It cuts both ways. Requiring that laws pertain to a single purpose wouldn't stop this indecency + a la carte bundle. The single purpose is cable television regulation. The bad side of single-purpose requirements is that sometimes it's helpful to get things done. Appropriations bills, for example, can't be done with a "single purpose" without that purpose being so broad that it becomes vacuous. Forcing a "single purpose" requirement so narrow as to separate 'television indecency' and 'television programming' would cost taxpayers tens of millions of dollars in added expenses for the glut of bills which would have to be offered individually.
But even more importantly, the bills would be offered independently (which costs a great deal more in the printing, binding, review, scheduling, distribution, markup, and really every phase of the bill) but would not be considered individually. Congress would start grouping them back together in odd and arbitrary ways in order to wade through the piles faster.
"Single purpose" provisions would help when someone tosses a strip mining rider on a bill for public education, but proper use of the media and internal power structures keep those blatant abuses down. Good bills are defeated by string-pulling and manipulation by the opponents. That's simply a given and how the process has always and will always work, so long as human beings are involved. The actual *voting* on any given piece of legislation is largely symbolic.
WMP7 release date: July 2000. Included music shopping sites at release: none.
Again, I will repeat, iTunes is not the leader in 'distribution, downloads, or profit'. Apparently, like the "facts" in the rest of your comments, this part happened in your head, because you're not repeating anything. You never said anything of the kind. You said, "More content is purchased through many other services than iTunes." This is not true. Not one of these services is tremendously profitable, so I'm not sure how trying to shape your argument to exclude the iTunes Store does you any good. iTunes isn't terribly profitable, but it's not running in the red, either. They're in no worse shape than Urge or Rhapsody as far as "lost (sic) leader" status is concerned.
Subscription services aren't purchases. Your sentence is simply false; iTunes is the market leader in digital content purchases. Walmart is the leader in DVD sales; Blockbuster does more business than Walmart, but they're not sales. Subscription music isn't owned by you--it's rented. That's like saying Dish Network has more customers than Comcast because more shows were viewed on Dish Network.
Since your English skills are about as good as your ability to come up with a logical, factually accurate statement, I'll just leave it at that.
Check your history, buddy. It's all there. A simple Google search for "iTunes market share" reveals that they've cornered 70% of the digital music sales marketplace. Since you've clearly got some math issues, that's what we call a majority. It would be quite a feat for any other service to outstrip it (hint: audible.com doesn't come close).
I was merely trying to head off what I perceived to be a slippery slope toward a bunch of the rabid kind of libertarians coming in to bitch about how taxes shouldn't be collected from anyone, and people who avoid "the system" are some kind of heroes.
The basic issue is that he was fined for not paying a tax which he owed. The question you asked was how that tax should be collected from vehicles not using a gasoline pump.
The fairness of the tax system is not at issue. The fact of the matter is that the gasoline tax is for road maintenance. Everyone owes it, and everyone should be expected to pay for it. The fact that the tax is scalar to the degree which the roads are used makes it one of the more fair taxes on the books. How is being charged for your usage of the roads at the estimated rate you use it less fair than the current system? Electric cars are currently being paid for by everyone else because they don't pay the tax. That isn't fair at all.
Perhaps next time you could bother to to read the sentences you quote in the future. I said I wasn't getting into an argument about the fairness of taxation in general or the inconsistencies of enforcement in tax collection. Obviously that didn't click.
However, do you realize the WMP had built in Store and Web Page Store support with integrated searching in the UI going back to at least WMP7 and this is before the year 2000? No, it didn't. Sony launched the first commercial music service in 2000, and it certainly wasn't accessible through WMP. You may be thinking of WMP8, which included web links to online music content in the player itself, which itself was something Winamp could do via plugins three years before that.
I never did any iTunes shilling or claimed that they introduced anything, aside from popularity of music services and a whole army of knockoffs (including a number of improvements to Windows Media Player). That's really neither here nor there. My post was simply correcting your bogus memory of history in some odd attempt to belittle users (both PC and Mac) for using "bad" software which is identical in almost every conceivable way to your "preferred" software--and then to ice the whole shitcake, claiming that Microsoft came up with things before they were implemented in iTunes. There are some important contributions made by Microsoft in the computing sphere. But not-a-one of them *later* found its way into iTunes.
As for your cute rant on Active Desktop, I'm not sure exactly what that has to do with anything (aside from it being total crap). There hasn't ever been any marketing of "putting part of your web page" on the desktop to fuel your trolling. What, if anything, are you even talking about?
And finally, you might want to pick up a dictionary. "Innovate" doesn't mean what you seem to think it means. In fact, the whole thing you've been railing against is one of the biggest innovations in the decade in the digital world. iTunes was *the* application that made digital distribution mainstream; its simple interface was a critical component in the launch of the mp3 player market as we know it. Hell, Apple introduced the _seminal_ personal computer of the modern era. Credit where credit is due. Microsoft's Office, DirectX, and Windows 95 were great, innovative products. Do you consider the personal computer an innovation? There were plenty of word processors and large computers before it. Was the car an innovation? All they did was put a motor on a carriage. It was hardly unprecedented. Everything builds on something. An innovation just has to have a new and significant impact on the market (i.e. outpace the establishment). You can't seriously sit back and claim that Microsoft has done as much in that space as Apple.
And that's fair? Why should customers have to pay a road maintenance tax when their gas is cut? Either they don't because they use a large corporate service (which isn't charged the tax), or they pay perhaps a nickel for the tenth of a gallon used to cut their grass if they're using a smaller company or cutting it themselves. It's less costly to pay the tax than to be exempted the tax, both in terms of time and money and on the government end and yours. Is that "fair"? No. Is it cheaper? Absolutely. Thus, is it better? Yeah.
But how does one do that with a tax based upon a fixed cost per gallon of a particular type of fuel? By being assessed a prorated standard tax at the end of the year, just like any other one-off system where tax is owed but not collected. Automatic charging of taxes is a convenience; people are responsible for paying taxes they owe but are not collected. I'm not getting into an argument about the fairness of taxation in general or the unevenness of enforcement with you. If the average car gets 25 mpg and travels 12,000 miles per year, that's 480 gallons of gas. If the gas tax is 50 cents per gallon (all these numbers chosen for simplicity), then a $240 bill at the end of the year for road use would be a good starting point, perhaps reduced to $150 to promote electric vehicle adoption, or whatever agreement is ultimately reached.
Really? I missed the part where you explained how the government would fill the gap left during the transition as people moved away from buying gasoline, and the part where you explained how the tax would be collected in the future. There are plenty of options. What would be the point of going through them all? An exercise to people who didn't take the 30 seconds to think about it? Traditional gasoline vehicles could be taxed at the pump until the pumps are gone. To deal with alternative fuel vehicles, they could be taxed at their commercial fueling stations (assuming a hydrogren or other chemical fuel source not stocked at home). For electric/solar/noncommercial fuel sources, they could be assessed their use taxes on insurance bills or on their license plate renewals (while gasoline vehicles would not be charged this fee and thus would not be double-taxed). They could also be billed on their income tax returns, as suggested earlier. It is really not a particularly difficult transition.
People who qualify for exemptions certainly get them. If the one standing complaint you have is that people cough up a dollar a year because their lawn mowers also run on gas, well then I think that merely goes to show you that the system is pretty damn good. If you were really, truly, upset by that annual buck or two, you could, when filling your gas can, pay in cash and in advance and ask that you not be charged the taxes on the can since it is not for interstate use. Your local gas attendant might be too stupid/lazy to do that, but that is entirely irrelevant to the point. You can get that 30 cents if you really, truly, desperately want it.
Well, as previously noted, farmers don't have to pay the tax. Landscaping companies pass that cost on to customers, just like your local flower shop delivery van does--and if they're big enough where the gas tax actually constitutes a business expense, they can get a tax reimbursement for that lawnmower fuel.
As for home users, you pay perhaps $2 a year in gas taxes to cut your grass, if that. Creating a specific exemption for that would cost more than the money you'd save. There are also places with special pumps for non-automotive uses (these pumps are either labeled or positioned such that they're walk-up only).
In terms of recreational use, as in for boats and aircraft--boating fuel stations do not charge this tax (though they may levy local fees for waterway maintenance in its place) and you can apply for a rebate for aviation use. You can also apply for the rebate for boating use if you have a big enough boat that it has a tank you fill at the gas station and not fuel cells you fill at the dock.
As for electric cars, yes, they absolutely should be taxed for their use of the roadways. This is not a problem for today, though--various governments are making the cost of entry as low as possible for hybrid/electric vehicles, and that includes reduced or no "gas tax" for road maintenance. That burden is being shifted to all-fuel vehicles to subsidize them and provide another incentive to select a hybrid. Once people no longer require tax credits, rebate vouchers, and special treatment (e.g. free access to HOV/carpool lanes even with just one passenger), then the tax system will shift to compensate. This is because by that time, the number of fuel vehicles paying gas taxes will no longer be a sufficient tax base to pay for road maintenance. It all works out if you stop to think about it for a moment.
What are you talking about, WMP11's "album view" predating Cover Flow? Cover Flow was out a year before it was bundled into iTunes, and is hardly some brilliant idea either one of them can claim to have hatched in their own brains.
Further, how does the fact that Microsoft's own application works demonstrate anything useful about iPod problems in Vista? For the record, iTunes worked fine for me even during the "incompatible" warning period after RTM. Winamp, on the other hand, and various filesystem-based software titles, would crash periodically when trying to load an iPod. The iPod is just a USB mass storage device--even on a virgin system with *no* Apple software on it, Vista didn't play nice with iPods. Linux worked fine; XP worked fine; OS X worked fine. Somehow, Vista magically broke what XP worked perfectly with and did it on its own without Apple software ever touching it.
Urge's search features are exactly what the iTunes store has had from the beginning. Your post is a sad example of Microsoft-shilling when they don't know better. iTunes on Windows is slow, absolutely. It's a non-native ported app. Photoshop 5 was also slow on Windows. It was a non-native, ported app. It wasn't until Photoshop 7 that Windows performance was actually good (and almost 7 years later). It happens. GAIM is slow and unresponsive on Windows, too, like lots of GTK applications. There's only so much time and effort you're willing to put into building for a non-native environment for software that you give away for free, especially when that software exists only to serve some other business purpose. It has to work well enough, and that's it.
Under your fictitious system, there could be no such thing as defamation. Anyone could say "Snaller is the biggest idiot on earth" and produce a "ranking system" which resulted in that conclusion. If that ranking system is specifically targeted so as to reduce your standing (i.e. reputation), that's libel. It can be as blatant as a system which targets you as an individual (-1500 starting score for "Snaller") or as subtle as a system which targets your attributes selectively (without basis or relevance to the scoring system).
Furthermore, any system which uses a "rank" system is assumed to be fair and appropriate, absent any publicized bias. A ranking system is no good if it is one-sided, and not disclosing that the system is in fact skewed misrepresents the service's stated. As for "they don't say factually accurate," guess again, dexter: http://www.avvo.com/avvo_guide/avvo_rating.
You've strayed from the original point, so I'll just accept that you are no longer arguing about the relevance of the inputs and are now just scrambling to be contrary. You lose. Better luck next time.
Wow, that's a corrupt law. If its true, which it most likely isn't - like when people sue Google because they want a better rank. This is their rank, its not the word of god. Please read what I wrote. I'll say it again. Having a low ranking is not actionable; having an *artificially* low ranking due to incompetence or malice in the ranking system is.
If someone tampered with Google's pagerank system to bury your page below its objective rank, you could sue for that, too. In fact, such allegations have been made with search engines. Google is fairly large and well-established, so they rarely have this problem.
The ranking does not produce factually correct information, it represents how valuable the website think a laywer is - its their opinion. It shouldn't be that hard to understand. That's a candidate for "obvious statement of the year." Of course it's their opinion. Do you not know what libel is? This site is offering its opinion in the context of providing advice to potential clients, manifesting its ranking as a factually accurate and impartial guide. They are providing a service, not a *personal* opinion of what they think of an attorney *based on their experience*. In the course of that service, they are obligated to disclose their subjectivity or they are required to abide by fair and equal standards.
The case is probably without merit. The information that proves or disproves that, though, will have nothing to do with the output and everything to do with the inputs.
"Subjectively chosen inputs" are the crux of the legal complaint. The output is a number; it is meaningless without knowing how it was derived (just as the claim "I'm the third best plumber in the state" is only relevant as a question of fact insofar as what evidence supports that conclusion). If the criteria selected are deemed appropriate for the field (i.e. they are justified with factual support or disclosed), then the output number that is assembled produces a permissable and legal rank. Any given ranking system is subjective to some extent; that is not important.
You claim to be logical, but don't actually use any logic. The output is a number. The claim is that they rank attorneys. That is completely vacuous without knowing what the chosen input criteria (and their relative numerical values) are. Having a low ranking is not actionable; having an *artificially* low ranking due to incompetence or malice in the ranking system is.
The INPUTS are what determine if that numerical ranking produces factually incorrect information or is designed to penalize certain kinds of lawyers while claiming to be a "fair" system. Once that determination is made, it can be decided whether that inaccuracy or bias constitutes libel. It truly is not particularly complicated.
I'm not sure how it is you're not getting this. The input absolutely is relevant. If the criteria used for rating are flawed or subjective, then the output is of no value.
If there's a selection criteria giving precedent to lawyers from wealthier parts of cities, for example, that's a flawed input. If there's a system designed to penalize lawyers from certain geographic or ethnic backgrounds, that's a flawed criterion. If the gender of the attorney results in a different score between two otherwise identical subjects, you've got an invalid data point. The output is simply a totaled numerical score derived from the values of the inputs--it's the criteria that determine whether the entire ranking process is appropriate.
Either way, they can't win with this crowd. If they encrypted the data, they'd be hiding it from the public and it would be some conspiracy to track customers and invade our homes with webcams and audio bugs. If they leave it in plain sight, then they're guilty of some perceived poor security practice.
Everyone's paper receipts have been doing this for as long as non-cash payments have been accepted. Your library card also has your name on it. Perhaps your cell phone displays your name on the home screen. Your name is accessible as the owner of your home for anyone who knows your address or parcel number. This isn't about privacy at all.
It's only about the ease of finding information that was already public (by which I mean to say "not a protected secret not to be disclosed except as required by law"), just obscure. That's a consequence (and indeed an *aim*) of the Internet.
The burden of proof always lies with affirmative, never the status quo. A EULA is a rights grant from the owner to a party, just as assignment in real property. The rightsholder (owner) is free to impose whatever legal terms s/he desires in the licensing of their goods. See franchise licensing, real estate leasing, trademark and patent licensing, and any other relevant field where use is transferred but only partial (if any) ownership.
As for "being a party to" EULAs, it's a standard form contract and a legally valid term in all fifty states (all 49 except Lousiana as a result of the UCC, Virginia and Maryland doubly so on account of UCITA, Louisiana cf. Lousiana License Act [see Vault v. Quaid, among others]).
What world are you living in where a majority of jurisdictions have ruled shrinkwrap licenses "generally unenforceable"?! Name just one jurisdiction in the US to have done so.
"Huge companies like Google" are still third-party developers. If you think history has been revised, please go back to the transcripts or videos of the original announcement and related press releases. Indicate where it says that there will be no third-party development allowed.
If you look at the Google Maps application on the phone, you'd see that it is far more than simply going to the Google maps website. I think you weren't actually present at the conference and you've never seen one in action, let alone discussed the product with its creators. The plan was always to include extensibility in the iPhone--just look at the flippin' interface. The only question was how open they'd leave the gates. Would third party software be released like iPod software, would it be released like Windows Mobile.cab files, or would it be somewhere in between? That's it. There has been no official claim otherwise.
The "6-bit" comment in my earlier post refers to the fact that Apple has been shipping 6-bit displays on its Powerbooks and MacBook pros for a while. I believe there has been a/. post on this situation. You mean ALL notebook manufacturers have been shipping 6-bit displays on it for nigh on a decade now. What would be newsworthy would be an 8-bit notebook panel AT ALL.
I believe there was some misguided bullshitting on this situation. Slashdotters and bloggers are good at that.
There is no difference. Regardless of the issue, every manner of representing the public is through some form of lobby. Good or bad, corporate funded or grassroots, they're all lobbies. There is no way to interact with "the public" of 220 million adults.
There is no collective will anymore. Everything is done by who shouts the loudest. If the people who want violent video games restricted are louder than the ones who want parents to take responsibility for their own children, that's how it goes. It's especially difficult when the position you're taking is unpopular, even if morally correct. This is what happens when you let people participate in government with their opinions and their money.
That's not a criticism, but simply a reality we must keep in mind.
Go into any law practice and ask for a show of hands about how many of them hate their state assemblies. You'd be surprised.
Lawmakers get all red-pen happy when issues pop up because whiny constituents demand that SOMEONE do SOMETHING to keep little Timmy from hearing "shit" on TV, or possibly, after specifically looking up how to accomplish it, have an encounter with a prostitute in a video game. It's not fair to blame legislatures, though, because they are acting in direct response to the public. They want them to write laws. People want callous, superficial, entertaining campaigns. People don't want to deal with real issues, and certainly don't want to take responsibility for themselves. A democracy reflects the people in it; the United States is getting exactly what it wants. But that's a subject for another thread.
Lawyers hate the absurdity of many laws as written, and hell, even many lawmakers get annoyed at the process. Writing rules by committee is like doing anything else by committee: if there was a creative vision, a coherent drive, or a sense of logic in the beginning, it's gone by the end. This is an inevitable consequence of letting too many people express too many opinions. Dictatorships have the cleanest, clearest laws. They have other downsides.
Yeah, okay, so let's extend your analogy's conclusion even further. You could spend $22,000 on an F150 to tow a boat. You could also spend $22,000 on a Jetta. It can't tow a boat. What you buy is dictated by what you're looking for. If you want a small, trendy car, that F150 doesn't seem attractive to you at any price. If you want a beefy, utilitarian, all-American pickup, that Jetta looks like a silly toy. That's what a Mac Mini vs. "a PC" (though I especially like how you've opened the floor to any non-Apple computer instead of even trying to compare members of a similar class--HTPCs are expensive web/word processors, but I guess that relative value calculation doesn't matter if there's no Apple logo on either of them) is like.
Now, why the holy war? VW doesn't make anything like the F150. If you need something to tow a boat, you can't buy the VW. Get over it. Buy the Ford (or the Chevy, or the Toyota) that does what you need it to do. You can't have a shit-fit because you think VW engines are better than Ford engines, so you want to buy a Ford with a VW engine. Sometimes you have to make a choice with imperfect options.
VW doesn't need to make a wide range of vehicles to tow a boat just to make you happy. They're doing fine without trucks.
What original decision? It was never specified that the iPhone would be completely closed to developers. In fact, the integration with Google Maps points to exactly the opposite--third party services were integral to generating the hype and producing the product.
What was (honestly) disclosed was that no decision had been made about how open the phone would be to third-party developers. Obviously there would be lots of geeks and idiot bloggers howling for a completely open device blah blah. It's not like that outcry has actually resulted in someone opening a product completely, much less a company as control-freak as Apple. Obviously there would be an interest in developing for the iPhone and for the mobile OS X in general. Obviously people would be upset to no end if they decided to keep the SDK to internal developers or licensed partners.
It's not like they needed to wait and see if anyone would actually get mad. They already knew that they would be. It still remains to be seen just how open the iPhone will be to third-party developers. The SDK isn't available because they don't want it to be or it doesn't exist in a nice "small developer" package. It's as simple as that.
It's neither a gift from the holy Apple Inc. nor a flip-flop from the evil MAC [sic] tyrants. It's just a business juggling two different customers with contrary desires in this area: networks and end users.
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It cuts both ways. Requiring that laws pertain to a single purpose wouldn't stop this indecency + a la carte bundle. The single purpose is cable television regulation. The bad side of single-purpose requirements is that sometimes it's helpful to get things done. Appropriations bills, for example, can't be done with a "single purpose" without that purpose being so broad that it becomes vacuous. Forcing a "single purpose" requirement so narrow as to separate 'television indecency' and 'television programming' would cost taxpayers tens of millions of dollars in added expenses for the glut of bills which would have to be offered individually.
But even more importantly, the bills would be offered independently (which costs a great deal more in the printing, binding, review, scheduling, distribution, markup, and really every phase of the bill) but would not be considered individually. Congress would start grouping them back together in odd and arbitrary ways in order to wade through the piles faster.
"Single purpose" provisions would help when someone tosses a strip mining rider on a bill for public education, but proper use of the media and internal power structures keep those blatant abuses down. Good bills are defeated by string-pulling and manipulation by the opponents. That's simply a given and how the process has always and will always work, so long as human beings are involved. The actual *voting* on any given piece of legislation is largely symbolic.
Subscription services aren't purchases. Your sentence is simply false; iTunes is the market leader in digital content purchases. Walmart is the leader in DVD sales; Blockbuster does more business than Walmart, but they're not sales. Subscription music isn't owned by you--it's rented. That's like saying Dish Network has more customers than Comcast because more shows were viewed on Dish Network.
Since your English skills are about as good as your ability to come up with a logical, factually accurate statement, I'll just leave it at that.
Check your history, buddy. It's all there. A simple Google search for "iTunes market share" reveals that they've cornered 70% of the digital music sales marketplace. Since you've clearly got some math issues, that's what we call a majority. It would be quite a feat for any other service to outstrip it (hint: audible.com doesn't come close).
Also, 1999 was Media Player 6.
You bore me.
I was merely trying to head off what I perceived to be a slippery slope toward a bunch of the rabid kind of libertarians coming in to bitch about how taxes shouldn't be collected from anyone, and people who avoid "the system" are some kind of heroes.
The basic issue is that he was fined for not paying a tax which he owed. The question you asked was how that tax should be collected from vehicles not using a gasoline pump.
The fairness of the tax system is not at issue. The fact of the matter is that the gasoline tax is for road maintenance. Everyone owes it, and everyone should be expected to pay for it. The fact that the tax is scalar to the degree which the roads are used makes it one of the more fair taxes on the books. How is being charged for your usage of the roads at the estimated rate you use it less fair than the current system? Electric cars are currently being paid for by everyone else because they don't pay the tax. That isn't fair at all.
Perhaps next time you could bother to to read the sentences you quote in the future. I said I wasn't getting into an argument about the fairness of taxation in general or the inconsistencies of enforcement in tax collection. Obviously that didn't click.
I never did any iTunes shilling or claimed that they introduced anything, aside from popularity of music services and a whole army of knockoffs (including a number of improvements to Windows Media Player). That's really neither here nor there. My post was simply correcting your bogus memory of history in some odd attempt to belittle users (both PC and Mac) for using "bad" software which is identical in almost every conceivable way to your "preferred" software--and then to ice the whole shitcake, claiming that Microsoft came up with things before they were implemented in iTunes. There are some important contributions made by Microsoft in the computing sphere. But not-a-one of them *later* found its way into iTunes.
As for your cute rant on Active Desktop, I'm not sure exactly what that has to do with anything (aside from it being total crap). There hasn't ever been any marketing of "putting part of your web page" on the desktop to fuel your trolling. What, if anything, are you even talking about?
And finally, you might want to pick up a dictionary. "Innovate" doesn't mean what you seem to think it means. In fact, the whole thing you've been railing against is one of the biggest innovations in the decade in the digital world. iTunes was *the* application that made digital distribution mainstream; its simple interface was a critical component in the launch of the mp3 player market as we know it. Hell, Apple introduced the _seminal_ personal computer of the modern era. Credit where credit is due. Microsoft's Office, DirectX, and Windows 95 were great, innovative products. Do you consider the personal computer an innovation? There were plenty of word processors and large computers before it. Was the car an innovation? All they did was put a motor on a carriage. It was hardly unprecedented. Everything builds on something. An innovation just has to have a new and significant impact on the market (i.e. outpace the establishment). You can't seriously sit back and claim that Microsoft has done as much in that space as Apple.
People who qualify for exemptions certainly get them. If the one standing complaint you have is that people cough up a dollar a year because their lawn mowers also run on gas, well then I think that merely goes to show you that the system is pretty damn good. If you were really, truly, upset by that annual buck or two, you could, when filling your gas can, pay in cash and in advance and ask that you not be charged the taxes on the can since it is not for interstate use. Your local gas attendant might be too stupid/lazy to do that, but that is entirely irrelevant to the point. You can get that 30 cents if you really, truly, desperately want it.
Well, as previously noted, farmers don't have to pay the tax. Landscaping companies pass that cost on to customers, just like your local flower shop delivery van does--and if they're big enough where the gas tax actually constitutes a business expense, they can get a tax reimbursement for that lawnmower fuel.
As for home users, you pay perhaps $2 a year in gas taxes to cut your grass, if that. Creating a specific exemption for that would cost more than the money you'd save. There are also places with special pumps for non-automotive uses (these pumps are either labeled or positioned such that they're walk-up only).
In terms of recreational use, as in for boats and aircraft--boating fuel stations do not charge this tax (though they may levy local fees for waterway maintenance in its place) and you can apply for a rebate for aviation use. You can also apply for the rebate for boating use if you have a big enough boat that it has a tank you fill at the gas station and not fuel cells you fill at the dock.
As for electric cars, yes, they absolutely should be taxed for their use of the roadways. This is not a problem for today, though--various governments are making the cost of entry as low as possible for hybrid/electric vehicles, and that includes reduced or no "gas tax" for road maintenance. That burden is being shifted to all-fuel vehicles to subsidize them and provide another incentive to select a hybrid. Once people no longer require tax credits, rebate vouchers, and special treatment (e.g. free access to HOV/carpool lanes even with just one passenger), then the tax system will shift to compensate. This is because by that time, the number of fuel vehicles paying gas taxes will no longer be a sufficient tax base to pay for road maintenance. It all works out if you stop to think about it for a moment.
What are you talking about, WMP11's "album view" predating Cover Flow? Cover Flow was out a year before it was bundled into iTunes, and is hardly some brilliant idea either one of them can claim to have hatched in their own brains.
Further, how does the fact that Microsoft's own application works demonstrate anything useful about iPod problems in Vista? For the record, iTunes worked fine for me even during the "incompatible" warning period after RTM. Winamp, on the other hand, and various filesystem-based software titles, would crash periodically when trying to load an iPod. The iPod is just a USB mass storage device--even on a virgin system with *no* Apple software on it, Vista didn't play nice with iPods. Linux worked fine; XP worked fine; OS X worked fine. Somehow, Vista magically broke what XP worked perfectly with and did it on its own without Apple software ever touching it.
Urge's search features are exactly what the iTunes store has had from the beginning. Your post is a sad example of Microsoft-shilling when they don't know better. iTunes on Windows is slow, absolutely. It's a non-native ported app. Photoshop 5 was also slow on Windows. It was a non-native, ported app. It wasn't until Photoshop 7 that Windows performance was actually good (and almost 7 years later). It happens. GAIM is slow and unresponsive on Windows, too, like lots of GTK applications. There's only so much time and effort you're willing to put into building for a non-native environment for software that you give away for free, especially when that software exists only to serve some other business purpose. It has to work well enough, and that's it.
Under your fictitious system, there could be no such thing as defamation. Anyone could say "Snaller is the biggest idiot on earth" and produce a "ranking system" which resulted in that conclusion. If that ranking system is specifically targeted so as to reduce your standing (i.e. reputation), that's libel. It can be as blatant as a system which targets you as an individual (-1500 starting score for "Snaller") or as subtle as a system which targets your attributes selectively (without basis or relevance to the scoring system).
Furthermore, any system which uses a "rank" system is assumed to be fair and appropriate, absent any publicized bias. A ranking system is no good if it is one-sided, and not disclosing that the system is in fact skewed misrepresents the service's stated. As for "they don't say factually accurate," guess again, dexter: http://www.avvo.com/avvo_guide/avvo_rating.
You've strayed from the original point, so I'll just accept that you are no longer arguing about the relevance of the inputs and are now just scrambling to be contrary. You lose. Better luck next time.
If someone tampered with Google's pagerank system to bury your page below its objective rank, you could sue for that, too. In fact, such allegations have been made with search engines. Google is fairly large and well-established, so they rarely have this problem.
The ranking does not produce factually correct information, it represents how valuable the website think a laywer is - its their opinion. It shouldn't be that hard to understand. That's a candidate for "obvious statement of the year." Of course it's their opinion. Do you not know what libel is? This site is offering its opinion in the context of providing advice to potential clients, manifesting its ranking as a factually accurate and impartial guide. They are providing a service, not a *personal* opinion of what they think of an attorney *based on their experience*. In the course of that service, they are obligated to disclose their subjectivity or they are required to abide by fair and equal standards.
The case is probably without merit. The information that proves or disproves that, though, will have nothing to do with the output and everything to do with the inputs.
"Subjectively chosen inputs" are the crux of the legal complaint. The output is a number; it is meaningless without knowing how it was derived (just as the claim "I'm the third best plumber in the state" is only relevant as a question of fact insofar as what evidence supports that conclusion). If the criteria selected are deemed appropriate for the field (i.e. they are justified with factual support or disclosed), then the output number that is assembled produces a permissable and legal rank. Any given ranking system is subjective to some extent; that is not important.
You claim to be logical, but don't actually use any logic. The output is a number. The claim is that they rank attorneys. That is completely vacuous without knowing what the chosen input criteria (and their relative numerical values) are. Having a low ranking is not actionable; having an *artificially* low ranking due to incompetence or malice in the ranking system is.
The INPUTS are what determine if that numerical ranking produces factually incorrect information or is designed to penalize certain kinds of lawyers while claiming to be a "fair" system. Once that determination is made, it can be decided whether that inaccuracy or bias constitutes libel. It truly is not particularly complicated.
I'm not sure how it is you're not getting this. The input absolutely is relevant. If the criteria used for rating are flawed or subjective, then the output is of no value.
If there's a selection criteria giving precedent to lawyers from wealthier parts of cities, for example, that's a flawed input. If there's a system designed to penalize lawyers from certain geographic or ethnic backgrounds, that's a flawed criterion. If the gender of the attorney results in a different score between two otherwise identical subjects, you've got an invalid data point. The output is simply a totaled numerical score derived from the values of the inputs--it's the criteria that determine whether the entire ranking process is appropriate.
And where is it written that a criteria used for input is true? If the criterion in question is itself libelous, then there is a problem.
You assume that the inputs are all incontrovertible facts. That is not known.
I'll say it again. Whether or not the program is libellous depends wholly on what the criteria are.
That depends wholly on what the criteria are.
Either way, they can't win with this crowd. If they encrypted the data, they'd be hiding it from the public and it would be some conspiracy to track customers and invade our homes with webcams and audio bugs. If they leave it in plain sight, then they're guilty of some perceived poor security practice.
Everyone's paper receipts have been doing this for as long as non-cash payments have been accepted. Your library card also has your name on it. Perhaps your cell phone displays your name on the home screen. Your name is accessible as the owner of your home for anyone who knows your address or parcel number. This isn't about privacy at all.
It's only about the ease of finding information that was already public (by which I mean to say "not a protected secret not to be disclosed except as required by law"), just obscure. That's a consequence (and indeed an *aim*) of the Internet.
The burden of proof always lies with affirmative, never the status quo. A EULA is a rights grant from the owner to a party, just as assignment in real property. The rightsholder (owner) is free to impose whatever legal terms s/he desires in the licensing of their goods. See franchise licensing, real estate leasing, trademark and patent licensing, and any other relevant field where use is transferred but only partial (if any) ownership.
As for "being a party to" EULAs, it's a standard form contract and a legally valid term in all fifty states (all 49 except Lousiana as a result of the UCC, Virginia and Maryland doubly so on account of UCITA, Louisiana cf. Lousiana License Act [see Vault v. Quaid, among others]).
What world are you living in where a majority of jurisdictions have ruled shrinkwrap licenses "generally unenforceable"?! Name just one jurisdiction in the US to have done so.
"Huge companies like Google" are still third-party developers. If you think history has been revised, please go back to the transcripts or videos of the original announcement and related press releases. Indicate where it says that there will be no third-party development allowed.
.cab files, or would it be somewhere in between? That's it. There has been no official claim otherwise.
If you look at the Google Maps application on the phone, you'd see that it is far more than simply going to the Google maps website. I think you weren't actually present at the conference and you've never seen one in action, let alone discussed the product with its creators. The plan was always to include extensibility in the iPhone--just look at the flippin' interface. The only question was how open they'd leave the gates. Would third party software be released like iPod software, would it be released like Windows Mobile
Revisionist history, indeed.
I believe there was some misguided bullshitting on this situation. Slashdotters and bloggers are good at that.
A canoe, maybe, or a couple jet skis. 3200 pounds (top of line) vs. 9700lbs (middle of the line) is no match.
There is no difference. Regardless of the issue, every manner of representing the public is through some form of lobby. Good or bad, corporate funded or grassroots, they're all lobbies. There is no way to interact with "the public" of 220 million adults.
There is no collective will anymore. Everything is done by who shouts the loudest. If the people who want violent video games restricted are louder than the ones who want parents to take responsibility for their own children, that's how it goes. It's especially difficult when the position you're taking is unpopular, even if morally correct. This is what happens when you let people participate in government with their opinions and their money.
That's not a criticism, but simply a reality we must keep in mind.
Go into any law practice and ask for a show of hands about how many of them hate their state assemblies. You'd be surprised.
Lawmakers get all red-pen happy when issues pop up because whiny constituents demand that SOMEONE do SOMETHING to keep little Timmy from hearing "shit" on TV, or possibly, after specifically looking up how to accomplish it, have an encounter with a prostitute in a video game. It's not fair to blame legislatures, though, because they are acting in direct response to the public. They want them to write laws. People want callous, superficial, entertaining campaigns. People don't want to deal with real issues, and certainly don't want to take responsibility for themselves. A democracy reflects the people in it; the United States is getting exactly what it wants. But that's a subject for another thread.
Lawyers hate the absurdity of many laws as written, and hell, even many lawmakers get annoyed at the process. Writing rules by committee is like doing anything else by committee: if there was a creative vision, a coherent drive, or a sense of logic in the beginning, it's gone by the end. This is an inevitable consequence of letting too many people express too many opinions. Dictatorships have the cleanest, clearest laws. They have other downsides.
Yeah, okay, so let's extend your analogy's conclusion even further. You could spend $22,000 on an F150 to tow a boat. You could also spend $22,000 on a Jetta. It can't tow a boat. What you buy is dictated by what you're looking for. If you want a small, trendy car, that F150 doesn't seem attractive to you at any price. If you want a beefy, utilitarian, all-American pickup, that Jetta looks like a silly toy. That's what a Mac Mini vs. "a PC" (though I especially like how you've opened the floor to any non-Apple computer instead of even trying to compare members of a similar class--HTPCs are expensive web/word processors, but I guess that relative value calculation doesn't matter if there's no Apple logo on either of them) is like.
Now, why the holy war? VW doesn't make anything like the F150. If you need something to tow a boat, you can't buy the VW. Get over it. Buy the Ford (or the Chevy, or the Toyota) that does what you need it to do. You can't have a shit-fit because you think VW engines are better than Ford engines, so you want to buy a Ford with a VW engine. Sometimes you have to make a choice with imperfect options.
VW doesn't need to make a wide range of vehicles to tow a boat just to make you happy. They're doing fine without trucks.
What original decision? It was never specified that the iPhone would be completely closed to developers. In fact, the integration with Google Maps points to exactly the opposite--third party services were integral to generating the hype and producing the product.
What was (honestly) disclosed was that no decision had been made about how open the phone would be to third-party developers. Obviously there would be lots of geeks and idiot bloggers howling for a completely open device blah blah. It's not like that outcry has actually resulted in someone opening a product completely, much less a company as control-freak as Apple. Obviously there would be an interest in developing for the iPhone and for the mobile OS X in general. Obviously people would be upset to no end if they decided to keep the SDK to internal developers or licensed partners.
It's not like they needed to wait and see if anyone would actually get mad. They already knew that they would be. It still remains to be seen just how open the iPhone will be to third-party developers. The SDK isn't available because they don't want it to be or it doesn't exist in a nice "small developer" package. It's as simple as that.
It's neither a gift from the holy Apple Inc. nor a flip-flop from the evil MAC [sic] tyrants. It's just a business juggling two different customers with contrary desires in this area: networks and end users.