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Comment Re:They aren't doing this to snub the little guys. (Score 1) 146

That works if and only if Apple tells everyone that's what they're doing. While it may be likely based on past experience, you cannot safely assume a company will do anything in particular.

Innovation often doesn't come from the big guys. Experience so far with the App Store has certainly shown that. There's no good reason for Apple to only look at large publishing operations for input.

The Courts

SCOTUS Nominee Kagan On Free Speech Issues 664

DesScorp submitted one of a few stories I've seen about Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan, whose confirmation hearings are supposed to start today (despite being a formality, given that she has the votes pretty much locked up). "SCOTUS nominee Elena Kagan hasn't left much of a paper trail during her legal career, which may make gauging her ideas and opinions somewhat difficult. But there are some positions she has made clear statements on, among them, pornography and 'hate speech.' In a 1993 University of Chicago seminar on the subject, Kagan argued that the government wasn't doing enough about the spread of porn or hate speech. She argued that new approaches were needed to fight their spread, as well as taking a fresh look at old approaches, such as obscenity laws. Kagan included herself among 'those of us who favor some form of pornography and hate speech regulation,' and told participants that 'a great deal can be done very usefully' to crack down on such evils."
Censorship

ACTA Is Backta, New Round of Talks Start Today 73

An anonymous reader writes "Negotiations on the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement resume today in Lucerne, Switzerland, with the ninth round of talks. The Toronto Star highlights the mounting opposition to the deal from developing world countries such as India and China, while Michael Geist has posted a video of a recent lecture that provides background on the agreement and where things currently stand."
Education

Khan Academy Delivers 100,000 Lectures Daily 213

eldavojohn writes "Working from the comfort of his home, Salman Khan has made available more than 1,500 mini-lectures to educate the world. Subjects range from math and physics to finance, biology, and current economics. Kahn Academy amounts to little more than a YouTube channel and one very devoted man. He is trying to provide education in the way he wished he had been taught. With more than 100,000 video views a day, the man is making a difference for many students. In his FAQ he explains how he knows he is being effective. What will probably ensure his popularity (and provide a legacy surpassing that of most highly paid educators) is that everything is licensed under Creative Commons 3.0. He only needs his time, a $200 Camtasia Recorder, an $80 Wacom Bamboo Tablet, and a free copy of SmoothDraw3. While the lecturing may not be quite up to the Feynman level, it's a great augmenter for advanced learners, and a lifeline for those without much access to learning resources."
Cellphones

Porting Lemmings In 36 Hours 154

An anonymous reader writes "Aaron Ardiri challenged himself to port his classic PalmOS version of Lemmings to the iPhone, Palm Pre, Mac, and Windows. The porting was done using his own dev environment, which creates native C versions of the game. He liveblogged the whole thing, and finished after only 36 hours with an iPhone version and a Palm Pre version awaiting submission, and free versions for Windows and Mac available on his site."

Comment Charge for tethering is a complete rip-off now (Score 5, Insightful) 514

The ridiculous part is that they're still charging a fee to enable tethering. That sort of makes sense with an "unlimited" plan. Presumably, the plan price was based on an estimate of how much data you'd use. Since tethering will obviously drive up usage, that assumption is no longer valid. (This highlights the absurdity of so-called "unlimited" plans that aren't really.)

But now that you are paying for actual use, there's no excuse to charge anything for tethering. You've paid for 2 GB (or whatever), and it shouldn't matter how it gets used. If you use more, you pay more.

I'd really like to see a regulatory authority question that charge.

Comment Changes affect all AT&T customers (Score 1) 670

If you actually read the AT&T press release you'll find that this applies to all smartphone data plans. It's not just about iPhones. They're basically changing the iPad plans to match.

As of right now, Apple's iPad product page still refers to unlimited data plans. It's hard to imagine AT&T didn't notify Apple that this is coming, but it almost looks like they don't know.

Software

IT Infrastructure As a House of Cards 216

snydeq writes "Deep End's Paul Venezia takes up a topic many IT pros face: 'When you've attached enough Band-Aids to the corpus that it's more bandage than not, isn't it time to start over?' The constant need to apply temporary fixes that end up becoming permanent are fast pushing many IT infrastructures beyond repair. Much of the blame falls on the products IT has to deal with. 'As processors have become faster and RAM cheaper, the software vendors have opted to dress up new versions in eye candy and limited-use features rather than concentrate on the foundation of the application. To their credit, code that was written to run on a Pentium-II 300MHz CPU will fly on modern hardware, but that code was also written to interact with a completely different set of OS dependencies, problems, and libraries. Yes, it might function on modern hardware, but not without more than a few Band-Aids to attach it to modern operating systems,' Venezia writes. And yet breaking this 'vicious cycle of bad ideas and worse implementations' by wiping the slate clean is no easy task. Especially when the need for kludges isn't apparent until the software is in the process of being implemented. 'Generally it's too late to change course at that point.'"
Music

Submission + - How can a business end wrongful ASCAP shakedown? (viewnews.com)

Logic Bomb writes: A local coffee shop was recently forced to stop performances by unsigned musicians because ASCAP and other licensing groups insist the shop owes thousands of dollars in fees. The fees are a preemptive shakedown, supposedly owed because performers at the shop might play someone's copyrighted work. Despite the shop owner's efforts to clarify or negotiate, the licensing groups aren't budging. Who can a small business owner turn to for help in this situation? It doesn't really seem like an issue for the EFF. The ACLU seems like a possibility, but this problem isn't on their list of key issues. Anyone dealt with this before?

Comment Asimov himself said nothing happens in Foundation (Score 3, Interesting) 283

These are absolutely some of my very favorite books. But as I recall, Asimov's own foreword to the original trilogy makes the idea of a movie series seem pretty stupid. He started Foundation as a series of short stories. Years later, when a publisher was trying to persuade him to make a longer Foundation work, Asimov had to go back and re-read the material. He reports that, as he sat there reading, he kept waiting for something to happen in the story. He was right (of course): Foundation is mostly people have discussions. What kind of movie can you make out of that?

Comment Re:Maybe it's just me (Score 1) 285

My understanding is that one of the primary issues in a civil case is whether there's even an issue that the court can decide. I believe one can ask a court to make a preemptive ruling. However, most of the time if there isn't actually a dispute the court won't hear the case. And since the TSA changed its policies, there's no longer a dispute.

Now, if the detained individual wants to file his own lawsuits for damages and that sort of thing, that's a different issue.

Comment Re:Large scale Apple managed LAN? (Score 4, Informative) 460

There are many huge Mac deployments: universities, school districts with 1-to-1 laptop programs where every student gets a laptop, Google (thousands of Macs), the Fountainbleau hotel in Miami, and more. Apple gear isn't always used to manage everything: most of these sites are probably using Active Directory or some UNIX-based LDAP service for account management. But there are plenty of large Mac deployments out there.

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