They charge what the market will bear. Just because the market is comprised of idiots who dont understand how badly they're being ripped off doesnt mean that the inkjet companies are colluding. people selling goods often charge a lower per-unit price for larger quantities and amounts. Its real. go to the supermarket and check out the price per ounce labels on different sizes of canned goods or ketchup. That the 'oh ink tech is super expensive' explanation is patently bullshit is enough. bullshit price-fixing conspiracy-theories are totally unnecessary.

well, none of this matters without a Bambleweeny 57 Sub-Meson Brain.

who the fuck modded this insightful? First of all, your analogies as to scientific peer review are, well, not analogous. Both the 9/11 conspiracy nuts and the your individual support department are limited subsets of larger groups - people who have investigated 9/11 and support departments across the nation, respectively. the whole point of scientific peer review is to prevent the exact situations you have described. If you think that the scientific community is one big monolithic entity that is capable of coherent self-interested behavior like that, well, you're fucking retarded. They're just as petty as the rest of us, and if scrambling for funding isnt enough reason to pick apart and disprove a competing scholar's work, if only for the recognition, then i don't know what is. It is a very adversarial, if cordial, system, and its a miracle when there's a scientific consensus about anything.

you say you've looked into it for yourself. well, congratulations. maybe you should also consider the possibility that you don't actually understand a fucking thing about climatology. The only thing reputable science doesnt agree on is the timescale of global warming, so hey, maybe you won't live to be proved a moron.

no, the phone was in a case that made it look, at first glance, like it was a 3g/3gs. But it wouldnt boot, and had noticeably different buttons on the side, and a flash on the back. with all the proper holes cut in the case. If i found a phone and couldn't get it to boot to find out whose it was, try to get it back to them, i'd definitely start looking at it more closely, and i'd certainly notice an iphone with a flash. and then take the case off, and then, wow, that's not an iphone i've seen. This would happen in maybe, what, 5 minutes? Clearly, the finder was a tool, and once he discovered what he had he started trying to shop it after making a perfunctory pass at returning it to apple.

I'm not entirely sure why 'contact HTC/Apple' is reduced to 'call nameless drone in a call center and decide that's good' in your mind. to be honest, i'd be operating more on a 'get as far away from the unreleased apple hardware as possible' strategy (once i'd satisfied my own curiosity at least). Apple isnt nice about leaks. I prob would have gone to nearest apple store, asked to speak to the most senior manager in private, said 'ok, i'm sure you're not cleared for this either, but here,' shoved it at him, and been rid of it. And legally, there are fairly well established rules for determining whether or not an employee can be determined to be speaking on behalf of the corporation, when determining agency. I dont think even the general manager of an apple store would fit that bill, but he or she would likely have the ability to get someone who did on the phone with little fuss.

um... yes. If i found an HTC Evo, on the ground in a bar, i would contact HTC. Even playing along with the idiotic assumption that a pre-release tester device would belong to the individual engineer or tester, this is still the most expedient means of returning it to its owner. As a pre-release device, the manufacturer would be remiss if they couldn't track down exactly who had had possession of it last. And no tester will be given ownership of a pre-release device. that's just silly. Maybe, MAYBE, members of the board might be outright given units from the first production run. But no major company, and certainly not apple, who as was posted on here the other day, fired an employee for showing Woz, in good-faith, mind you, the 3g ipad before he was supposed to, no major company would transfer ownership of a tester device. because the owner of a chattel can do whatever the fuck he pleases with it. why would apple, HTC or any other company do that?

Well, yeah, but its way funner to rant about how google is evil and ignoring fair use without understanding what is and is not fair use.

haha, there *may* have been some hyperbole in there. ok, there obviously was. mainly its a sort of low level feeling that i'm being disrespected. At the atlas-buddies' urging, i used bing for a week, and just got sick of having to bully it into giving me what i wanted every time. the tendency of bing to give precedence to links selling me things rather than informing me about things got old.

I'm well aware that i'm not exactly in the majority with the paid search click-through and i wholly understand that it facilitates my preferred search engine's existence. I dont watch commercials on tv, either. shrug.

Yeah, I think part of my problem with this is the blending of the paid search and user experience arguments. I've got a couple buddies at atlas who can go on about attribution for longer than is really credible, but dont seem to understand my 'but the actual search experience on bing is nearly unbearable to me' response. I know (from getting almost immediately lost when they get into the behind the scenes workings of it on their end) that the intricacies of paid search are more complicated than i really have a handle on. However:

I rarely if ever click on a paid link, and cannot think of any instance off the top of my head where a paid link looked more appropriate than one of the top organic search results. I occasionally see a word or two in a paid link that might have improved original search - so i refine my search.

Search is a very strange business to be in. the user and the customer aren't the same person. I will use which ever search engine gives me the best results, not which ever one has the least sleazy billing method for paid links. Really, it strikes me that Search is itself a sleazy business, insofar as it necessarily can only make money by enticing the user to click not on the result it deems to be the most relevant to the user's search criteria, but rather to the result that has paid to be displayed in conjunction with the user's search criteria.

I love my buddies at Atlas dearly, but I'm not their customer, and as such, that they provide better service and value to their customers than google really couldnt concern me less. I find Bing's search engine inferior.

Is this google's business model, or is the the general public being stupid with browsers, and in what way is this unique to Google? What about bing will make my internet illiterate (i still can't convince him that he doesnt need to double-click links) father decide that, unlike the google search pane in firefox, the bing search pane in IE isn't for entering urls?

nothing. obviously. and as Bing corners the market on people not internet skilled enough to know better, i have a feeling that this particular behavior will tend to skew toward it over Google.

This seems to me to be the key issue here: do you know how to search for what you want, or do you not? Do you want a decision engine or a search engine? I'm actually sort of surprised that more hasnt been made of the 'decision engine' business. Microsoft seems pretty up front about their 'we're making this search engine for people who either dont know how or are too lazy to properly seek out the information they want' strategy. And in a way, i actually support this. I was back home over christmas, helpin dad with some internets, and watching him fail to use google properly was really quite painful. he should be using bing. However, I, too, will continue using the search engine that both works and respects my intelligence.

actually, yes, they did. read their answer on groklaw. they liken what they did to swapping internet browsers, something clearly not part of the core copyrighted work. they explicitly deny that their modification was of apple's copyrighted work, or at least that if they are guilty than so is mozilla and any other company writing 3rd party software that replaces functionality bundled with the operating system.

It is affected, but not permitted, by 117. 117a(1) provides for the essential step allowance for adaptation of a computer program. 117b allows the resale of those adaptations only with the authorization of the copyright owner. Pystar did not obtain apple's authorization, their behavior was infringement as a matter of law, as reflected by summary judgment.

actually its not that its vaguely defined so much as it is itself vague by nature. It is inherently a balance between contrary interests that must be evaluated on a case by case basis. Congress amended 117 in 1998, to its current form, setting out what are essentially fair-use exceptions. Unlike with art, however, the uses of computer programs excepted can be very narrowly defined, as they are in section a.

here we agree. a business model where pystar is facilitating the end-user modifying his or her own copy of OS X seems like it should pass muster.

actually its not stupid, the car analogy is just flawed. We're talking about copyright, not strict property. Its not like adding a supercharger scoop on a car and then reselling it, its like replacing the first chapter of a book with a new and different one, then reselling it as the original That is different than selling that different first chapter as 'hey this makes the book way better, read it first'

by altering copyrighted code, pystar has created a derivative work, and the right of the copyright owner to distribute derivative works is not affected by fair use. Given that modification of software if it is necessary in order to use it is fair use for a non-distributing end-user, it may be that some future hackintosh business can exist if it merely facilitates the end-user making the modifications themselves.

No. 'necessary step' has only been applied to cases where, for example, a corporation commissions a computer system from a consultant as a work for hire, then has a falling out with the consultant. The consultant later brought suit against the corporation when they hired someone else to continue modifying the source code, to fix bugs and to make it compatible with the next iteration of windows. That is what the exception is for. So if you had yourself modified OS X to run on non-apple hardware and apple then sued your for copyright infringement, you would be able to rely on 117(a)1.

This is not what is happening with Pystar. Pystar is creating a new work, modifying Apple's copyrighted code, and distributing it without their permission. To be clear, 117(a) is concerned with the making of additional copies by the owner of a copy, 117(b) is concerned with transfer of these copies. copies of copies may only be transferred with the original copy, as a part of the original owner transferring all of his ownership of that copy. Modified copies may not be transferred except with the permission of the copyright owner, in this case, Apple. On this point, Pystar's only defense is arguing that what they do to OS X isnt actually a modification, which they made in their response to motion for summary judgment. It strikes me a ludicrous to compare tinkering with the inner workings of the OS and how it boots to swapping out internet browsers. One is clearly part of the internal workings of the OS, the other is an end-user applications running on the OS. I think it likely that infringement will be found as a matter of law on summary judgement.

you don't really understand the law at issue here. sale/license is irrelevant. If you recall the recent AutoCAD case in Washington, the courts have found the sale of a copy to be a SALE. Though in that case Autodesk was found to be under no requirement to honor a transfer of license, which would be required to receive updates to the transferred copy.

This is not a question of direct transfer of a copy though. Pystar modifies OS X in order to make it run on its hardware. you say this is allowable under the 'necessary step' exception. It is not. The courts have allowed modification under 'necessary step' for correcting bugs, and for ensuring a piece of software will work on upgraded systems. 17 USC 117 (b) however, prohibits the transfer of such modified copies without the authorization of the copyright owner. This is designed to preserve the copyright holder's right to produce derivative works. what pystar is doing is analogous to buying copies of a book, unbinding it, replacing the first chapter with one they wrote, rebinding it, then selling it as the original work. Apple has not authorized Pystar to transfer the modified copies of OS X, therefore 17 USC 117 is not a defense.