delackner

Anyone who has purchased any IAP content at all has an IAP receipt that you have access to even across installs.

This leaves the problem that v>1 first time buyers will have to IAP something immediately after buying the app, kind of pushes you to have a free trial mode.

Hopefully apple will eventually introduce time-limited free trials and upgrade options. If their history with iOS and Mac versioning is any hint, the current simple system is not a religious thing for them and they will listen if they see enough negative feedback. Which we should provide.

Can't believe no one has mentioned that the TV option does not include AMC, HBO, ESPN, Disney Channel, TNT, CNN, Cartoon Network. (List from the Verge).

So the only channel it has that I actually would watch is The Daily Show, I mean Comedy Central, which I can watch on the net for free (in a much better extended length version).

Spreading real modern internet infrastructure to the masses in the US though, yes that is a very positive thing.

The USER intent is to have their listing seen by as many people as possible. If the courts decide that the listing site can block access to such public listings they have been entrusted with, I don't know how the law needs to change, but the current legal situation is bad for the general public, bad for commerce, and bad for progress.

Why not take this idea in a more comprehensive direction: a donation supported site with API to register your app as consuming specific mime-types, so any compliant app wanting a producer of emails for instance, could grab a list from this site and then ask the user which they prefer, out of those apps they have installed (since those apps would all phone home to the server and say "user foo@bar.com has installed app Y on device with MAC ID M".

Could someone explain what they disagree with? Do you disagree that databases of public facts are not copyrightable? With the idea that craigslist's investment in their system is irrelevant compared to the value of their userbase? With the idea that craigslist's main success is just being lucky?

Mods please re-title to make it clear this is an app in the store

Spent millions gathering? Two basic problems with that mindset. First, spending money to assemble a database of public facts does not magically give you a right to protect your investment in an uncopyrightable asset. Second, I don't know what millions you are talking about since craiglist's only asset is the users, and the users are just a result of tremendous network effects. They had a great idea and got very lucky, but gathering their massive userbase had nothing to do with spending money.

There is no protection for a database of public facts under US law, contrary to say the UK. Craiglist's data is all public facts.

I always just blamed the systemic paralysis of sf bay government caused by poor design of the intersection between public power and private power over the commons.

When a person has seen only a single sociopolitical system, it is easy to just shrug and say "it just is this way.". It is often only after seeing the totally different systems active in other societies first-hand that it becomes brilliantly clear that not only are the wrongs back home unacceptable, but that the other society you have found also possesses its own share of injustices that the locals are indifferent to. It is not wrong to be enraged at the suffering and petty evil everywhere. It is simply uncommon and stressful to try to do something since a single individual's effort may seem like that of an ant.

If someone had all cancer cells in their bloodstream effectively destroyed, could this indefinitely prevent metastis?

> Dropbox and Box are file syncing/backup services, and MegaUpload is a filesharing service. Both types have different legitimate use-cases.

What are you talking about? Here is a dropbox public link to a photo: https://www.dropbox.com/s/q1rw9irkhyn400d/Boston%20City%20Fl...

Just as with megaupload, any person with that link is able to download that file. The paying customer is the person hosting the file, and just as with dropbox, anyone who only has a small volume of files doesn't have to pay anything.

I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of people are using dropbox, google drive, and any number of other companies today for EXACTLY the kind of piracy that megaupload stands accused of. The main difference seems to be that those other companies are not as successful and try very hard to present a public face that emphasizes their other features, like file syncing.

It isn't inherently terrible or good. It just is. We will change, and it will change with us. Your example is poorly chosen though, as the current model of standard parent behavior is to just sit there with a big SLR taking photos of the kid playing with the other parent, or playing alone, since how can you play while you are busy using a camera? Sure you can say people SHOULD be present all the time, but the reality is people want to take pictures of their kids.

Most people in the US today have chronic sleep deprivation. Just because most people are used to not being healthy doesn't mean it is normal (over the course of human history).

All I can say is, this makes for a very easy competitive environment for companies that are smart enough to grab up all those foreign-contaminated rejects.

You have made a few simple basic errors of data that lead to some very incorrect conclusions.

The bulk of the US population live in areas that have population densities at or even sometimes (NYC) above European levels. The entire state of california (not exactly high density at all, given the bulk of the state is just open space) has an average population density slightly higher than Spain, a country that managed to build a national High speed rail network.

The entire eastern sea-board is at roughly european density levels as well. No one is suggesting we build a bullet train that goes to North Dakota.

As for "not being profitable for another 20-30 years", you are arguing from a very short-term mindset about national infrastructure, but also you are pre-assuming that infrastructure should be directly profitable. This is not a commonly agreed idea, rather there is fierce disagreement between fiscal conservatives who think the government shouldn't do ANYTHING, and those (like most of europe) who believe the government should undertake large "public-good" projects precisely because they are not directly profitable, but they are PUBLIC GOODS.

Universal health care is also "not profitable" directly, but the benefit to society of having everyone live decades longer is massive increased economic output, to say nothing of increased quality of life.

The network effect of having efficient rail transportation balloons the entire economy. This is why governments pay for big infrastructure: everyone benefits and the direct revenue and direct costs are high enough to be uninteresting for investors.

Its funny you mention the train being late, and crowds. When I lived in NYC, traveling on the train during non-peak times was so stressful I avoided it like the plague. Always late. Noisy as hell. Smells like a cesspool. During rush-hour the train might stop in the middle of a tunnel, and the lights go out, the whole time it is not even air conditioned. I visited NYC 2 months ago after a few years away, and the floating filth in the tracks was still there of course. My Japanese travel companion who had never been in NYC before took only two train rides (at non-peak hours) to declare a strong negative impression of the NYC subway.

Maybe you live in another NYC where there are no trains? Or you just drive everywhere, but you don't mind that it takes an hour stuck in traffic to get out of Manhattan on a friday evening. In Tokyo it takes about the same amount of time to travel any distance whether it is 9am or 3pm, since the trains actually work.

If you live in a commuter suburb of Tokyo and ride the train at rush hour, yes you will not be happy. But why commute? I live 8 minutes' walk from Shibuya station and during the day perhaps 1 or two people walk by every few minutes. At night even fewer. Cars drive so slowly on my side-street that you cannot hear them at all.

As for taking two hours to "actual green stuff" man are you ever exaggerating. Even without LEAVING the city I know of 3 different nature preserves that range from 20 to 30 minutes away DOOR TO DOOR. If you hop on a train for 30 minutes, you hit Tamagawa, a breathtaking open expanse of river and low brush. Want forest? How about Takao-san, a breathtaking natural space with tons of hiking trails and a mountain you can climb easily in an afternoon. 44 minutes west of Shinjuku.

If you hate crowds, just avoid them. "Living in Tokyo is not fun" says more about your unhappiness with the rhythm of life you have created for yourself than it says about the city.

Home prices in the bay area have skyrocketed 10 to 15 times beyond the rate of inflation over the past 30 years. This has pushed the renters who used to live there further and further out, or forced their standard of living ever further downward.

I disagree with the idea that existing homeowners have some right prevent developers from building tall housing nearby on PRIVATE property. You own your land, I own mine, and as long as I'm not doing anything toxic, your rights do not extend into my space. These anti-development policies force people to live far away from their workplace, turning most of the bay area into a massive wasteland of highways and parking lots.

A few incredibly lucky and selfish people can deny the right of the many to have the dignity of affordable housing, but it is not just. It is shameful.

As an aside, despite artificially enforced low-density, Berkeley and Palo Alto have depressingly few vibrant public spaces. Sure there's trees along the street, but most of the parks are just little tiny bits of grass and a few scraggly trees sandwiched between two or three active roads. You'd think low density might include huge open parks, but no, it is mostly just big houses with private yards and lots of parking lots to deal with how far apart everything is.

Contrast: In Tokyo, since there is almost nothing preventing you from doing whatever you like with your own land, there is a wide mix of different housing to choose from, at all different price-points. I can afford to live smack in the middle of everything, near the biggest park and shopping area, also a few minutes walk from a major train station. I also have a spectacular view that goes all the way to the horizon for about 160 degress.

It is all about perspective. Compared to London, Paris, Tokyo, New York, most of the bay area is incredibly low density. Huge chunks of SF, Oakland, Berkeley, Palo Alto, Redwood City are 1 or 2 story single-family homes with huge lots. Regulations prevent even a modest 10 story condo.

You don't have to make it into a false dichotomy of LA-like insane urban sprawl vs. the current situation.

This cannot be stressed enough. Benzodiazepines are insidious because people get used to taking them when they have trouble sleeping, and when they try to stop, they cannot sleep properly for a very long time. I have seen this happen with two of my friends, and it is painful just to watch. Not being able to sleep is a crippling enough horror that people go right back to consuming. To paraphrase Fight Club: NO, what you NEED is some exercise, good food, and to relax.

That looks fun. Would be really useful if each list had a field to "cue" a youtube url that was not in the crate already. That way you can browse youtube in a separate tab to find a video, then cue it up and start the crossfade.

This doesn't make any sense at all. You could easily defeat such a countermeasure by putting an IR filter over your lens. Dunno about camcorders, but usually DSLRs have such filters built-in to prevent IR from contaminating the sensor's input.

Maybe the actors visit a few of the largest markets. But they aren't going to go on a year-long press-junket for the premieres everywhere, regardless of how much of a delay there is. They are working on the next film. [edit: I wonder if this might be why so many movie-release events in Tokyo feature B-grade local celebrities as the spokesperson for the film. None of the actors could be bothered to fly over].

Why not just have ONE worldwide premiere, and journalists from various countries can cover that single meaningful event?

Japan is a huge market for international film releases, so some of the actors do show up once in a while, but not often and certainly not for most movies.

There are popular television shows that cover all the current Hollywood releases of the week, including those without any scheduled local release date. Lack of media attention is not the problem.

Inertia, fear of change, and localism (who cares about the rest of the world?) is the problem, but it is slowly but surely getting better.

Fansubs (japanese subtitles) of foreign movie releases? Where is this scene? I can't watch an english language movie with Japanese friends until the J release without J subtitles.

I'm not sure how you got the idea that I was trying to argue about what copyright LAW says. I was simply making the case that, just as with quantum mechanics, nothing about copyright is based on common sense, so people need to be careful to be aware of this bias when they think about these issues, especially when a lot of people discussing this have moral / philosophical positions that confuse their view of the legal standing of the plaintiffs. "That doesn't seem right" is a question of legislation policy, not of interpreting existing law.

I'm no expert, but you are not comparing similar cases. It is in the interest of an operating system / tools vendor to give their customers blanket permission to use their APIs with the platform they are selling, otherwise they have an unattractive product (buy our computer and write software for it, but we own whatever you write!)

Google's case is different: They have created a platform that uses APIs from a different vendor's plaform (Sun) and while Sun would have been perfectly happy to grant their own users permission to use the APIs, of course they have no interest in Google's customers being given that permission.

The whole basis of assuming that anyone can use an API that you write is that "anyone" is "all people who you have permission to use your software in the first place". Of course it limits adoption of your platform if you restrict who is allowed to use it, but so does charging money for it. Some people choose to charge money for their work, some people give it away.

This whole thing sounds like the quantum mechanics of copyright since it doesn't fit with common sense.

If copying individual elements (all the chapter titles) of a work is fine, how is it that it is unacceptable to make an original song that contains a 5 second sample of a single instrument from another song? Both are copying a very small excerpt from a larger work.

Tried a gevey sim and the phone randomly lost unlock once every few days. Totally unusable. Maybe they have improved since last year...

I know this is getting really tangential, but prolongued exposure to the Japanese language (where they usually drop the leading I/he/she/we on a sentence) has made me start doing this myself fairly often in written communication, ala "sounds good, arriving soon."