At heart, the synchronization rights comes from the basic copyright itself. The copyright holder has the statutory legal right to prohibit or authorize any particular use of the song. However, the copyright statute itself does not distinguish between whether the music is copied by itself or synchronized with a motion picture. Both are equally prohibited without the consent of the copyright holder.

Over the years, as publishers tried to maximize their earnings and simplify licensing procedures, they created the idea of synchronization rights, and wrote those into their licensing agreements. So, for example, anybody who pays appropriate fees to a licensing agency such as BMI or ASCAP is buying the right to play the songs they are licensed to provide, but when you read the fine print, you will see that the publisher/owner of the copyright is licensing, through ASCAP to you, only the right to play the song itself in your bar or wherever, not the right to do anything else with it. The license is carefully written to not grant you the license to do other things with the music, such as uploading it, redistributing it to others, or synchronizing it with a motion picture and using it for that purpose. To do that, they sell you a different license which DOES include the synchronization rights, but doesn't include stuff in the ASCAP license.

Well, actually I use the earphones AND lock the keyboard. The top button does not hang up the call when the earphones are in use. You are correct, though, that the top button does hang up the call when the earphones aren't plugged in. My other workaround is just pressing the home key and opening Notes or some other simple, quiet app; that way it doesn't really matter if any keys are pressed.

The antenna issue hasn't bothered me a bit. But this problem affects me every day. Since I got my iPhone, I haven't had one day where at least one call wasn't accidentally disconnected, muted, or interrupted by touchtones as my ear hit various buttons on the keypad. There are a couple of workarounds (use the earphones, or lock the keyboard), but those take time to establish at the beginning of the call.

My bet is that this can be fixed with a simple software update, but I really don't see how Apple could possibly not have found this issue in their testing. Some reports I've seen suggest that the problem goes away if you put it in a case of some sort, so maybe Apple only tested it with those silly cases that made it look like a 3G when they sent it out in the wild for testing, and the case kept it from having the problem.

And it seems to me that they could combine the proximity sensor input with the accelerometer and gyroscope inputs. When you hold the phone within a certain range of angles AND the proximity sensor reads X, then turn off the touchscreen.

Well, the other way to look at it is that they used private e-mail to avoid violating the law prohibiting use of public e-mail accounts for conducting political business. Most folks who work for the White House have, for example, 2 cell phones. One is paid for by the taxpayer and is used when conducting official government business. The other is paid for by the party or by a campaign committee and is used when conducting political business which the government employee, by law, must do in their "private" time and using private, not government, resources.

Since the law expressly allows federal employees at that level to remain involved with the political process, so long as they don't use public resources to do so, I don't see how they can function without having a separate e-mail account just as they have a separate cell phone. The only legal issue is whether they are using that separate e-mail account properly for political business, or whether they are improperly using it to conduct official government business, which would be a violation of the law for circumventing the archiving and disclosure laws.

And yes, I took the same position with the last President as I do with this one, even though I really don't care for the current President.

I was always fond of "chaotic neutral" alignment, myself...

That's fine, but.... would you say the same thing if they were releasing the names of people who had signed a petition IN FAVOR of gay marriage, in response to a public records request from Fred "God Hates Fags" Phelps? How about a list of people signing a petition in favor of maintaing or increasing abortion rights?

I think the names are and should be public, but that has nothing to do with the issue for or against which they were campaigning. I'd say the same thing about petitions for any subject at all, not just those who are campaigning "to take away other peoples' rights." And, I recognize that we have a secret ballot for a reason, because sometimes there are those willing to do violence to accomplish political ends, and the safest way to protect our political rights from them is to ensure that they can't identify those who would vote them out of power.

I understand that line of argument. But it's not what my comment was addressing. The post by LabmdaWolf to which I replied was lamenting the change from the prior California system to the current open primary system. The prior California system was not the system you describe, but the classic party primary, then general election, first-past-the-post election. Had LamdaWolf complained that the new primary system doesn't make matters any better for the third parties, that might be a legitimate complaint. But LamdaWolf's actual complaint was that the new system was itself worse for third parties than the previous system, and that's not true.

It is simply not the case now that in the previous California system there was any common, regular, or even (to the best of my knowledge) once-in-a-blue-moon practice, in elections for state and national offices, for "moderate" third parties to be chosen in preference over extremists from the two major parties. The third party candidates were not, as a practical matter, viable before, and they remain, as a practical matter, not viable now. Changing the form of the election to the open primary did not change that.

Well, you omit 2 crucial facts about California. First, none of those 3rd parties getting onto the "general election" ballot had any chance of winning to begin with, correct? Second, ALL of those 3rd parties can participate equally in the new primary election, a non-partisan primary which results in the 2 highest vote getters, regardless of party, going to the general election.

Thus, if a 3rd party has sufficient support to have any chance of prevailing in the general election, it must certainly have sufficient support to come in first or second in the primary election, yes? Or are you seriously arguing that a 3rd party might be able to garner 51% of the vote when running against the 2 major party candidates, but can't manage to get about 30% of the people to vote for it in a wide-open primary election?

Not to go all insensitive clod on you, but.... When I was a kid, a member of my immediate family passed away. The newspaper printed the obituary and noted (against my dad's instructions) that the funeral would be in another town, in a distant part of the state. When we returned home several days later, we found that burglars had broken into the house while we were gone. Eventually it was confirmed that the burglars had read the obituaries, saw we would be out of town, and used that information to decide to rob us. So, there are very GOOD reasons for people who are doing nothing wrong to also not want the world at large to know their location.

I think AT&T is the main problem, not Apple. But what ticks me off is this happened LAST TIME, when they rolled out the 3G. Do their network people not plan ahead for such things? What's IS Apple's fault, though, is the fact that I have to keep re-entering my cell phone account information (cell #, billing zip, and last 4 of SSN) EVERY SINGLE TIME. The Apple page ought to be smart enough to queue that information and let the computers keep trying AT&T, then getting back to me once it finally has the information from the AT&T servers it needs for me to tell it what plan I want to select, etc. Seriously, it would have been nice if you could have pre-applied for the pre-application, so that they could have selected a much smaller database which could handle the load, and Apple could have already had on their servers the data they need about my account to process my freaking order.

Says who? Prove it. What tax dollars, how many, and to whom? There was a lot of companies in the late 90s went belly up and declared bankruptcy after laying a lot of fiber across the country. I'm not aware of them receiving any subsidies. And I'm sure not aware of any cell phone companies receiving significant subsidies. I seem to recall that most of the airwave frequencies used by cell phones was auctioned off by the federal government, so there's not even a "subsidy" there.

Well, the idea behind open source companies is that the software is free, and the company pays for support. Thus, no licensing fees for the development, and ONLY the support costs associated with being able to call and talk to a support personnel. That's where the savings comes in to the end-user client.

I continue to fail to see how it is "bait & switch" when a company decides to stop offering one plan, after several years, and change to offering a different pricing plan that it thinks will better meet its and its consumers needs. No contract you ever signed with them guaranteed that you would ALWAYS be able to buy unlimited access at $30. They never guaranteed that unlimited access at $30 would be available forever. Me, I've been using my iPhone pretty extensively for almost 2 years now, and I've run up a grand total of 3.8 GB. That's 2GB a year for me, and AT&T's service will now be $5 per month less and give me 2GB per month. I'm coming out ahead of the game here. I'm glad AT&T has decided to change their plan to charge me less for the same amount of service that I am actually consuming now. AND they've announced this change just before release of the new iPhone version. That's the exact opposite of bait & switch. "Hey, folks, before you sign a new 2 year contract to get the new iPhone, we're telling you about this new service terms that you'll be signing up for, so you can make an informed decision." That's truth-in-advertising, not bait & switch.

You are correct, of course. I misunderstood my first reading of the article. Though I wonder... is it possible to change tab order or close a tab with javascript? I actually do use tab order to help keep me organized. Tab 1 is whatever I'm currently surfing, for pleasure or for work. Tab 2 is my e-mail account, tab 3 is FB. Anything after that will be tabs I've opened by choosing "open in new tab" when clicking on a link, and they almost always get closed after I read the article, though occasionally one of those tabs will stick around on, say, imdb, for awhile if I anticipate using it a lot. This pretty regular tab order should then help me avoid this particular exploit.

No, the attack knows what site you had open in tab 1, and replaces the page that had been in there with another page which appears to be from the SAME site. It will have all the right logos and so forth, and will says something like "Your Facebook session has timed out. Please log in again." ... with a very normal looking log-in button right below it. Except that you're not actually on Facebook in that tab anymore. In other words, RTFA. This is a potentially very sophisticated attack which could dupe even folks who are pretty careful about always entering web addresses directly to avoid phishing attempts.