Because the Chrome browser is fairly standards compliant?
What this whole thing is about is microsoft trying to use a fairly broken and proprietary version of htmtl, css and javascript to make it impossible for people to use the web without using internet explorer.
it is really a most stunning abuse of law. something like this:
"hello, i'm a private company and i misled my customers into buying a product telling them it was product A (a film) when it was actually product B (encrypted data). Because i totally screwed up and made it trivial for the customer to transform product B (what i sold them) into product A (what they wanted to buy) in the privacy of their own homes, can you make this a criminal offense punishable by up to 5 years in prison? KTHXBYE"
no, but it does tell you something about the lack of criminal energy involved. if i left my front door open and came back home to find someone in my flat, i doubt i'd alarm the police, provided i could get the trespasser to leave by myself and was pretty certain that nothing had been stolen or broken.
the thing is, most of us have a gut feeling that mckinnon doesn't really deserve more than a slap on the wrist and to be told to go to bed early without pudding. what he did should have been regarded as a schoolboy's prank---he guessed the passwords of some poorly sites to search for information about UFOS. he didn't actually damage anything and he didn't actually inconvenience anyone himself. had he deleted or modified information, then that would be a different thing. your line "free to do whatever they like" is a very poor strawman, as the fact is that he didn't damage anything.
that sounds to me rather like the corn laws, but being passed by a company and not the government.
Re:Why does anyone want internet GPS anyway?
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fortunately, we are still able to switch it off and still get from A to B. the problem is complete when it becomes impractical to live and work without using the technology you mentioned. at that stage we will have a microsoft-style monopoly.
as long as i can still get from A to B using a book of maps or my memory, i won't need google to plot the route for me and accompany me along the way. it is however (almost) impossible to create and edit.doc files using a (non-existent) specification and a text editor.
what this really needs to make it horrible is for google to add a function to trace social undesirables and have their positions updated in real time in google maps. then the government could spin it to be the duty of every parent to use google maps to protect their children from drug addicts, murderers and the like.
once more i will try to explain the difference. you have often said "apple should not be required to actively support hardware they do not make" to which i reply "i don't think they should either, that is not what we are arguing about here". but there is a world of difference between "not actively supporting hardware" and "actively and deliberately modifying a product so it won't run on that hardware". is this now clear?
what people here are accusing apple of is deliberately modifying osx so that it will no longer run on intel atom processors. if this is the case (and from what i can tell, there appears to be no conclusive evidence either way), then apple has done something that is not nice to the people who use osx on intel atom equipped computers. if this is not the case, then this is little more than bad luck.
You say it's a strawman, and for some odd reason you get modded insightful for it. But please, humour me: how, exactly, is it a strawman to point out that Apple sells hardware, and is under no obligation to ensure that the software it creates specifically for that hardware works on 3rd party hardware?
because that's not what i'm complaining about, and i don't think anybody here is. it is a strawman to say that we are arguing that. we aren't. we are arguing that it is not nice of apple to intentionally modify their product so that it won't work on intel atom processors. we do not expect apple to ensure that their software works on intel atom processors, and i don't think anybody here as argued that, but i may be wrong.
of course, it is not clear that apple has deliberately changed osx binaries so they won't run on intel atom processors. they may just need some instructions which intel atom doesn't implement, in which case it would be quite nice for apple to say "btw, we changed our compiler to optimise for this and that, so intel atom no longer works." rather than leave others in the lurch. of course disassembling the update should soon reveal if this is true or not, or if apple has introduced some code to deliberately make sure os x doesn't run on intel atom processors.
There's no legitimate reason--ethical, legal or otherwise--that Apple should be obligated to continue supporting a processor they don't use in any of their own products.
And once again i must repeat myself. nobody is asking apple to do this. you are arguing a strawman here.
How are they obligated to ensure that their product continues to work on a processor that they do not support? Why are they obligated to ensure the OS X hackintosh community can continue installing OS X on Atom-powrred netbooks?
they aren't and they aren't. but that's not what this argument is about.
the problem is that it is a generally not nice thing to do. many people (i am not one of them, as i would not sully my hands with os x) have quite happily installed os x on intel atom powered products and (presumably) enjoyed using the hardware with this operating system. for apple to deliberately disable their systems from working is just not nice. what harm is it doing apple? why do they have to say to these (presumably hundreds if not thousands of people) "we don't like what you're doing so we're going to make sure you can't!"? it's just small-minded, egocentric behaviour which would get a reprimand if a child did it.
and although i repeat what hundreds have said before me, you are creating a strawman. nobody wants apple to support intel atom processors and there is no way their eula can tell me what to do with an osx cd in my own home. people who buy an osx cd and install the software on their own netbooks have done nothing morally wrong.
they are perfectly allowed to disable support for whatever they want to. i'm not saying (and i don't think anybody is saying) that apple doesn't have the right to do that. what others are saying is that it is morally questionable for apple to do so.
there is a reason why many here have mentioned intent. if apple has deliberately disabled os x from running on intel atom processors, then in the minds of most here we have a very different situation from the one if os x no longer ran on intel atom processors because of some technical reason.
in general we are arguing morals here, not law. legally i doubt that apple has done anything wrong. morally there is a very strong case to be made (which you have in no way countered) that apple has done something morally wrong.
The government has always acted in its own interests.
oh, citation needed big time. maybe this is true in some communist/fascist dictatorships, but i really do like to believe (and i see evidence that supports this belief) that in first-world countries with constitutions and functioning legal systems, the government is mostly a government of the people, by the people and for the people.
Dear me, there are a lot of nay-sayers posting here. I wonder why? I can't inherently see something terrible about providing a large number of books for the world's poorest, yet the comments here would have me believe that it is hopeless, and everybody has an anecdote about why there's no point in even trying.
so why are the astroturfers out en force for this story?
anyway, i say good on the olpc project for trying to bring knowledge to the poor, the underprivileged, the down-trodden, the economically abused and the politically silenced. i still hope that we will someday look back on this project and think that it was a major stepping stone in our journey towards human rights, education and dignity for all.
One was because it is under GPLv2 without the "or later" option, so cannot mix with GPLv3 code. That a pretty irrelevant point, though, because the problem lies entirely with GPLv3's lack of compatibility wity other free licenses, such as GPLv2.
in what way does that make the point irrelevant? the problem still exists. just because you see a way of apportioning blame does not make the problem go away.
no, no and a thousand times no. patents are (were) not about ideas. they are (were) about implementations of ideas. everybody can have a good idea. until they make a working implementation of it, that idea is worth nothing.
well, as we all should know by now, pirating is only about teh money. that's the only reason anybody ever pirates anything: because they want to rob other people. it never has anything to do with sharing with friends, or convenience, or a desire to have something now and not wait 6 months until it becomes available legally. no, if you pirate you are a criminal and you hate america... (i could go on like this all day)
are you seriously trying to suggest that at some stage in apple headquarters the following conversation took place?
A: yeah, i've got this cool idea of having LPs on iTunes
B: oh, okay. what will be in them?
A: well, songs and some images and maybe some texts
B: okay, sounds like a good idea.
A: shall we charge a band extra for it?
B: yes, let's charge 10000 dollars, because this will prevent bad content from being offered as LPs
i'd say the lack of legal accountability for software is a historical accident. if you wanted to, you could say that computers were developed in two areas: firstly very expensive mainframes and workstations from ibm and the like and secondly toy computers from sinclair, commodore, tandy and the rest. with the first class of computer you certainly did get guarantees from the manufacturer that everything would work and you could get on their case if something terrible happened. with the second class this would have seemed ridiculous.
this of course does lead to the ridiculous situation as you described where apple and microsoft vie over the title of the best operating system in the world where in the licensing agreement phrases can be found like "This software is fit to do absolutely nothing. If you use it and something goes wrong it's your fault".
strangely FOSS seems to strengthen their case, the ideal of FOSS being that anybody who's sufficiently skilled and patient should be able to roll their own operating system or text editor or whatever oh and here's this stuff someone else made when they sat down one day and tried to write a piece of software for music notation---do with it what you will. i think if regulation were imposed on software for the home pc market it could turn out to be legally difficult to treat FOSS and proprietary software differently. certainly if ms or apple were forced to write in their eulas that "this software is an operating system and it promises to fulfill certain requirements *long list of requirements*", their astro-turfers would go crazy discrediting FOSS for not having these clauses in the GPL or whatever license.
no, i don't think anybody is demanding that apple create and maintain a 3rd party synchronization scheme. that's a strawman you've built up there. what people find objectionable is that apple has recently modified a product to prevent it working with anything other than their own products.
let me spell it out to you:
modifying a product for other reasons than making it incompatible with 3rd party products is not objectionable. if compatibility with 3rd party products is broken, well that's just the way it is.
modifying a product to make it incompatible with 3rd party products is not okay. it's a bad way of trying to increase market share in a different market.
yes, it should be up to palm to make sure that syncing with itunes works. apple shouldn't lift a finger one way or the other. instead apple has invested time and money in changing how itunes works in order to reduce the capabilities enjoyed by palm's customers.
> which now also seems to be a mix probably dominated by H.264.
The jury's still out on that one - I think most people expect the W3 to wash their hands of baseline video recommendations entirely (at least until a possible appropriate future format meets the requirements)
the trouble is, theora does meet the requirements, and it's the only halfway modern codec which does. however the requirements for accepting a video tag for html from apple seem to be that it cannot be a royalty-free codec because that would allow firefox to continue to exist, which would slow market share growth for safari. instead, a patent-encumbered codec will make it impossible for free-software to implement html5 and manufacturers of proprietary software will have another string in their monopoly.
no, no. totally wrong. computers were expensive because they were big and manufacture was less automated than nowadays. nowadays i'd wager just as high a proportion or even higher goes into r&d at hardware manufacturers.
also i doubt many important advances in car technology come because of F1. there's no reason why they should do. you could probably argue that F1 gives the r&d department of car manufacturers a hobby, but you'd be pushing it to say that any advance came specifically because of F1. F1 may give manufacturers a chance to show off the advances they have made, though modern rules make this rather dubious.
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Because the Chrome browser is fairly standards compliant?
What this whole thing is about is microsoft trying to use a fairly broken and proprietary version of htmtl, css and javascript to make it impossible for people to use the web without using internet explorer.
it is really a most stunning abuse of law. something like this:
"hello, i'm a private company and i misled my customers into buying a product telling them it was product A (a film) when it was actually product B (encrypted data). Because i totally screwed up and made it trivial for the customer to transform product B (what i sold them) into product A (what they wanted to buy) in the privacy of their own homes, can you make this a criminal offense punishable by up to 5 years in prison? KTHXBYE"
no, but it does tell you something about the lack of criminal energy involved. if i left my front door open and came back home to find someone in my flat, i doubt i'd alarm the police, provided i could get the trespasser to leave by myself and was pretty certain that nothing had been stolen or broken.
the thing is, most of us have a gut feeling that mckinnon doesn't really deserve more than a slap on the wrist and to be told to go to bed early without pudding. what he did should have been regarded as a schoolboy's prank---he guessed the passwords of some poorly sites to search for information about UFOS. he didn't actually damage anything and he didn't actually inconvenience anyone himself. had he deleted or modified information, then that would be a different thing. your line "free to do whatever they like" is a very poor strawman, as the fact is that he didn't damage anything.
that sounds to me rather like the corn laws, but being passed by a company and not the government.
fortunately, we are still able to switch it off and still get from A to B. the problem is complete when it becomes impractical to live and work without using the technology you mentioned. at that stage we will have a microsoft-style monopoly.
.doc files using a (non-existent) specification and a text editor.
as long as i can still get from A to B using a book of maps or my memory, i won't need google to plot the route for me and accompany me along the way. it is however (almost) impossible to create and edit
what this really needs to make it horrible is for google to add a function to trace social undesirables and have their positions updated in real time in google maps. then the government could spin it to be the duty of every parent to use google maps to protect their children from drug addicts, murderers and the like.
i thought wave is foss. you don't stop developing foss just because you work for a company.
once more i will try to explain the difference. you have often said "apple should not be required to actively support hardware they do not make" to which i reply "i don't think they should either, that is not what we are arguing about here". but there is a world of difference between "not actively supporting hardware" and "actively and deliberately modifying a product so it won't run on that hardware". is this now clear?
what people here are accusing apple of is deliberately modifying osx so that it will no longer run on intel atom processors. if this is the case (and from what i can tell, there appears to be no conclusive evidence either way), then apple has done something that is not nice to the people who use osx on intel atom equipped computers. if this is not the case, then this is little more than bad luck.
You say it's a strawman, and for some odd reason you get modded insightful for it. But please, humour me: how, exactly, is it a strawman to point out that Apple sells hardware, and is under no obligation to ensure that the software it creates specifically for that hardware works on 3rd party hardware?
because that's not what i'm complaining about, and i don't think anybody here is. it is a strawman to say that we are arguing that. we aren't. we are arguing that it is not nice of apple to intentionally modify their product so that it won't work on intel atom processors. we do not expect apple to ensure that their software works on intel atom processors, and i don't think anybody here as argued that, but i may be wrong.
of course, it is not clear that apple has deliberately changed osx binaries so they won't run on intel atom processors. they may just need some instructions which intel atom doesn't implement, in which case it would be quite nice for apple to say "btw, we changed our compiler to optimise for this and that, so intel atom no longer works." rather than leave others in the lurch. of course disassembling the update should soon reveal if this is true or not, or if apple has introduced some code to deliberately make sure os x doesn't run on intel atom processors.
There's no legitimate reason--ethical, legal or otherwise--that Apple should be obligated to continue supporting a processor they don't use in any of their own products.
And once again i must repeat myself. nobody is asking apple to do this. you are arguing a strawman here.
How are they obligated to ensure that their product continues to work on a processor that they do not support? Why are they obligated to ensure the OS X hackintosh community can continue installing OS X on Atom-powrred netbooks?
they aren't and they aren't. but that's not what this argument is about.
the problem is that it is a generally not nice thing to do. many people (i am not one of them, as i would not sully my hands with os x) have quite happily installed os x on intel atom powered products and (presumably) enjoyed using the hardware with this operating system. for apple to deliberately disable their systems from working is just not nice. what harm is it doing apple? why do they have to say to these (presumably hundreds if not thousands of people) "we don't like what you're doing so we're going to make sure you can't!"? it's just small-minded, egocentric behaviour which would get a reprimand if a child did it.
and although i repeat what hundreds have said before me, you are creating a strawman. nobody wants apple to support intel atom processors and there is no way their eula can tell me what to do with an osx cd in my own home. people who buy an osx cd and install the software on their own netbooks have done nothing morally wrong.
they are perfectly allowed to disable support for whatever they want to. i'm not saying (and i don't think anybody is saying) that apple doesn't have the right to do that. what others are saying is that it is morally questionable for apple to do so.
there is a reason why many here have mentioned intent. if apple has deliberately disabled os x from running on intel atom processors, then in the minds of most here we have a very different situation from the one if os x no longer ran on intel atom processors because of some technical reason.
in general we are arguing morals here, not law. legally i doubt that apple has done anything wrong. morally there is a very strong case to be made (which you have in no way countered) that apple has done something morally wrong.
one small point. C, java, python and ruby were all invented and named before people started googling for stuff.
this is something shuttleworth gets right with ubuntu development names. googling for 'karmic umts' is pretty likely to find results you want.
i think that's false, unless you cast pi as an int. :)
The government has always acted in its own interests.
oh, citation needed big time. maybe this is true in some communist/fascist dictatorships, but i really do like to believe (and i see evidence that supports this belief) that in first-world countries with constitutions and functioning legal systems, the government is mostly a government of the people, by the people and for the people.
Dear me, there are a lot of nay-sayers posting here. I wonder why? I can't inherently see something terrible about providing a large number of books for the world's poorest, yet the comments here would have me believe that it is hopeless, and everybody has an anecdote about why there's no point in even trying.
so why are the astroturfers out en force for this story?
anyway, i say good on the olpc project for trying to bring knowledge to the poor, the underprivileged, the down-trodden, the economically abused and the politically silenced. i still hope that we will someday look back on this project and think that it was a major stepping stone in our journey towards human rights, education and dignity for all.
One was because it is under GPLv2 without the "or later" option, so cannot mix with GPLv3 code. That a pretty irrelevant point, though, because the problem lies entirely with GPLv3's lack of compatibility wity other free licenses, such as GPLv2.
in what way does that make the point irrelevant? the problem still exists. just because you see a way of apportioning blame does not make the problem go away.
no, no and a thousand times no. patents are (were) not about ideas. they are (were) about implementations of ideas. everybody can have a good idea. until they make a working implementation of it, that idea is worth nothing.
well, as we all should know by now, pirating is only about teh money. that's the only reason anybody ever pirates anything: because they want to rob other people. it never has anything to do with sharing with friends, or convenience, or a desire to have something now and not wait 6 months until it becomes available legally. no, if you pirate you are a criminal and you hate america ... (i could go on like this all day)
are you seriously trying to suggest that at some stage in apple headquarters the following conversation took place?
A: yeah, i've got this cool idea of having LPs on iTunes
B: oh, okay. what will be in them?
A: well, songs and some images and maybe some texts
B: okay, sounds like a good idea.
A: shall we charge a band extra for it?
B: yes, let's charge 10000 dollars, because this will prevent bad content from being offered as LPs
i'd say the lack of legal accountability for software is a historical accident. if you wanted to, you could say that computers were developed in two areas: firstly very expensive mainframes and workstations from ibm and the like and secondly toy computers from sinclair, commodore, tandy and the rest. with the first class of computer you certainly did get guarantees from the manufacturer that everything would work and you could get on their case if something terrible happened. with the second class this would have seemed ridiculous.
this of course does lead to the ridiculous situation as you described where apple and microsoft vie over the title of the best operating system in the world where in the licensing agreement phrases can be found like "This software is fit to do absolutely nothing. If you use it and something goes wrong it's your fault".
strangely FOSS seems to strengthen their case, the ideal of FOSS being that anybody who's sufficiently skilled and patient should be able to roll their own operating system or text editor or whatever oh and here's this stuff someone else made when they sat down one day and tried to write a piece of software for music notation---do with it what you will. i think if regulation were imposed on software for the home pc market it could turn out to be legally difficult to treat FOSS and proprietary software differently. certainly if ms or apple were forced to write in their eulas that "this software is an operating system and it promises to fulfill certain requirements *long list of requirements*", their astro-turfers would go crazy discrediting FOSS for not having these clauses in the GPL or whatever license.
one point. cvs transmissions were designed and implemented by the dutch company DAF in 1958.
no, i don't think anybody is demanding that apple create and maintain a 3rd party synchronization scheme. that's a strawman you've built up there. what people find objectionable is that apple has recently modified a product to prevent it working with anything other than their own products.
let me spell it out to you:
modifying a product for other reasons than making it incompatible with 3rd party products is not objectionable. if compatibility with 3rd party products is broken, well that's just the way it is.
modifying a product to make it incompatible with 3rd party products is not okay. it's a bad way of trying to increase market share in a different market.
yes, it should be up to palm to make sure that syncing with itunes works. apple shouldn't lift a finger one way or the other. instead apple has invested time and money in changing how itunes works in order to reduce the capabilities enjoyed by palm's customers.
> which now also seems to be a mix probably dominated by H.264. The jury's still out on that one - I think most people expect the W3 to wash their hands of baseline video recommendations entirely (at least until a possible appropriate future format meets the requirements)
the trouble is, theora does meet the requirements, and it's the only halfway modern codec which does. however the requirements for accepting a video tag for html from apple seem to be that it cannot be a royalty-free codec because that would allow firefox to continue to exist, which would slow market share growth for safari. instead, a patent-encumbered codec will make it impossible for free-software to implement html5 and manufacturers of proprietary software will have another string in their monopoly.
no, no. totally wrong. computers were expensive because they were big and manufacture was less automated than nowadays. nowadays i'd wager just as high a proportion or even higher goes into r&d at hardware manufacturers.
also i doubt many important advances in car technology come because of F1. there's no reason why they should do. you could probably argue that F1 gives the r&d department of car manufacturers a hobby, but you'd be pushing it to say that any advance came specifically because of F1. F1 may give manufacturers a chance to show off the advances they have made, though modern rules make this rather dubious.
if it's built on open source software, chances are someone will force them to reveal their source code.
i'm sorry, whose source code?