Freedom is slowly dying

Blogs are quickly becoming America’s Public Enemy #1 it seems. Political blogs are under fire and the ruling so far in the Apple vs. “The Rumor Sites” case is not going so great for freedom of speech. According to the San Jose judge ruling in the Apple case web blogs are not covered under the same constitutional protection that traditional media outlets are. It’s only a preliminary ruling so far, but I’m guessing it’s a good indication of how things will transpire in the end. The case is interesting in that it’s questioning who should be considered “legitimate members of the press” in today’s digital world. The preliminary ruling doesn’t bode well for the legitimacy of rumor sites/blogs and that’s not good for those of us who love rampant Apple product speculation!

Attack of the Clones

It took a few weeks, but Intel has already proven that Apple will be shamelessly copied in the very near future. At their Intel Developer Forum in San Francisco yesterday Intel’s VP showed off a plastic concept mock-up called the “Sleek Concept Entertainment PC.” This surprises nobody I’m sure. I can’t wait for Dell or HP to offer this to their customers for $100 so we can have a real problem with zombie bot led DoS attacks!

RIAA proves they are money hungry vampires!

Here’s how I see it; the record industry was hurting a few years ago when Steve Jobs approached them about this little idea he had for selling their content online for a buck a song. They thought it was a novel idea and agreed to it thinking they’d make some money off of him and didn’t think twice about it. Fast forward ~2 years and Apple’s sold over 300 million songs via their wildly successful iTunes Music Store. The record industry gets greedy causing them to think they’ve undersold themselves and now would like to ruin it for all parties involved by jacking up the price. Hmm, that sounds pretty close to what they did with the cost of compact discs a few years ago. Didn’t they eventually get sued over that and end up owing consumers a ton of money because they were ripping everybody off with their over inflated CD costs? Way to go RIAA! You are the devil!