're back to my original point, which you can't seem to grasp: 3G is a myth on GSM. In the few markets with the hardware, the speeds are not great and the availability is not what is advertised. It's not my phone, because it works beautifully overseas. It's congested, poorly implemented networks.
Not having a feature is better than having a frustrating and unreliable feature, especially one as outdated as 3G which is already being replaced in Asian and European markets by faster, newer, and better hardware. The US missed the boat.
Putting a 3G radio in the phone wouldn't do a damn thing to improve its performance across the overwhelming majority of the US. People comparing spec sheets can complain all they want, but it doesn't change a thing. GPRS is more reliable than HSDPA, it's more pervasive, and HSDPA does not achieve the theoretical speeds in major places in the US. Your experience with CDMA or PCS may differ--Sprint has excellent 3G availability and performance. AT&T doesn't. A 3G radio would do nothing to change that; Cingular software updates, in fact, have disabled 3G on many of their smart phone products because performance is so terrible.
Railing against its inclusion on an AT&T exclusive product is like bitching about Verizon's phones not having SIM card slots. They are inconsequential omissions for their respective networks.
Re:But will it talk to my car?
on
All Things iPhone
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
One-size-fits-all headset jack (May have to buy an adapter for certain headphones) Versus the 2.5mm stupid-ass jack on Windows Mobile devices? I'll take my chances with the fully standard minijack.
Songs as Ringtones
- Games We don't know that. In the introductory videos, there was a ringtones tab in iTunes. The iTunes store for the iPhone hasn't been launched yet, so who knows what sorts of games and additional apps will become available.
- Instant Messaging
- Picture messages (MMS) Why would you need either of those with an internet connection? Why pay 25 cents for a stupid MMS message when you can just send a friggin email?
- A real keyboard So? Notebooks don't have real mice. People get over it--all the reviewers have.
I'm sure the battery will be replaceable for anyone with five minutes, just like the iPod is now. It would be strange to expect any differently of a small Apple device. 3G isn't a practical expectation or a useful feature given that this is a GSM device. If you want a 3G phone, wait for a later version, to be launched around the time AT&T has a useful 3G network to take advantage of it.
It is not Jesus. It is not sex. It's just a handheld electronic device. But damn, if people don't try to find any little thing to put on a 'con' list. Some of this stuff just doesn't make sense--what is their reasonable base of comparison? Why not add "it doesn't run Windows" to the list? It's like someone put this whole thing together without even stopping to consider that there might be alternatives to some of these "essential" features.
No. Private copying and private preparation of derivative works are covered by copyright. In what capacity? Your sentence does not specify a premise or a point. "Private copying" is not prohibited by copyright. Derivative works without commercial (that is, public) use are not barred by copyright.
Further, there are other uses -- like bad reviews --which DO affect the commercial uses of the rightsholder and are not covered by copyright. Bad reviews do not affect commercial use. They affect retail performance. These are separate issues. A bad review does not inhibit any action by a rightsholder.
It's fairly rich for you to discuss Title 17 without evidently knowing the contents, nor do you seem to have a point you're trying to make. I work with copyright laws every day in a professional capacity. What, if any, is your point?
It protects only uses which the RIAA wouldn't discover anyway, which are arguably fair use, There you go again. Personal use != fair use; not all sanctioned uses are "fair use" in the slightest. Fair use is authorized use of copyright; personal, and by that I mean noninfringing use, is noninfringing and therefore not "fair use." Further, you dismiss these acts while introducing two of your own: personal copying and private derivative works of no commercial value--the RIAA has no way of monitoring or detecting either of these, either. Why you've conceded that the RIAA has any authority TO monitor or make determinations is beyond me. It is perhaps the biggest problem with the current system.
It's that the law has been changed to take technological realities and developments into account, and has been changed to do so in an oppressive manner. Demonstrate how the law has "changed" to do so "in an oppressive manner" outside the provisions enacted by the passing of the DMCA, which have already been discussed. What oppressive laws have taken away your "rights" (and I use the term loosely because your actual rights, as a licensee, are not and have never been, as extensive as some people seem to believe)?
You're not being logical at all. Lack of 3G isn't a problem for the iPhone, because GSM 3G sucks--there's no good network for it in the US. That's like saying "I won't buy this boat because it's too small for ocean waves" if you live in Oklahoma.
If the iPhone had 3G, you wouldn't be able to use it in 90% of the country, and where you could, it wouldn't necessarily be at 3G speeds, as thousands of "3G" customers will attest to, including myself. I don't buy the whole "wrong band" thing since I get excellent 3G performance overseas, where all of the good 3G phones come from in the first place. (If the US is doing something differently, that's all the more reason to wait.) In the next 5-10 years, once there's a solid 3G network in place, then it might be an important feature to have. Adding it now isn't futureproofing, because there's no guarantee it'll be of any real use in the future.
So to recap, if you can't really use it now, and there's a fair chance it won't be useful or state of the art in the future, why bother?
Wait for the world iPhone launch. That will surely have 3G and might give the domestic networks enough time to roll out something that works. Not buying something because it doesn't have a feature that "will be" implemented in the future, to some unknown extent and performance level, is absurd.
I think it's just a numbers maze you're stuck in--the safety factor of 1.5 for the load is mandated by the FAA and European counterparts, but in order to achieve 150% effective load, you have to apply a tremendous amount of force. Put another way, dropping the plane straight down from space still probably wouldn't cause a wing deflection of 25 feet (A380) or 24 feet (B777), which is what these aircraft were tested to their breaking points.
The point I'm trying to make, and perhaps not clearly (and if so, my apologies--it's been a long day!), is that they could perform the testing at 100% load and still have adequate safety factors in terms of structural performance. The 150% load test assumes a load the aircraft will never experience and then qualifies that the structure maintains its integrity in extreme conditions.
The load rating (i.e. 100% load) is a product of the lowest common denominator of design safety factors throughout the aircraft. Testing beyond 100% load is an *extra* margin of safety because 100% load already incorporates safety factors appropriate for human life.
How can the limit be too low? If it passes the 150% load test, you're done. You can't exceed 100% load on planes or they won't be allowed into the sky. It's not a question of choosing the wrong numbers here--100% load is 100% load; exceeding that is simply not permitted and liability falls back on the airline for exceeding hard maximums. There's a lot of paperwork and calculating done before pushing back from the gate. Weight and balance is a major part of that. In any case, if the plane is pushing 3+ G's for any real length of time, there are other much more important things to worry about than possibly coming close to snapping the wings.
Airbus planes are tested to the same standards--they both have to pass FAA certification. It's not like the testing is unique to Boeing--in fact, the A380 wing-break test was in the news a few months ago.
EVDO covers over 250 million people. You may not like CDMA2000, but the majority of mobile users in the US use it. Saying that the US doesn't have 3G widely deployed is simply wrong. Is there some magical world I've slipped into where everyone forgets that the iPhone is a GSM phone? There's practically no GSM 3G in the United States. Including 3G would make sense on CDMA/PCS networks, but the phone is fundamentally incompatible.
The infrastructure that does exist is premature, and as you've clearly noted, a large number of devices (including several very new ones) are not fully compatible.
Would it be better for the iPhone to include 3G hardware that turns out to be useless in a few years when there is a meaningful network deployed on the GSM carriers? This is the problem with early adoption. Features will undoubtedly be added in future iPhone revisions. Network changes (likely major, knowing the history of US carriers) will make a large number of 3G devices either incompatible or poor-performing. Trying to shoot at a moving future target is pointless. How many times have people bought cutting edge devices that ended up going nowhere?
There's no network for the iPhone to use most places; the network that exists in many of the pilot cities is outdated and overly congested, and the planned deployment will take close to a decade to finish. That's more than enough time to wait and see what happens. The rest of the world is looking at 3G successors--what if AT&T plans to skip 3G and move on? What good would the precious 3G radio do in that case inside the US?
Not true. What's restricted is copying, distribution, preparation of derivative works, public display, public performance, and a few other things All of which "affects the commercial uses of the rightsholder" where it is restricted as it says directly in the sentence you quoted. Now, none of the things you mentioned is categorically prohibited by law nor does any of them stand alone as a reasonable or prudent measure without further justification, so it's inaccurate to claim that those restrictions are the crux of the matter. Uses that do not affect the commercial rights of the rightsholder are not, in point of fact, unlawful.
But here one must make the distinction between what is unlawful and what is punished in the legal system. Like all civil matters and particularly like difficult statutory requirements (things like violating building codes and traffic laws), being ruled against in a court is about more than "breaking the letter of the law." For example, it is not illegal to "speed" per se, and in fact police departments and traffic planners base speed limits around a projected traffic flow percentile, which means that a considerable portion of cars exceed the posted speed. At the risk of making this a long story, suffice it to say that exceeding the posted speed is only one component in a speeding ticket successfully defended, and not the deterministic one. Likewise, courts may find uses in violation (or not in violation) beyond Title 17 text. It matters not only what you do, but how and why. This is a different beast than criminal law where the how and why are less important.
Because the law disagrees with us. Since the law was written by our opponents, this is not a surprise. The law does not disagree with you when it comes to actual fair use rights and approved noninfringing uses under such major guarantees as the HRA and quite a long history of case law. Apart from some DMCA nonsense that could easily be fixed if anyone made a sensible case, there's nothing disagreeable in the law itself. The lawyers and judges certainly didn't write it, and they're certainly not insensitive to the abuses of the RIAA, MPAA, and other big media houses. That's one of the top five myths perpetuated by "your side." The problem is that instead of saying that the balance is out of whack, that the RIAA is abusing its power and exceeding its intellectual property rights, and that the law fails to account for a number of technological realities and developments, the "anti-IP" crowd (which only exists in some very small circles, and a "pro-IP" crowd doesn't really exist at all because EVERYONE is pro-IP, outside opponents of the "anti-IP" groups in those circles) instead rails against the existence of patents and copyrights and the existence of restrictions on their use. They boil everything down to some oppressive regime that gets in their way of "their stuff" while failing to realize that in fact, it's *not* their stuff. It's a mixed bag of shared ownership and joint rights, and you will never get to do as you please with it. Fair use *never* covered many of the uses people whine about being prevented from exercising. Fair use has, in fact, always been a narrow group of exceptions primarily aimed at groups OUTSIDE private individuals.
Sometimes deliberately to confuse, as the RIAA does with "IP theft". But more often as a convenient shorthand. "Anti-IP" people do it deliberately to confuse as well--attacking IP as some artificial, recent abomination that is responsible for all of the evils in the world. This is of course as far from the truth as the RIAA's machinations. It might be a bit of a pot-kettle-black situation on both sides, but I'd expect opponents of the RIAA to be more sophisticated and more honest. As it is, no one can stand the "anti-IP" nuts because they're generally just as repugnant as the RIAA, and at least the RIAA makes their case based on reality (before twisting and abusing it). You can't fix the system by saying that the entire concept is wrong. It's a laughable charge. This society cannot exist without IP--and I refer here of course to real IP, not the IP of Slashdot animosity.
Slashdot Mirror
It's not so simple. Yeah, the CSR probably screwed up, since I think what s/he actually meant is that there were about 3 million iPhones *manufactured* according to most sources online. Still, we have no way of knowing how many people placed online orders yesterday, and sales were clearly quite strong in retail locations, though there are some left on Apple store shelves.
There may only be 233 million subscribers, but each and every day in 2006, 2.7 million phones were sold on average. 2007 numbers can reasonably be expected to be higher, and that the iPhone launch would be higher-than-average in volume isn't that far of a stretch. So it's entirely possible that 1 or 2 million iPhones were sold yesterday since it would probably be an otherwise-slow day for cell phone sales.
Once you get that high, whether it's 500,000 or 2 million, there's probably not an activation system in the world that could handle that gracefully. It also wouldn't make sense to invest in tremendously increased capacity for such a short spike time.
Here are the "six" steps: Turn on iPhone, unlock screen, "summon home screen" (whatever that means; it goes straight to the home screen when you turn it on, unless you've left it in your email or web browser, in which case you'd have to back up), choose Phone, choose person, dial.
Here are the steps of a normal cell phone: Turn on phone, unlock keypad, "summon home screen" (if you've left it in some other mode like the inept iPhone reviewer), choose person from address book, dial.
You saved one step comprising a single tap of the screen. Hardly an extra complication, and you can more than make up the time in the address book scrolling speed (Motorola, I'm looking at you).
This is the same as, say, an employment contract. There are labor laws and employment standards, but they're not all unbreakable. Many of them can be bypassed voluntarily by contractual agreement at hiring, and some of them can't. Reading the law alone is insufficient to make this determination. Employment contracts can stipulate anything not expressly forbidden by law. Copyright holders can make their goods available under any terms not prohibited by law. Those terms, even if they exceed the "standard" agreement, are not automatically invalid.
You didn't make a point of any consequence. Or had you forgotten what you wrote?
There is no point in arguing with a fool who thinks there are more "good" apps for Windows Mobile than apps for Apple products as a whole. It's an absurd and moronic statement, and nobody needs to be convinced of that but you--everyone else can see straight through it. Ergo, arguing with you is of no worth to me or to Slashdot.
"Larger installed base" for Windows Mobile than for all Apple products? You truly are a loon.
In the US, MMS is used for overpriced picture mail. Just like not having 3G is not a major concern for the US GSM iPhone and just like not having an actual keyboard is only an imaginary problem, there's not a terribly huge point to it. If you send an MMS to my phone, it comes through as an email. I do not get MMS messages at all, though my phone physically supports them. If the iPhone works the same way, you're not missing anything.
Naturally, I expect the feature set to be revised for future launches, so that the people here with their panties in a twist over features that don't actually do anything in the US can wait for that model.
You don't pay for incoming calls on your land line. You don't pay for incoming cellular calls in Canada, South America, Asia, or Europe. The reason being that you didn't make the call and you're not choosing anything about it other than to answer, and you don't know how long that call will be or where it's coming from--you could be charged international rates for someone calling you, even though the number appears to be local, because they could be roaming.
It doesn't cost them anywhere near what they currently charge to connect the call, much less cost them double by making both ends pay. It's something the American cellular market invented to make more money and is unique to them.
Except that switching to them 'right now' would incur a cancellation fee ($175-200+) from the current carrier with whom you have a contract. So while you could switch to the hypothetical "new guys" without hidden fees, the old guys would still get you--and hidden fees and feet dragging about taking your current number with you can still cause headaches.
You're right, it doesn't make any sense to charge an activation fee, really, since it's a simple matter of activating the card in the computer system and handing over the service agreement. But it's a mistake to think that what US cellular providers do should make sense. We pay for incoming calls, all text messages, both directions, and nationwide long distance/no domestic roaming fees were a big deal when they became standard not that long ago. We're also assessed airtime for toll-free numbers and I had an amusing incident where checking my voicemail cost me nearly $4 (not a typo) per minute, because I was being triple-charged international rates because of how they route calls to voicemail numbers on a previous carrier.
Prior to that, if you were driving across the country and got handed off to a competitor's network, you were charged for your roaming per minute (40 cents/minute or even more was not uncommon), even though it was YOUR carrier's fault that their network didn't provide coverage, forcing you to piggyback on someone else's towers.
Last time I checked, sending an email to the person's handset number at the appropriate domain worked just as well.
I Gmail pictures to my phone all the time. I can also send an email from my phone's web browser to someone else's mobile number and they get the picture just fine, receiving it on their handset as an MMS message. You can test it yourself--1234567890@cingularme.com where the numbers are, of course, your 10-digit number. The only iPhone users who would need MMS would be those iPhone users without data plans. If my computer can MMS my phone via the web, the iPhone shouldn't have trouble, either.
Obviously my experience is anecdotal, but it didn't get modded up because I pulled it out of my ass. There are tens of thousands of frustrated users--check any of the "usual suspects" for cell phone boards and discussions. I don't know of any non-anecdotal, non-blog, non-forum poll collection of evidence to offer in support of this reality. The word from the horse's mouth in terms of what they offer is just about as good as what comes out of the horse's rear. We're talking cellular providers here, after all.
Believe me, there are some important upgrades to the iPhone I can't wait to see. I'm certainly not buying one of these. But until some other carrier picks it up or until AT&T gets off their asses and does something about their "3G" networks, it should have zero bearing on purchase plans. I have a feeling that Apple talked with then-Cingular about their data network and the 3G omission is intentional. Most HTC devices Cingular ships come with the 3G radio disabled last time I checked (my own device is T-Mobile, though I have service with both T-Mo and Cingular--for the record, T-Mo provides excellent service and call quality), requiring a hack to switch it back on. I'd even go so far as to bet that they're planning something along different lines, such as a direct skip to 4G rollouts or massive deployment of so-called "3.5G" technologies.
Basically. Cellular carriers charge an activation fee for new accounts here (usually $30-60) to set up the line; in other countries where I've lived, I've sometimes been charged a fee for the SIM card, which amounts to the same thing (but usually closer to $15 in value). It is in part how they recoup the cost of the "free" phones they give away (putting the rest into the subscription costs spread over the length of the inescapable contract). Occasionally, they will have special sales where they don't charge an activation fee, usually for holiday rushes or to pump up end-of-quarter numbers.
Not having a feature is better than having a frustrating and unreliable feature, especially one as outdated as 3G which is already being replaced in Asian and European markets by faster, newer, and better hardware. The US missed the boat.
Putting a 3G radio in the phone wouldn't do a damn thing to improve its performance across the overwhelming majority of the US. People comparing spec sheets can complain all they want, but it doesn't change a thing. GPRS is more reliable than HSDPA, it's more pervasive, and HSDPA does not achieve the theoretical speeds in major places in the US. Your experience with CDMA or PCS may differ--Sprint has excellent 3G availability and performance. AT&T doesn't. A 3G radio would do nothing to change that; Cingular software updates, in fact, have disabled 3G on many of their smart phone products because performance is so terrible.
Railing against its inclusion on an AT&T exclusive product is like bitching about Verizon's phones not having SIM card slots. They are inconsequential omissions for their respective networks.
I'm sure the battery will be replaceable for anyone with five minutes, just like the iPod is now. It would be strange to expect any differently of a small Apple device. 3G isn't a practical expectation or a useful feature given that this is a GSM device. If you want a 3G phone, wait for a later version, to be launched around the time AT&T has a useful 3G network to take advantage of it.
It is not Jesus. It is not sex. It's just a handheld electronic device. But damn, if people don't try to find any little thing to put on a 'con' list. Some of this stuff just doesn't make sense--what is their reasonable base of comparison? Why not add "it doesn't run Windows" to the list? It's like someone put this whole thing together without even stopping to consider that there might be alternatives to some of these "essential" features.
Is this a joke, or have you honestly never bought a cell phone?
That mysterious "activation fee" has been kicking around first cell phone bills for at least 14 years now.
It's fairly rich for you to discuss Title 17 without evidently knowing the contents, nor do you seem to have a point you're trying to make. I work with copyright laws every day in a professional capacity. What, if any, is your point? It protects only uses which the RIAA wouldn't discover anyway, which are arguably fair use, There you go again. Personal use != fair use; not all sanctioned uses are "fair use" in the slightest. Fair use is authorized use of copyright; personal, and by that I mean noninfringing use, is noninfringing and therefore not "fair use." Further, you dismiss these acts while introducing two of your own: personal copying and private derivative works of no commercial value--the RIAA has no way of monitoring or detecting either of these, either. Why you've conceded that the RIAA has any authority TO monitor or make determinations is beyond me. It is perhaps the biggest problem with the current system. It's that the law has been changed to take technological realities and developments into account, and has been changed to do so in an oppressive manner. Demonstrate how the law has "changed" to do so "in an oppressive manner" outside the provisions enacted by the passing of the DMCA, which have already been discussed. What oppressive laws have taken away your "rights" (and I use the term loosely because your actual rights, as a licensee, are not and have never been, as extensive as some people seem to believe)?
You're not being logical at all. Lack of 3G isn't a problem for the iPhone, because GSM 3G sucks--there's no good network for it in the US. That's like saying "I won't buy this boat because it's too small for ocean waves" if you live in Oklahoma.
If the iPhone had 3G, you wouldn't be able to use it in 90% of the country, and where you could, it wouldn't necessarily be at 3G speeds, as thousands of "3G" customers will attest to, including myself. I don't buy the whole "wrong band" thing since I get excellent 3G performance overseas, where all of the good 3G phones come from in the first place. (If the US is doing something differently, that's all the more reason to wait.) In the next 5-10 years, once there's a solid 3G network in place, then it might be an important feature to have. Adding it now isn't futureproofing, because there's no guarantee it'll be of any real use in the future.
So to recap, if you can't really use it now, and there's a fair chance it won't be useful or state of the art in the future, why bother?
Wait for the world iPhone launch. That will surely have 3G and might give the domestic networks enough time to roll out something that works. Not buying something because it doesn't have a feature that "will be" implemented in the future, to some unknown extent and performance level, is absurd.
I think it's just a numbers maze you're stuck in--the safety factor of 1.5 for the load is mandated by the FAA and European counterparts, but in order to achieve 150% effective load, you have to apply a tremendous amount of force. Put another way, dropping the plane straight down from space still probably wouldn't cause a wing deflection of 25 feet (A380) or 24 feet (B777), which is what these aircraft were tested to their breaking points.
The point I'm trying to make, and perhaps not clearly (and if so, my apologies--it's been a long day!), is that they could perform the testing at 100% load and still have adequate safety factors in terms of structural performance. The 150% load test assumes a load the aircraft will never experience and then qualifies that the structure maintains its integrity in extreme conditions.
The load rating (i.e. 100% load) is a product of the lowest common denominator of design safety factors throughout the aircraft. Testing beyond 100% load is an *extra* margin of safety because 100% load already incorporates safety factors appropriate for human life.
How can the limit be too low? If it passes the 150% load test, you're done. You can't exceed 100% load on planes or they won't be allowed into the sky. It's not a question of choosing the wrong numbers here--100% load is 100% load; exceeding that is simply not permitted and liability falls back on the airline for exceeding hard maximums. There's a lot of paperwork and calculating done before pushing back from the gate. Weight and balance is a major part of that. In any case, if the plane is pushing 3+ G's for any real length of time, there are other much more important things to worry about than possibly coming close to snapping the wings.
Airbus planes are tested to the same standards--they both have to pass FAA certification. It's not like the testing is unique to Boeing--in fact, the A380 wing-break test was in the news a few months ago.
The infrastructure that does exist is premature, and as you've clearly noted, a large number of devices (including several very new ones) are not fully compatible.
Would it be better for the iPhone to include 3G hardware that turns out to be useless in a few years when there is a meaningful network deployed on the GSM carriers? This is the problem with early adoption. Features will undoubtedly be added in future iPhone revisions. Network changes (likely major, knowing the history of US carriers) will make a large number of 3G devices either incompatible or poor-performing. Trying to shoot at a moving future target is pointless. How many times have people bought cutting edge devices that ended up going nowhere?
There's no network for the iPhone to use most places; the network that exists in many of the pilot cities is outdated and overly congested, and the planned deployment will take close to a decade to finish. That's more than enough time to wait and see what happens. The rest of the world is looking at 3G successors--what if AT&T plans to skip 3G and move on? What good would the precious 3G radio do in that case inside the US?