Earlier? How much less than 22 days would you have expected it? And they haven't said they'll cut it off after two months; they said they would "re-evaluate" the possible solutions.

According to their data, they *haven't* done anything wrong. But hey, why use data when you can grind an axe on imagined "facts", right?

The only design flaw they made was putting the gap in an obvious and touchable place, which SJ outright admitted (the whole "X marks the spot" bit). If they'd put that on the top, away from the palm of the hand, I don't think you'd see near the amount of problems.

Really? That's how you read it? 'Cuz the way I read it is that Apple was saying "There are tradeoffs any phone makes. Just because a Blackberry doesn't have a media storm about the antenna doesn't mean that the same problems don't affect them."

I mostly agree with you, but by what measure would you say they've "dragged their feet"? The thing's been out for less than a month. In internet time, that is dragging your feet; in the real world, that's an incredibly short turnaround to come up with a) reliable data for the phenomena; and b) a comprehensive solution to the issue.

Flash doesn't do any of that. H.264, the video codec Flash puts its own wrapper around, delivers all of that stuff. Remove the wrapper, and you've still got the same video stream. The issue isn't that the content is not available in an video format that the iPad can't play, it's that all the websites are slow to catch up on the shift. Give them time, however, and Flash will follow Realplayer into the history books.

The article (and most of the discussion) is about how the record company gives an artist a loan, makes that loan back by collecting 63% of every dollar they make on the album, while still requiring that the band pay back the full amount they loaned them out of the 37% and keeping the copyright over the works. If that's not a crooked scheme, I don't know what is.

I don't see it as a means to justify piracy, but I do see it as a means to question the RIAA when they push for draconian DRM & copyright laws in the name of "protecting the artists." Explain to me how purchasing an album legally helps the artist, if .63 for every dollar goes directly to the label, while the other 37 also goes to the label, except it's shuttled through the band's books first.

To put it in software terms, imagine a company that pays funds a group of employees to develop a software application. The company then turns around, sells it for $10mil, keeps $6.3mil off the top, and docks the pay of each of the employees that worked on it for promotion, expenses, sales channels, etc. PLUS docking them for the initial outlay of the cost of developing the software. And when it's all done, the employees don't get to keep the rights to redistribute or sell the software that they developed. Does that seem fair, even if the employees were dumb enough to sign a contract? Doesn't that seem like something labour laws were enacted to combat?

Wait.... the iPad isn't a mainstream hit? It sure looks like it is from here...

I guess that was the point I was trying to make. SJ is as much a "threat" to free software as RMS is. If everyone in the world released their software under the GPL, would we have a truly "free" software ecosystem? No, because would still be restrictions that you have to play nice with. That's OK, but I don't think its fair to villianize SJ on the grounds that Apple wants to control its own platform.

Objective-C is an open language and compilers are available through GCC and CLANG. Apple has had a history of always contributing their work on Obj-C back to GCC, and now with the LLVM project they're doing a whole new Open Source compiler infrastructure that is GCC-compatible, but produces better results. This is available to the Mac, Linux, Windows, *BSD, etc. In other words, yes, there is a threat that Apple will always wall off its Obj-C implementation. There are similar threats that Oracle could do the same to Java, or Larry Wall could do to Perl, or Linus could do the same to the Linux Kernel, which is to say that there is always the possibility, but right now all signs point to No.

I get your point - I certainly don't want Apple to have anywhere near the amount of control over mobile computing as Microsoft had over desktop computing. It's a different ballgame now, though. I don't think they chose Obj-C out of malice like, say, ActiveX or Microsoft's own Java VM that guaranteed a lock-in to the platform. I think they did it to maintain a certain amount of mobility in a fast-moving market. Apple chose Obj-C because they only wanted to support Obj-C. From their perspective, this is an important choice. It guarantees a certain level of consistency, and the ability to change their entire platform's direction on a moment's notice.

Personally, I think it's going in the other direction. Obj-C is a legacy from the NeXT days and its days are numbered at Apple, at least as the sole language they support on the iPhone. It would be entirely like Apple to introduce a new language that compiles down to the same binary as code written in Obj-C, but is easier to write or learn, or comes with more bells & whistles as a feature of the language itself (e.g. easier to write threaded code). They use Obj-C because that's what their Mac developers know and they wanted to capitalize on that knowledge to get the platform off the ground. Now that the iOS is well and firmly launched, look for them to start branching out to include more features to entice more developers to join.

I keep bringing back the LLVM project, but you should really look at the features that project supports if you want to see where Apple is heading. With that project, they can give devs the option to write code in e.g. Python, and it compiles down to the same bytecode as the ObjC implementation. They're not funding the development of that project out of the kindness of their hearts - I think they have a business direction wrapped up in those features, and they're just waiting for it to mature.

One might argue that Steve Jobs is no more a threat to "free software" than Richard Stallman. Stallman believes that the GPL is superior to, say, the BSD or MIT licenses; a stance that is primarily idealogical. The GPL is not as free as the BSD license, but that's OK. Some people like it better that way. You have the choice. If you look at it from a certain, limited point of view, the GPL can be seen as the "iPhone" of the open source licenses in that it restricts what you can, and cannot do, with the software.

If you take everything coming from Apple as coming from Steve Jobs himself, then we could just as easily point to liberally-licensed projects like WebKit (LGPL), LLVM (NCSA License) and CLANG (BSD), libdispatch (Apache) or launchd (Apache) as arguments against your assertion that Jobs is against free software. Even the Apple Public Source License is certified by the FSF as a true Open Source license.

Huh? That's one twisted way to look at it.

Licensing is the mechanism for regulation. A restaurant owner has to be licensed to operate, and if the quality of the food or sanitary measures falls below a certain level, that license can be revoked and the restaurant has to close. Licenses for cars allows for the regulation of those who have shown themselves competent enough to drive one. If you do something stupid, you get your license revoked and you can no longer drive. I have yet to hear of a credible story of the government revoking a driver's license for no reason. Care to link a source?

Licenses for guns make sense as well. Not having a firearms license and a registered firearm doesn't mean you're considered a felon, it simply means that you have not demonstrated a level of competence required to own a weapon.

But who am I to say anything? I think the "right to bear arms" is one of the most abused statutes in the Constitution. It was put there to address a practical problem - that of the King of England not allowing the citizens to bear arms, making a people's uprising against the military impossible. That was the days when there was a fairly level playing field between citizens and the military. Now, a popular uprising would not likely be done with guns, since type of firearm a citizen can get is significantly less powerful than the military's arsenal.

Hm. You have a very charming witticism, but I think you're wrong.

You can teach critical thinking, which is a major component in learning how to learn. True, some people are better at it than others, but it can be a skill you pick up. If not, everyone would be born understanding Plato and Wittgenstein.

Ha! If anything, PBS is more necessary now than it was before. With all of the big corporate entities buying and merging, your radio, newspaper and television media is increasingly controlled by fewer and fewer people. Or are you one of those people that think that corporations are more benevolent and altruistic than your government? At least in government there's always the threat that a politician will lose his or her job if they displease the people. With a corporate entity, they don't have to appease anyone as long as they make money.

Taxpayer-funded national broadcasters, like ABC (Australia), BBC or CBC can be critical of the government in a way that corporate broadcasters cannot be critical of their parent company.

A quick Google search turned up some ASCAP asshattery:

http://blogs.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=blog.view&friendId=51550622&blogId=510343864 http://www.woodpecker.com/writing/essays/phillips.html http://www.synthzone.com/ubbs/Forum37/HTML/019179.html http://www.woodpecker.com/writing/essays/royalty-politics.html http://games.slashdot.org/story/09/12/16/0940232/ASCAP-Seeks-Licensing-Fees-For-emGuitar-Hero-Arcadeem?from=rss