Sorry for the language but what lobotomized slime ball signed into existence an environment where European citizens (actually UK citizen) can face extradition to the US?
I understand the EU makes this a little bit awkward, hence extradition inside the EU (and even there one of the requirements is that the crime exists in similar ways in both countries). But the normal thing has been always to keep your own citizen, and if the crime warrants the citizen is prosecuted at home. Neither Germany, nor Austria for example allow extradition of their own citizens, nor if the death penalty is a possibility. In both cases it's part of the constitution.
Actually, here around iPhones are subsidized more than other more mainstream devices. It also makes sense, why should Apple give them away cheaper as long willing consumers queue overnight to get the newest and greatest?
And comparing non-sub prices proves not much, because the non-sub prices are clearly not the prices the carriers are paying internally. (Non-sub prices at carrier outlets are blown up in a humoristic way, so the customer knows how much cheaper it is with a plan, and other retailers most vertainly have other incoming prices,...)
Actually war is a state that can be entered between two nations.
You cannot declare war on drugs, nor can you declare on Mr. Bin Laden's explosive vacations club.
Terrorism, beside not being a country is a very unclear label. (You do realize, that the Founding Fathers, nowadays would be labeled Terrorists, right?)
Simple, a "suspected terrorist" (wonder when this will include copyright terrorists that downloaded a Hollywood movie) in the US can be locked up by the Feds, and kept for indefinite periods without judicial review. (Look up PATRIOT Act)
For citizens (US and others) outside the US, the government needs to decide if the cost of capturing a person alive is worth the trouble. Usually it is not.
Well, the feds can hope that NZ does not extradite (which they probably will not), because the US judge already mentioned that the whole proceedings are probably illegal.
Hint: You might not noticed, but the US has been turned into a police state the last 10 years. Nothing is safe against the government. Not even for citizens,
There is no privacy. The feds can get everything on you. The is no private property. Oops, somebody in this city did a drug deal (or mentioned terrorism, or did not like a federal official, well, that's also terrorism, right?), or at least one of our agents had a vision that it's so, so we have to confiscate your stuff.
There is no personal freedom, the US has statutes on the book to look up people indefinitely without a trial. At should you think you can run away, they'll tax you when you leave. Well, it's a well known legal practice, actually, only one example comes to mind, the Nazis robbed Jews that tried to emigrate,...
But the US is also the guys that maintain death lists. That's another term that one usually associates with dictatorships and other bad guys. (Sure that the WTC did not contain at least one guy that might worthy a death penalty by Iranian legal standards, if so, I don't know why you are whinning, your own government considers civilian collateral damages okay.)
Well, the issue here is that Samsung learnt from Sony's downfall (which included beside other issues the interference between business units e.g. DRM crippled entertainment devices because Sony is also in music/movie business), and so Samsung business units basically run independently, so the screen producing division happily sells to Apple, while the mobile/tablet unit is battling Apple in court around the globe.
(Basically it's "if we are not hard on ourselves, the competition will be, and that will be even more painful")
Probably, the S2 managed this feat already for a good number of markets.
Another interesting tidbit, from a local network operator is that the S3 is the first phone beside Apple products, where they had preorders before the specs were released.
Apple has no other option but to lose ground to competitors. They were the first largely successful tablet on the market and grabbed a huge percentage of sales. As competition comes along Apple can't realistically hold onto its entire marketshare. That doesn't mean that they are failing or being driven out of the market, it's just the reality of the numbers.
Don't think that Apple can't compete just because they're spending as much time on legal maneuvers as they do on R&D. They're still the market leader in tablets, they're near the top in smart phones, and they're only going to branch out further into the new areas of consumer electronics. They may act like dicks a lot of the time but that doesn't mean being a dick and being competitive are mutually exclusive.
Well, they are quite a bit away from Android in smart phones, market share wise they are neader to Windows Phone than to Android, tablet-wise the same will basically happen, it will just take some time => it's basically Apple against all other manufacturers, again, offering not one model, that by religious decree has to fit everyone, Android tablets offer all kinds of form factors. From cheap to expensive, from small (= oversized phones) to huge (>10"), different types of display technology (no pun intended, there are people that are partial to certain solutions), and so on. How Apple is meant to compete here, while their biggest part supplier is also their main competitor?
Copy? Android is being developed since 2003, the T-Mobile G1 was released 2008 only a couple of months after the iPhone 3G (which was the first "smartphone" iPhone, the iPhone of 2007 not offering apps), so I guess Android was really quick at copying the stuff, you know, Google engineers had lined up at the Apple stores to get an iPhone 3G, and to save time, because the HTC Dream/T-Mobile G1 was in preproduction already, patched the copied features into the firmware by editing binary files directly,...
If you want to claim copying, then I guess Apple as a company with a tradition of polishing things that they ripped off (you know, Apple did not invent the GUI, they ripped it off from Xerox) can also be accused of copying, I mean, other companies had mobiles with web browsers (Nokia, Win Mobile phones, Sidekicks,...), apps (about the same set), touchscreens (Winmobiles) and so on. Furthermore most if not all companies sued by Apple are old hands in the mobile business, meaning that they together more or less developed the underlying standards (GSM, UMTS), investing in basic research and development, while Apple simply is a freeloader builting on it. Which leaves the FRAND patents as a problem => how can Apple get the same deal as most other companies. I mean they basically have no critical patents to cross license,...
Fascinating aspect is that you need to be able to navigate traditionally to get license for sailing ships here around. It's nothing very difficult, it's just that it requires one guy (that is responsible for navigation) to keep his brain engaged. Personally I always found docking under sails without engine, potentially at night time to be way more nerve wrecking.
Well, technically they are at war, just in a very long cease-fire.
And yes, while there might have been cases where other countries have done bad stuff, no questions, the US have the problem of being seen as a hypocrite.
"The land of the Free", "The Good Guys",... => well, in many cases it would be helpful if they could pin labels in big high contrast letters on the Americans on site "WE ARE THE GOOD GUYS. REALLY.".
The problem is that especially in the last decade, it has often become hard to find the goodness that the PR is still claiming.
Examples would include:
-) drone killings in foreign countries => collateral damage is accepted, and that does not even ask the question if the US administration can decide on it's own that they want someone dead, without a court,... => how's that much different from a terrorist that want's to kill one person inside and bombs the whole house?
-) arrests without warrants, without the option to legal representation, => everything there in the PATRIOT act.
-) US agents wanted by international arrest warrants by supposedly friendly countries => yeah, sometimes the criminal (as the local law defines) energy of CIA agents can lead to embarrassing situations. (So if the local law does not apply, why do you expect Islamist terrorists to obey local US laws?)
-) Generally speaking, the US constitution has been turned into an optional guideline.
-) Ah, one last thing, the Supreme Court demands that capital punishment is handed down by objective criteria. Wonder how many service man have been sentenced to DR that commited multiple murders on the local population. Happened many times, and these guys usually get just a slap on the hand.
Well, actually, everything hinges on the decision if an IP address can identify a person. If so, and a number of data protection authorities in Europe tend to view it this way, it's illegal already to store IP-address containing logs. IPv6 is almost bound to be found person/device-identifying (because a part of the address is derived from the device and most non-PC devices do not allow for randomizing it), so it does not matter how you classify IPv4 addresses in the longterm, hence companies like Google have started to deal with local law and usually "anonymize" the IP address down to the C-class network address. Personally I think that's rather bullshitish, but they do try to somehow compromise.
Actually that's not the issue. ad networks like Google's doubleclick.net do track users on all domains that use ads from them.
So if you want to submarine on a party like Google, you need a good browser with a number of extensions (Adblock+, NoScript, Ghostery,...) to prevent them from getting you on 3rd party sites. And you need not to use their services to prevent them from getting you explicitely.
The issue is, that item 1 is very hard to do in a completely user friendly way.
UPC in Austria has defacto static IP addresses for their cable customers. To change the IP you have to turn the modem off for a very long time, or ask the support to reassign you a new one.
It's basically static with the caveat "we reserve the right to change it for whatever reason".
And you have a contract claiming that the CEO's office is rented to you AND you feel threatened by the guy. Actually, it would probably help if you could put a toy gun into his hand so you can make it believable that you were threatened,...
Not exactly, it has just a different cultural set of what is dictated to you and what not.
There are quite a bit of places that make some European countries look employee hating, when you compare work place regulations.
OTOH, "work at will" is primarily American thing, in most places in Europe you cannot simply fire an employee without following rules.
And when we are at it, before anyone zeros in on the problems in Greece (and other places), please notice that the budget situation of some US states make Greece look like an A+ pupil, e.g. California.
And compared to tax dodge heavens like Nevada (which btw still does not share data with the IRS, right?), Switzerland is actually a champion of tax justice.
LOL, RLL harddiscs had capacities that are by today standards located somewhere between the CPU cache size and the RAM size of average smartphones. (My first PC had a 20MB HDD)
Put simply, a modern hdd are about the same as a RLL hdd, as a Cadillac is similar to a tryke.
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Sorry for the language but what lobotomized slime ball signed into existence an environment where European citizens (actually UK citizen) can face extradition to the US?
I understand the EU makes this a little bit awkward, hence extradition inside the EU (and even there one of the requirements is that the crime exists in similar ways in both countries). But the normal thing has been always to keep your own citizen, and if the crime warrants the citizen is prosecuted at home. Neither Germany, nor Austria for example allow extradition of their own citizens, nor if the death penalty is a possibility. In both cases it's part of the constitution.
Actually, here around iPhones are subsidized more than other more mainstream devices. It also makes sense, why should Apple give them away cheaper as long willing consumers queue overnight to get the newest and greatest?
And comparing non-sub prices proves not much, because the non-sub prices are clearly not the prices the carriers are paying internally. ...)
(Non-sub prices at carrier outlets are blown up in a humoristic way, so the customer knows how much cheaper it is with a plan, and other retailers most vertainly have other incoming prices,
Okay, so you've been partnering with the evil Overlord for decades, and you thought yourself immune?
I don't think that there are many former MS partners alive, and of those, all are alive not because MS, no they are alive despite MS.
No democracy that is not a police state can protect every and each piece of public infrastructure.
Guess the Senator has less problems with the US becoming police state.
Only if everything works as intended. The moment iTunes decides to reflash your phone all the time, you are starting to get a headache.
You mean the law of war that the US usually ignore?
Actually war is a state that can be entered between two nations.
You cannot declare war on drugs, nor can you declare on Mr. Bin Laden's explosive vacations club.
Terrorism, beside not being a country is a very unclear label. (You do realize, that the Founding Fathers, nowadays would be labeled Terrorists, right?)
Simple, a "suspected terrorist" (wonder when this will include copyright terrorists that downloaded a Hollywood movie) in the US can be locked up by the Feds, and kept for indefinite periods without judicial review. (Look up PATRIOT Act)
For citizens (US and others) outside the US, the government needs to decide if the cost of capturing a person alive is worth the trouble. Usually it is not.
Well, the feds can hope that NZ does not extradite (which they probably will not), because the US judge already mentioned that the whole proceedings are probably illegal.
Hint: You might not noticed, but the US has been turned into a police state the last 10 years. Nothing is safe against the government. Not even for citizens,
There is no privacy. The feds can get everything on you. The is no private property. Oops, somebody in this city did a drug deal (or mentioned terrorism, or did not like a federal official, well, that's also terrorism, right?), or at least one of our agents had a vision that it's so, so we have to confiscate your stuff.
There is no personal freedom, the US has statutes on the book to look up people indefinitely without a trial. At should you think you can run away, they'll tax you when you leave. Well, it's a well known legal practice, actually, only one example comes to mind, the Nazis robbed Jews that tried to emigrate, ...
But the US is also the guys that maintain death lists. That's another term that one usually associates with dictatorships and other bad guys. (Sure that the WTC did not contain at least one guy that might worthy a death penalty by Iranian legal standards, if so, I don't know why you are whinning, your own government considers civilian collateral damages okay.)
Well, the issue here is that Samsung learnt from Sony's downfall (which included beside other issues the interference between business units e.g. DRM crippled entertainment devices because Sony is also in music/movie business), and so Samsung business units basically run independently, so the screen producing division happily sells to Apple, while the mobile/tablet unit is battling Apple in court around the globe.
(Basically it's "if we are not hard on ourselves, the competition will be, and that will be even more painful")
Probably, the S2 managed this feat already for a good number of markets.
Another interesting tidbit, from a local network operator is that the S3 is the first phone beside Apple products, where they had preorders before the specs were released.
Apple has no other option but to lose ground to competitors. They were the first largely successful tablet on the market and grabbed a huge percentage of sales. As competition comes along Apple can't realistically hold onto its entire marketshare. That doesn't mean that they are failing or being driven out of the market, it's just the reality of the numbers.
Don't think that Apple can't compete just because they're spending as much time on legal maneuvers as they do on R&D. They're still the market leader in tablets, they're near the top in smart phones, and they're only going to branch out further into the new areas of consumer electronics. They may act like dicks a lot of the time but that doesn't mean being a dick and being competitive are mutually exclusive.
Well, they are quite a bit away from Android in smart phones, market share wise they are neader to Windows Phone than to Android, tablet-wise the same will basically happen, it will just take some time => it's basically Apple against all other manufacturers, again, offering not one model, that by religious decree has to fit everyone, Android tablets offer all kinds of form factors. From cheap to expensive, from small (= oversized phones) to huge (>10"), different types of display technology (no pun intended, there are people that are partial to certain solutions), and so on. How Apple is meant to compete here, while their biggest part supplier is also their main competitor?
Copy? Android is being developed since 2003, the T-Mobile G1 was released 2008 only a couple of months after the iPhone 3G (which was the first "smartphone" iPhone, the iPhone of 2007 not offering apps), so I guess Android was really quick at copying the stuff, you know, Google engineers had lined up at the Apple stores to get an iPhone 3G, and to save time, because the HTC Dream/T-Mobile G1 was in preproduction already, patched the copied features into the firmware by editing binary files directly, ...
If you want to claim copying, then I guess Apple as a company with a tradition of polishing things that they ripped off (you know, Apple did not invent the GUI, they ripped it off from Xerox) can also be accused of copying, I mean, other companies had mobiles with web browsers (Nokia, Win Mobile phones, Sidekicks, ...), apps (about the same set), touchscreens (Winmobiles) and so on. Furthermore most if not all companies sued by Apple are old hands in the mobile business, meaning that they together more or less developed the underlying standards (GSM, UMTS), investing in basic research and development, while Apple simply is a freeloader builting on it. Which leaves the FRAND patents as a problem => how can Apple get the same deal as most other companies. I mean they basically have no critical patents to cross license, ...
Well, nothing alarmist about this.
The police state is starting to encroach citizen rights for some time, wonder how long it will take till "breathing" will be considered suspicious.
Not really, in most countries you do not pay for receiving calls or texts.
Hint: Long before GPS, human beings navigated.
Fascinating aspect is that you need to be able to navigate traditionally to get license for sailing ships here around. It's nothing very difficult, it's just that it requires one guy (that is responsible for navigation) to keep his brain engaged. Personally I always found docking under sails without engine, potentially at night time to be way more nerve wrecking.
Well, technically they are at war, just in a very long cease-fire.
And yes, while there might have been cases where other countries have done bad stuff, no questions, the US have the problem of being seen as a hypocrite.
"The land of the Free", "The Good Guys", ... => well, in many cases it would be helpful if they could pin labels in big high contrast letters on the Americans on site "WE ARE THE GOOD GUYS. REALLY.".
The problem is that especially in the last decade, it has often become hard to find the goodness that the PR is still claiming.
Examples would include:
-) drone killings in foreign countries => collateral damage is accepted, and that does not even ask the question if the US administration can decide on it's own that they want someone dead, without a court, ... => how's that much different from a terrorist that want's to kill one person inside and bombs the whole house?
-) arrests without warrants, without the option to legal representation, => everything there in the PATRIOT act.
-) US agents wanted by international arrest warrants by supposedly friendly countries => yeah, sometimes the criminal (as the local law defines) energy of CIA agents can lead to embarrassing situations. (So if the local law does not apply, why do you expect Islamist terrorists to obey local US laws?)
-) Generally speaking, the US constitution has been turned into an optional guideline.
-) Ah, one last thing, the Supreme Court demands that capital punishment is handed down by objective criteria. Wonder how many service man have been sentenced to DR that commited multiple murders on the local population. Happened many times, and these guys usually get just a slap on the hand.
Well, actually, everything hinges on the decision if an IP address can identify a person. If so, and a number of data protection authorities in Europe tend to view it this way, it's illegal already to store IP-address containing logs. IPv6 is almost bound to be found person/device-identifying (because a part of the address is derived from the device and most non-PC devices do not allow for randomizing it), so it does not matter how you classify IPv4 addresses in the longterm, hence companies like Google have started to deal with local law and usually "anonymize" the IP address down to the C-class network address. Personally I think that's rather bullshitish, but they do try to somehow compromise.
Actually that's not the issue. ad networks like Google's doubleclick.net do track users on all domains that use ads from them.
So if you want to submarine on a party like Google, you need a good browser with a number of extensions (Adblock+, NoScript, Ghostery, ...) to prevent them from getting you on 3rd party sites. And you need not to use their services to prevent them from getting you explicitely.
The issue is, that item 1 is very hard to do in a completely user friendly way.
UPC in Austria has defacto static IP addresses for their cable customers. To change the IP you have to turn the modem off for a very long time, or ask the support to reassign you a new one.
It's basically static with the caveat "we reserve the right to change it for whatever reason".
I know that sounds stupid, so what's the problem? Move the office, import workers?
And you have a contract claiming that the CEO's office is rented to you AND you feel threatened by the guy. Actually, it would probably help if you could put a toy gun into his hand so you can make it believable that you were threatened, ...
Not exactly, it has just a different cultural set of what is dictated to you and what not.
There are quite a bit of places that make some European countries look employee hating, when you compare work place regulations.
OTOH, "work at will" is primarily American thing, in most places in Europe you cannot simply fire an employee without following rules.
And when we are at it, before anyone zeros in on the problems in Greece (and other places), please notice that the budget situation of some US states make Greece look like an A+ pupil, e.g. California.
And compared to tax dodge heavens like Nevada (which btw still does not share data with the IRS, right?), Switzerland is actually a champion of tax justice.
LOL, RLL harddiscs had capacities that are by today standards located somewhere between the CPU cache size and the RAM size of average smartphones.
(My first PC had a 20MB HDD)
Put simply, a modern hdd are about the same as a RLL hdd, as a Cadillac is similar to a tryke.