I agree. Why not just do wireless syncing of the relevant information? It's a software update to enable a cloud service or a dynamic P2P connection over wi-fi, not a proprietary hardware Frankenstein. This is so 1997.
How do you differentiate between "I feel fully alert" and "I am fully alert"?
If it can be proved that the natural condition of a full bladder actually leads to a physiological change, i.e. increased adrenaline and heightened awareness, then that would make it a useful trick. Comparing it to alcohol, which is an outside agent that always has the reverse effect of depressing the body's responses, is a fallacious analogy.
Most laptops with a MacBook Pro's feature set also cost about the same amount of money. Compared to those around me, I'd say you get a sexy, sturdy exterior and a high-quality screen.
However, I think the 10% is far more reasonable, and I'm saying this as an iPhone user. 30% for the app and 10% for content doesn't seem that unreasonable. Although the data management and delivery would probably be the same, there's no review process overhead as there is with apps. As a customer of Kindle and Audible, I'm against Apple's current audacious grab of 30%, since it threatens the continued availability of material from those providers.
I have to agree that as an Audible and Kindle customer on my iPhone, I'm concerned about this new strategy. If these two companies decide to pull their apps, we all lose.
Because then you have to write your own backend software for delivery, billing and processing. Apple provides all of these, and for probably less than you can do it yourself. Plus, since they're requiring that in-app subscriptions be available, it means that once users know how to do it in one application, they can do it in all applications, which reduces technical support issues and costs.
Pity about all the patents they use but don't actually own. Unfortunately, royalty-free seems to equal indemnity-free (FYI, not a good kind of freedom to have).
Actually, you don't have to be accused of anything to be held indefinitely without trial in the US anymore. Of course, they could actually indict you for something and then just seal the indictment so that it can't be made public.
You want to measure the width of a carbon nanotube in *meters*? How is that easier?
Even if you meant to say nanometers, I disagree with your argument. A human hair is a measure of a daily object that people can intuitively grasp. The measurement, "one meter", however, is not an intuitive concept. You still need to relate it to something in order to grasp it, even if it's just holding out your hands to show how far it is.
Why do you equivocate "pedophile" with "peaceful"? I think what you meant to say is "people who keep a low profile so as to stay off of the authorities' radar". Just because someone has a specific fetish doesn't mean that they're excluded from having other fetishes, i.e. sadomasochism or rape fantasies. Pedophilia is never justifiable, no matter how peaceful they might be. You should consider just what it is that makes people so angry at pedophiles.
That being said, this is indeed and example of government overreaching its bounds using the excuse of "think of the children". We already have laws to punish offenders; crime prevention of this magnitude with no legal oversight is a terrible mistake and punishes good people along with bad by abridging basic freedoms of choice and speech.
This is good news for web developers and content creators - it means that Microsoft is even more serious than expected about embracing HTML 5 and standardizing media formats. It might seem like a shame to use a patented codec, but on the bright side, we're getting something that will continue to be developed and refined, and doesn't require a cumbersome, buggy abstraction layer AKA Flash.
This decision basically affects gray-market products, i.e. those made for retail in other countries. This is actually good for the consumer insofar that it protects them from buying merchandise that can't be serviced under a warranty. A good example would be electronics goods bought abroad: attempting to get them serviced in your home country may be impossible, as the manufacturer may not even have the replacement parts on hand, assuming they even have a presence in said country. This decision is actually *good* for consumers, because it means that retailers can't get away with unloading illegitimate goods with voided warranties onto unsuspecting customers.
Legalizing non-commercial downloads is just as bad as making piracy illegal, since the tools necessary to determine whether someone was legitimately non-commercial or not would be just as onerous as the 1984/Great Firewall of China scenario you painted.
The legitimate problem the creators face is that "non-commercial users" are also known by the more colloquial term, "customers". If you make it legal for people to not pay you at all, you go out of business. Customers, for their part, need to acknowledge that they have no right to download for free something that they didn't work to create and don't actually need to possess in the first place. Nobody *needs* to download music. There's no legitimate argument for making it free; it's up to the artist to decide that.
In the end, the market has to change to meet the new reality of the digital download. On the upside, this makes distribution to a wider audience at a much lower cost a real benefit. On the downside, the old guard of distributors and retailers have to either retool their business to accommodate this new business model, or go out of business. If you make the digital downloads reasonably priced and widely accessible, the majority of people will lose the incentive to pirate in the first place. The rest who continue to pirate will hopefully become a small minority, and infringers can be punished with a more reasonable fine that fits the crime.
If they tried to go that route with Adobe, they'd get sued for antitrust on the spot. Their second option, of course, is what they do with Office: continue offer the product, but let it lag behind, and make several features (such as collaboration) available as Windows-only options. Basically, a lobotomy.
Apple may have made people unhappy with what they did with Logic Pro and Shake (which got cannibalized for Final Cut Studio and then discontinued), but they weren't buying the only game in town; Windows is, after all, famous for software choice, right? Adobe, on the other hand, is a monopoly in the creative market, and its discontinuation on the Mac platform would be an unparalleled disaster. The legacy of Photoshop overshadows even that of Office; there simply is no realistic competition at this point, more's the pity, and even if Apple stepped in and tried to fill the gap, it'd take several years for a realistic replacement to emerge - that's simply not possible. We'd be back in 1996 again, slowly bleeding users over to the Windows platform.
Having said all this, it's important to note that the current competition from Apple and Microsoft's point of view is the mobile space. Adobe would be insane to let Microsoft buy them out, as Flash still comes in second to the importance of Creative Suite to their bottom line. Microsoft is not even a player in the mobile space at this point; they're going on name recognition alone. As good as their new platform appears to be, they also run the risk of the same kind of market fragmentation that Android now faces. Adobe can hitch their wagon to the software platform, but unless Microsoft takes a more draconian approach to hardware control with the vendors (which would make them serious contenders against both Apple and Android, and they of all companies should have the clout to do it), they're not going to any more benefit from the partnership than allying themselves with Google.
Looks like the general vibe here is that companies can have the personal rights of an individual just as soon as they're held liable to the same laws that any individual must obey in a human society. You can't have your cake and eat it, too.
Easy: you have to brew in space to keep the bubbles. Can you imagine how flat your beer would be after being subjected to 3 g's of acceleration? You're not even supposed to shake the can; launching it into low earth orbit can't be good for it.
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I agree. Why not just do wireless syncing of the relevant information? It's a software update to enable a cloud service or a dynamic P2P connection over wi-fi, not a proprietary hardware Frankenstein. This is so 1997.
How do you differentiate between "I feel fully alert" and "I am fully alert"?
If it can be proved that the natural condition of a full bladder actually leads to a physiological change, i.e. increased adrenaline and heightened awareness, then that would make it a useful trick. Comparing it to alcohol, which is an outside agent that always has the reverse effect of depressing the body's responses, is a fallacious analogy.
Most laptops with a MacBook Pro's feature set also cost about the same amount of money. Compared to those around me, I'd say you get a sexy, sturdy exterior and a high-quality screen.
Tell me about it. The clock is ticking and the cast isn't getting any younger, or more available. Fear the juggernaut of incompetence that is Fox!
However, I think the 10% is far more reasonable, and I'm saying this as an iPhone user. 30% for the app and 10% for content doesn't seem that unreasonable. Although the data management and delivery would probably be the same, there's no review process overhead as there is with apps. As a customer of Kindle and Audible, I'm against Apple's current audacious grab of 30%, since it threatens the continued availability of material from those providers.
Should be Secret Service, one would think, since they're in charge of preventing forgeries, etc.
I have to agree that as an Audible and Kindle customer on my iPhone, I'm concerned about this new strategy. If these two companies decide to pull their apps, we all lose.
Because then you have to write your own backend software for delivery, billing and processing. Apple provides all of these, and for probably less than you can do it yourself. Plus, since they're requiring that in-app subscriptions be available, it means that once users know how to do it in one application, they can do it in all applications, which reduces technical support issues and costs.
Pity about all the patents they use but don't actually own. Unfortunately, royalty-free seems to equal indemnity-free (FYI, not a good kind of freedom to have).
http://www.mpegla.com/main/pid/vp8/default.aspx
The Kepler space telescope found six planets around Kepler-11? Sounds a bit self-involved if you ask me. ;)
Call me when they find a Kemplerer rosette; then I'll be impressed.
Actually, you don't have to be accused of anything to be held indefinitely without trial in the US anymore. Of course, they could actually indict you for something and then just seal the indictment so that it can't be made public.
You want to measure the width of a carbon nanotube in *meters*? How is that easier?
Even if you meant to say nanometers, I disagree with your argument. A human hair is a measure of a daily object that people can intuitively grasp. The measurement, "one meter", however, is not an intuitive concept. You still need to relate it to something in order to grasp it, even if it's just holding out your hands to show how far it is.
Why do you equivocate "pedophile" with "peaceful"? I think what you meant to say is "people who keep a low profile so as to stay off of the authorities' radar". Just because someone has a specific fetish doesn't mean that they're excluded from having other fetishes, i.e. sadomasochism or rape fantasies. Pedophilia is never justifiable, no matter how peaceful they might be. You should consider just what it is that makes people so angry at pedophiles.
That being said, this is indeed and example of government overreaching its bounds using the excuse of "think of the children". We already have laws to punish offenders; crime prevention of this magnitude with no legal oversight is a terrible mistake and punishes good people along with bad by abridging basic freedoms of choice and speech.
This is good news for web developers and content creators - it means that Microsoft is even more serious than expected about embracing HTML 5 and standardizing media formats. It might seem like a shame to use a patented codec, but on the bright side, we're getting something that will continue to be developed and refined, and doesn't require a cumbersome, buggy abstraction layer AKA Flash.
Having one operating system do everything you need is not less superior than needing two operating systems to accomplish the same task.
This decision basically affects gray-market products, i.e. those made for retail in other countries. This is actually good for the consumer insofar that it protects them from buying merchandise that can't be serviced under a warranty. A good example would be electronics goods bought abroad: attempting to get them serviced in your home country may be impossible, as the manufacturer may not even have the replacement parts on hand, assuming they even have a presence in said country. This decision is actually *good* for consumers, because it means that retailers can't get away with unloading illegitimate goods with voided warranties onto unsuspecting customers.
At my apartment in Osaka it's $20 for 1GB, actually.
Pity about the continuation of the 20th century pricing. I live in Japan and my 1GB fiber costs me $20 a month.
Legalizing non-commercial downloads is just as bad as making piracy illegal, since the tools necessary to determine whether someone was legitimately non-commercial or not would be just as onerous as the 1984/Great Firewall of China scenario you painted.
The legitimate problem the creators face is that "non-commercial users" are also known by the more colloquial term, "customers". If you make it legal for people to not pay you at all, you go out of business. Customers, for their part, need to acknowledge that they have no right to download for free something that they didn't work to create and don't actually need to possess in the first place. Nobody *needs* to download music. There's no legitimate argument for making it free; it's up to the artist to decide that.
In the end, the market has to change to meet the new reality of the digital download. On the upside, this makes distribution to a wider audience at a much lower cost a real benefit. On the downside, the old guard of distributors and retailers have to either retool their business to accommodate this new business model, or go out of business. If you make the digital downloads reasonably priced and widely accessible, the majority of people will lose the incentive to pirate in the first place. The rest who continue to pirate will hopefully become a small minority, and infringers can be punished with a more reasonable fine that fits the crime.
Apt analogy, as both Microsoft and IBM's stars are waning. Perhaps Larry should take a hint from that.
As for no single individual being indispensable, maybe, but losing everyone would be rather inconvenient.
If they tried to go that route with Adobe, they'd get sued for antitrust on the spot. Their second option, of course, is what they do with Office: continue offer the product, but let it lag behind, and make several features (such as collaboration) available as Windows-only options. Basically, a lobotomy.
Apple may have made people unhappy with what they did with Logic Pro and Shake (which got cannibalized for Final Cut Studio and then discontinued), but they weren't buying the only game in town; Windows is, after all, famous for software choice, right? Adobe, on the other hand, is a monopoly in the creative market, and its discontinuation on the Mac platform would be an unparalleled disaster. The legacy of Photoshop overshadows even that of Office; there simply is no realistic competition at this point, more's the pity, and even if Apple stepped in and tried to fill the gap, it'd take several years for a realistic replacement to emerge - that's simply not possible. We'd be back in 1996 again, slowly bleeding users over to the Windows platform.
Having said all this, it's important to note that the current competition from Apple and Microsoft's point of view is the mobile space. Adobe would be insane to let Microsoft buy them out, as Flash still comes in second to the importance of Creative Suite to their bottom line. Microsoft is not even a player in the mobile space at this point; they're going on name recognition alone. As good as their new platform appears to be, they also run the risk of the same kind of market fragmentation that Android now faces. Adobe can hitch their wagon to the software platform, but unless Microsoft takes a more draconian approach to hardware control with the vendors (which would make them serious contenders against both Apple and Android, and they of all companies should have the clout to do it), they're not going to any more benefit from the partnership than allying themselves with Google.
They could have saved a lot of time and man-hours and just asked me.
Looks like the general vibe here is that companies can have the personal rights of an individual just as soon as they're held liable to the same laws that any individual must obey in a human society. You can't have your cake and eat it, too.
Easy: you have to brew in space to keep the bubbles. Can you imagine how flat your beer would be after being subjected to 3 g's of acceleration? You're not even supposed to shake the can; launching it into low earth orbit can't be good for it.
How many more times do we have to endure the same movie being released over and over again? Let it go already and make something new, George.
Wait - he does realize that 3D actually refers to a change in technology, not in showing the exact same movie three times, right?