Just as MS windows is an optional OS. All the computers I have had over the past 5 years has not had MS Windows on it. Just as IE is an optional application. When I do use MS Windows, I never use IE.... However, I don't see how what MS did is any different than what Apple is doing with their 87% market share of portable music players and on-line music stores.
???
Being optional is not the key point here. You only have a problem using an iTMS downloaded file on a non-iPod device. You aren't restricted from accessing that content through another means. (In fact, buy burning to a CD and re-ripping, you're not restricted at all... and that's legal, I believe...) On the other hand, without a (properly functioning) Office, Outlook, Access, or IE, you may in fact be restricted from content due to the closed nature of the document/media type, or be unable to properly view content intended for 95% of the installed base due to improper implementation or bug-workarounds. Depending on your need/profession, you could be driven to Windows. There is nothing driving one to the iTMS except perhaps convenience and the coolness factor. There is a vast difference here.
Owning an iPod is also optional. There is barely any audio that you can't load on a non-iPod player. There is barely any audio that you can't play on a non-iTunes music playing app. In terms of listening to a specific piece of music on a specific music player you have tremendous choice. The fact that files which can, but need not be purchased from a particular on-line store don't work with every portable music player is not restrictive in the general sense. You can walk (or surf over) to your local music store and pick up a CD that you can do whatever you want with (in theory). Blame the RIAA (again) for requiring DRM to be in every downloadable digital medium. Not Apple. Everyone has to do it.
The fact that 87% of the market is choosing an iPod has very little to do with the iTMS and nearly everything to do with the iPod itself. If the RIAA had said "no digital downloads at all" and the iTMS didn't exist, I doubt the numbers would be very different. If the suit is (essentially) claiming the iTMS requires anyone interested in using a portable music device to use an iPod, they better have pretty hard evidence that most people are buying the iPod because of the iTMS. Otherwise, this is a ridiculous assertion.
If Apple would just license FairPlay, people/companies wouldn't be complaining.
No argument here. But I don't think all the complaining is "fair". Some is. Some is just sour grapes. Tough luck for now, I seyz.
As it is now, Apple wants to keep FairPlay locked up to lock customers into the iPod and iTMS. I really don't see how this is any different that what MS does that gets all the Apple fans screaming against MS.
The iTMS is an optional service offered to users of iTunes and/or iPod. That's it. Users of iTunes and/or iPod have a myriad of non-Apple ways to load music into the app and/or device.
If you want full control over your digitally downloaded media, you'd better go knock on the RIAA and MPAA's doors, not Apple's. It's been well documented that Jobs brought the music industry to this point kicking and screaming. Requiring Apple to police the use of their DRM iTMS files on every 3rd-party device is asking way too much (at least for now, likely). What happens if a licensee of FairPlay slips up and allows the DRM to be more easily defeated that it is now? What happens if they do it deliberately?
You'll have to cite a similar MS situation that we non-MS users have yelled and screamed about. I can think of many non-similar situations:
* Marketing a supposedly "compatible" office suite on another platform when said company is in full control of the closed document standard and having it not be 100% compatible. They certainly work better together now, but the damage was done long ago when they didn't so well. Should we fault them? Maybe not as a money-making company. But Apple offers no deception about how you can get music on your iPod and what the optional iTMS works with (and doesn't).
* Leveraging OS dominance in the browser wars coupled with poor standards adherence. This would have never been a big issue if they would have bothered making IE feature compatible cross-platform or make it render emerging standards *well*. They didn't. Should they have? Well, this year certainly will tell with Firefox on the rise. Compare to iTunes. Apple made them *identical* on both platforms. iPod works *identical* on both platforms. If people switch to Apple machines because of using iTunes and iPod, it's not because of enhanced features or performance on OS X vs. Windows.
* There are plenty of other examples where the dominance of Windows is guaranteed in the near term because of exclusive, closed apps/file types/"standards". Access and Outlook come to mind immediately, but I'm sure others can cite many others from the enterprise sector. You can't compare this to an optional service that is "locked" into using Apple's technology.
And yes, even as an iTunes/iPod user I'd like to use my music purchased from iTMS more freely than I can now--*legally*. I'd like to share my iTMS albums over iTunes with my co-workers, for example, but I can't right now. Their machine would have to use up one of my authorization slots. I'd like the option to convert to other formats without going to CD.
But the fact is, I can't grouse about the way Apple has implemented all this. Technically, it is fantastic and nearly bug-free. The features provided are innovative and have lead me to use my music in ways I never did 5 years ago. I haven't usually found MS technology to work this well or be so inspiring, even when I'm using Windows.
Maybe, but that doesn't explain why they moved it from the system's prefs to the browser prefs. It doesn't belong there (I didn't find it myself... I would never had thought to look for it there).
IIRC, in OS X it was never a part of the system prefs. When they were shipping with IE as the default browser, you could change the URI helper apps from IE's prefs (and looks like you still can). Now that no one in their right might uses IE as a primary browser, we've all wondered where that panel went to:)
There are several 3rd party panels that do a fine job. I'm using More Internet. But I agree it really should be a Apple supplied pane.
I'm finding it hard to understand how a land line to every home is cheaper than a single new cell tower in the town. The cost seemed to be very similar according to the article (~$700,000). That seems high for a single tower, doesn't it? Anyone in the biz know better?
I think it would be fun to be able to listen to everyone's else's music for the whole flight. The in-flight music blows, and it's nice to have something new to hear.
iChat Rendezvous is then an option too. I've been on a few flights over the last few years when I wasn't sitting next to colleages and it would have been nice to 'talk'. SubEthaEdit becomes even more useful as well... hrmmm...
...It's absolutely astonishing to me how Democrats have become the party of fiscal responsibility.
I think the reason for this is that conservatives dramatically cut government revenue through heavy tax cuts saying "you can spend the money better than the government" but then the government keeps spending the money anyway.
That and probably the reality that spending government money to help people is a bit cheaper than trying to kill them in fancy new ways.
Holy cow, Skilling was (is?) awesome. Back in our college days we'd try to catch the evening forecast every night. They gave (still give?) him like 15 minutes to talk about the weather in detail. I learned way more from him in a few nights about weather than listening to the useless talking heads on any other station for years.
The nice thing about wikipedia is that it can be corrected immediately & readers can review the editing process by glancing through past revisions and/or the talkback pages.
The other nice thing is that those of us going in with the knowledge that this is possibly an incomplete, evolving source of information *won't* treat it as gospel. When something sounds odd on Wikipedia, you may be more likely to actually delve in and do mini-research on something (and perchance improve the source itself!). When you read something in EB, you're more likely to go in trusting the source because it's in this nicely bound "permanent" form.
When I was a wee lad, I used to religiously take my World Book Year Books, tear out the crappy little update tabs, and plaster them all over the encyclopedia so I'd be sure to look up the updated entry when I hit a topic. I have to say, the Wikipedia interface is just a little bit better and a whole lot cheaper.
I don't think Wikipedia is going to or should be a replacement for a bound books. In some ways it's very much better. In other ways it's never going to have quite the same "aura" of perfection and completeness (reality or no). Welcome to the digital age.
More importantly, OSX apps are designed to be left open -- keep them open, close or hide their windows, and they'll use virtually no resources, but will start significantly faster the next time you use them.
Unless the app is designed by Microsoft. Then it will suck 5-10% of your CPU for no reason. (caveat: Office X and IE; hopefully 2004 has fixed this... er.... bug?).
I wonder if further studies were able to prove or disprove the hypothesis that children seem hard-wired with certain grammatical rules?
I think this is just applying patterns to trends, which is something kids do very well. Kids older than infants start to apply patterns extending beyond exactly what they've seen/done before. I think this is just a basic tenant of how humans learn, more than anything. Is this really what Chomsky meant? (No exposure here, so educate me if so.)
Languages vary tremendously in their specific grammar, so I would be surprised if there was anything hard-wired that allowed them to grasp verb tenses any better than how the ubiquitous base-10 numeric system works (for example).
My son turns 4 in a month, and he is in that final zone where the only mistakes are exceptions. During the whole last year we've gotten a chance to realize what an idiotic language it is sometimes (English, that is). I hate correcting him, since his phasing is often perfectly logical.
Too bad real languages can't be reformed (or scrapped & reinvented!) like machine languages can.
Integrated != Closed
on
The Cult of Mac
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Because if the group doing the integrating decides you dont need it, you dont get it.
Unless the group doing the integrating decides, on a lark, to join, embrace, and even contribute to the open standard/software movement. 'Cause then you might be able to still decide what you want or need.
But that couldn't possibly come from some overpriced, consumer-electronic excuse for a computer, now could it? No way.
Not to mention $600 (and $500 for that matter) is really reaching, considering we are just talking about music and pictures.
Sheesh!
We've been complaining about Apple not having a sub-grand machine, and now it's too much? Come on! It's got Firewire and USB 2.0, a generous 220x176 built-in display (with AV-out if a 2" screen is too small for you whiners), and comes with real games (my Ti PB can't touch this)! Plus, it's portable! Plug in a keyboard, mouse, and your 37" TV and you've got one mean machine.
Now we just need that Doom 3 port and we're set. I don't think Brick will hold my attention all that long...
Peer review is already done on volunteer basis anyways. I was briefly in a master/PhD program, all the grad students had to do some article reviewing, and they are not paid to do this.
In my field, only PhD's are typically invited by journals to review. I find it surprising that grad students were asked to do it. That seem counter to the process a little.
In any case, yes, we do it for free. However, the system for the reviews at some of the top Astronomy journals includes a number of scientific editors who are essentially paid peers from the field who farm out the reviews on a specific subtopic, typically related to their speciality. These editors aren't on-site for the publishers, it's a side job for a well-established scientist. The hope, then, is that this editor picks good (i.e. appropriate) reviewers for each paper.
From my experience so far, the matching has been pretty good both for my submitted and reviewed papers. The thing you can't do anything about even with this model is controlling the slice of attention the reviewer gives the article.
Another example is arxiv.org the preprint archive. their article is peer reviewed as well, but since they operate entirely without fee, except a small grant that keeps the database and servers running. Their reviewers are volunteers as well. So peer review never been a bottle neck to open journals.
I don't know where you got that, but AFAIK, arXiv articles (at least those for astro-ph) are only skimmed for appropriateness. They are not reviewed in the least. Unfortunately, there are wildly different uses of the service that have resulted in a few problems.
Many (too many, IMHO) publish there before the reviewing process has completed. Nowadays it's not too uncommon to see references to arXiv right in a published paper. But, in some cases that paper (or its conclusions) have changed substantially since it was used as that reference (say, after the refereeing process).
Others argue that it's a great model to expose their research to a wider audience to get early feedback on a project, especially if they are at small institutions. I guess I can see that, but I would think e-mailing to a smaller list of interested colleagues would be just as good. I'm just not sure a 'pre-print' system is the way to go since the state of the pre-print is not a required element of the submission (right now).
I'm personally a little leery of a completely open publishing model like this for the 'standard'. Although I can judge papers in my own speciality just fine whether they have been officially reviewed or not, when I need a good reference for material outside of that zone, I like to feel that it has been through at least some critical filter.
Someone is trying to set up a system for astro-ph (the astronomy part of arXiv) that is like peer review, but it hasn't quite gained any significant mass quite yet.
Although I bet the problem here is the quality of XM versus FM (signal that is, not material). You know... cause it's hard not to tell the difference between that track on a CD and the 14.4 kbps MP3 mono version you snagged from Limeware last night.
Unless they intend to go after all of us with tape recorders after they run out of Permission2Pilfer users. Hey, I bet there's more users there than even of Windows.... oops, shouldn't have tipped them off...
My cousin David is a nurse. Funny thing is at first he wanted to be a truck driver, but couldn't find a job after getting his commercial license, so he went back to school.
That's a pretty funny coincidence. I have an uncle named Dave. He was a nurse and then became a truck driver. He totally fits the truck driver stereotype (mentality, etc.). I always thought it was pretty cool that he was a nurse. It certainly didn't seem to affect his image of himself:)
The Superconducting Super Collider was canned for political reasons. The congress wanted to crack down on something for budget reasons, and there were 2 big targets: the International Space Station or the SSC. Remeber how each of these projects are a tiny amount of the goverments budgets. They needed to make an example out of one of them to "show" that they were serious about the budget. They cracked on the SSC because it was less "interesting" to the public, even though it was more important scientifically. They were going to look, among other things, for the Higgs Boson. It would have attracted thousands of scientists from around the world.
To be even more of a cynic, I suspect that the ISS also touched a much larger number of districts with its funding than the SSC did. It's just so much easiler canning a program that doesn't help your locals versus one that does. And with a feel-good public reason on top of it... must have been a no-brainer.
Slashdot Mirror
???
Being optional is not the key point here. You only have a problem using an iTMS downloaded file on a non-iPod device. You aren't restricted from accessing that content through another means. (In fact, buy burning to a CD and re-ripping, you're not restricted at all... and that's legal, I believe...) On the other hand, without a (properly functioning) Office, Outlook, Access, or IE, you may in fact be restricted from content due to the closed nature of the document/media type, or be unable to properly view content intended for 95% of the installed base due to improper implementation or bug-workarounds. Depending on your need/profession, you could be driven to Windows. There is nothing driving one to the iTMS except perhaps convenience and the coolness factor. There is a vast difference here.
Owning an iPod is also optional. There is barely any audio that you can't load on a non-iPod player. There is barely any audio that you can't play on a non-iTunes music playing app. In terms of listening to a specific piece of music on a specific music player you have tremendous choice. The fact that files which can, but need not be purchased from a particular on-line store don't work with every portable music player is not restrictive in the general sense. You can walk (or surf over) to your local music store and pick up a CD that you can do whatever you want with (in theory). Blame the RIAA (again) for requiring DRM to be in every downloadable digital medium. Not Apple. Everyone has to do it.
The fact that 87% of the market is choosing an iPod has very little to do with the iTMS and nearly everything to do with the iPod itself. If the RIAA had said "no digital downloads at all" and the iTMS didn't exist, I doubt the numbers would be very different. If the suit is (essentially) claiming the iTMS requires anyone interested in using a portable music device to use an iPod, they better have pretty hard evidence that most people are buying the iPod because of the iTMS. Otherwise, this is a ridiculous assertion.
No argument here. But I don't think all the complaining is "fair". Some is. Some is just sour grapes. Tough luck for now, I seyz.
The iTMS is an optional service offered to users of iTunes and/or iPod. That's it. Users of iTunes and/or iPod have a myriad of non-Apple ways to load music into the app and/or device.
If you want full control over your digitally downloaded media, you'd better go knock on the RIAA and MPAA's doors, not Apple's. It's been well documented that Jobs brought the music industry to this point kicking and screaming. Requiring Apple to police the use of their DRM iTMS files on every 3rd-party device is asking way too much (at least for now, likely). What happens if a licensee of FairPlay slips up and allows the DRM to be more easily defeated that it is now? What happens if they do it deliberately?
You'll have to cite a similar MS situation that we non-MS users have yelled and screamed about. I can think of many non-similar situations:
* Marketing a supposedly "compatible" office suite on another platform when said company is in full control of the closed document standard and having it not be 100% compatible. They certainly work better together now, but the damage was done long ago when they didn't so well. Should we fault them? Maybe not as a money-making company. But Apple offers no deception about how you can get music on your iPod and what the optional iTMS works with (and doesn't).
* Leveraging OS dominance in the browser wars coupled with poor standards adherence. This would have never been a big issue if they would have bothered making IE feature compatible cross-platform or make it render emerging standards *well*. They didn't. Should they have? Well, this year certainly will tell with Firefox on the rise. Compare to iTunes. Apple made them *identical* on both platforms. iPod works *identical* on both platforms. If people switch to Apple machines because of using iTunes and iPod, it's not because of enhanced features or performance on OS X vs. Windows.
* There are plenty of other examples where the dominance of Windows is guaranteed in the near term because of exclusive, closed apps/file types/"standards". Access and Outlook come to mind immediately, but I'm sure others can cite many others from the enterprise sector. You can't compare this to an optional service that is "locked" into using Apple's technology.
And yes, even as an iTunes/iPod user I'd like to use my music purchased from iTMS more freely than I can now--*legally*. I'd like to share my iTMS albums over iTunes with my co-workers, for example, but I can't right now. Their machine would have to use up one of my authorization slots. I'd like the option to convert to other formats without going to CD.
But the fact is, I can't grouse about the way Apple has implemented all this. Technically, it is fantastic and nearly bug-free. The features provided are innovative and have lead me to use my music in ways I never did 5 years ago. I haven't usually found MS technology to work this well or be so inspiring, even when I'm using Windows.
"Now that no one in their right might..."
mind even... yeesh.
IIRC, in OS X it was never a part of the system prefs. When they were shipping with IE as the default browser, you could change the URI helper apps from IE's prefs (and looks like you still can). Now that no one in their right might uses IE as a primary browser, we've all wondered where that panel went to
There are several 3rd party panels that do a fine job. I'm using More Internet. But I agree it really should be a Apple supplied pane.
I don't know,,, whipped cream and a Geo Metro are mostly air. You gotta be doing pretty well selling those things for money.
Wish granted.
Gonna have to wait a while, but it's being worked on...
I'm finding it hard to understand how a land line to every home is cheaper than a single new cell tower in the town. The cost seemed to be very similar according to the article (~$700,000). That seems high for a single tower, doesn't it? Anyone in the biz know better?
No graphics.
No foofy stylized text.
1D tables.
Color optional.
Mouse optional.
The Web as it was *meant* to be...
Lynx 2.8.5*
(*) 14.4k modem not included.
I think it would be fun to be able to listen to everyone's else's music for the whole flight. The in-flight music blows, and it's nice to have something new to hear.
iChat Rendezvous is then an option too. I've been on a few flights over the last few years when I wasn't sitting next to colleages and it would have been nice to 'talk'. SubEthaEdit becomes even more useful as well... hrmmm...
Yup, it all went downhill when they cut butt-slapping rulers out of the budget.
mh
That and probably the reality that spending government money to help people is a bit cheaper than trying to kill them in fancy new ways.
Holy cow, Skilling was (is?) awesome. Back in our college days we'd try to catch the evening forecast every night. They gave (still give?) him like 15 minutes to talk about the weather in detail. I learned way more from him in a few nights about weather than listening to the useless talking heads on any other station for years.
We were (are?) such geeks.
The nice thing about wikipedia is that it can be corrected immediately & readers can review the editing process by glancing through past revisions and/or the talkback pages.
The other nice thing is that those of us going in with the knowledge that this is possibly an incomplete, evolving source of information *won't* treat it as gospel. When something sounds odd on Wikipedia, you may be more likely to actually delve in and do mini-research on something (and perchance improve the source itself!). When you read something in EB, you're more likely to go in trusting the source because it's in this nicely bound "permanent" form.
When I was a wee lad, I used to religiously take my World Book Year Books, tear out the crappy little update tabs, and plaster them all over the encyclopedia so I'd be sure to look up the updated entry when I hit a topic. I have to say, the Wikipedia interface is just a little bit better and a whole lot cheaper.
I don't think Wikipedia is going to or should be a replacement for a bound books. In some ways it's very much better. In other ways it's never going to have quite the same "aura" of perfection and completeness (reality or no). Welcome to the digital age.
...check out these dancing digs. Very handy for showing off your, er, potential... on the road.
More importantly, OSX apps are designed to be left open -- keep them open, close or hide their windows, and they'll use virtually no resources, but will start significantly faster the next time you use them.
Unless the app is designed by Microsoft. Then it will suck 5-10% of your CPU for no reason. (caveat: Office X and IE; hopefully 2004 has fixed this... er.... bug?).
I wonder if further studies were able to prove or disprove the hypothesis that children seem hard-wired with certain grammatical rules?
I think this is just applying patterns to trends, which is something kids do very well. Kids older than infants start to apply patterns extending beyond exactly what they've seen/done before. I think this is just a basic tenant of how humans learn, more than anything. Is this really what Chomsky meant? (No exposure here, so educate me if so.)
Languages vary tremendously in their specific grammar, so I would be surprised if there was anything hard-wired that allowed them to grasp verb tenses any better than how the ubiquitous base-10 numeric system works (for example).
My son turns 4 in a month, and he is in that final zone where the only mistakes are exceptions. During the whole last year we've gotten a chance to realize what an idiotic language it is sometimes (English, that is). I hate correcting him, since his phasing is often perfectly logical.
Too bad real languages can't be reformed (or scrapped & reinvented!) like machine languages can.
Because if the group doing the integrating decides you dont need it, you dont get it.
Unless the group doing the integrating decides, on a lark, to join, embrace, and even contribute to the open standard/software movement. 'Cause then you might be able to still decide what you want or need.
But that couldn't possibly come from some over priced, consumer-electronic excuse for a computer, now could it? No way.
Just keep doing yer thing, man...
Not to mention $600 (and $500 for that matter) is really reaching, considering we are just talking about music and pictures.
Sheesh!
We've been complaining about Apple not having a sub-grand machine, and now it's too much? Come on! It's got Firewire and USB 2.0, a generous 220x176 built-in display (with AV-out if a 2" screen is too small for you whiners), and comes with real games (my Ti PB can't touch this)! Plus, it's portable! Plug in a keyboard, mouse, and your 37" TV and you've got one mean machine.
Now we just need that Doom 3 port and we're set. I don't think Brick will hold my attention all that long...
Look, I'm whining again already. Sheesh...
Same here! Just last week for me. Grumble, grumble... Hope they have a better option than that $59.95 update edition.
1. Write post-mortem, famous last e-words
2. Die
3. ?????
4. Profit!
Peer review is already done on volunteer basis anyways. I was briefly in a master/PhD program, all the grad students had to do some article reviewing, and they are not paid to do this.
In my field, only PhD's are typically invited by journals to review. I find it surprising that grad students were asked to do it. That seem counter to the process a little.
In any case, yes, we do it for free. However, the system for the reviews at some of the top Astronomy journals includes a number of scientific editors who are essentially paid peers from the field who farm out the reviews on a specific subtopic, typically related to their speciality. These editors aren't on-site for the publishers, it's a side job for a well-established scientist. The hope, then, is that this editor picks good (i.e. appropriate) reviewers for each paper.
From my experience so far, the matching has been pretty good both for my submitted and reviewed papers. The thing you can't do anything about even with this model is controlling the slice of attention the reviewer gives the article.
Another example is arxiv.org the preprint archive. their article is peer reviewed as well, but since they operate entirely without fee, except a small grant that keeps the database and servers running. Their reviewers are volunteers as well. So peer review never been a bottle neck to open journals.
I don't know where you got that, but AFAIK, arXiv articles (at least those for astro-ph) are only skimmed for appropriateness. They are not reviewed in the least. Unfortunately, there are wildly different uses of the service that have resulted in a few problems.
Many (too many, IMHO) publish there before the reviewing process has completed. Nowadays it's not too uncommon to see references to arXiv right in a published paper. But, in some cases that paper (or its conclusions) have changed substantially since it was used as that reference (say, after the refereeing process).
Others argue that it's a great model to expose their research to a wider audience to get early feedback on a project, especially if they are at small institutions. I guess I can see that, but I would think e-mailing to a smaller list of interested colleagues would be just as good. I'm just not sure a 'pre-print' system is the way to go since the state of the pre-print is not a required element of the submission (right now).
I'm personally a little leery of a completely open publishing model like this for the 'standard'. Although I can judge papers in my own speciality just fine whether they have been officially reviewed or not, when I need a good reference for material outside of that zone, I like to feel that it has been through at least some critical filter.
Someone is trying to set up a system for astro-ph (the astronomy part of arXiv) that is like peer review, but it hasn't quite gained any significant mass quite yet.
They'll probably ignore it until there's a PC version.
Or, even until there is a version.
Although I bet the problem here is the quality of XM versus FM (signal that is, not material). You know... cause it's hard not to tell the difference between that track on a CD and the 14.4 kbps MP3 mono version you snagged from Limeware last night.
Unless they intend to go after all of us with tape recorders after they run out of Permission2Pilfer users. Hey, I bet there's more users there than even of Windows.... oops, shouldn't have tipped them off...
My cousin David is a nurse. Funny thing is at first he wanted to be a truck driver, but couldn't find a job after getting his commercial license, so he went back to school.
:)
That's a pretty funny coincidence. I have an uncle named Dave. He was a nurse and then became a truck driver. He totally fits the truck driver stereotype (mentality, etc.). I always thought it was pretty cool that he was a nurse. It certainly didn't seem to affect his image of himself
The Superconducting Super Collider was canned for political reasons. The congress wanted to crack down on something for budget reasons, and there were 2 big targets: the International Space Station or the SSC. Remeber how each of these projects are a tiny amount of the goverments budgets. They needed to make an example out of one of them to "show" that they were serious about the budget. They cracked on the SSC because it was less "interesting" to the public, even though it was more important scientifically. They were going to look, among other things, for the Higgs Boson. It would have attracted thousands of scientists from around the world.
To be even more of a cynic, I suspect that the ISS also touched a much larger number of districts with its funding than the SSC did. It's just so much easiler canning a program that doesn't help your locals versus one that does. And with a feel-good public reason on top of it... must have been a no-brainer.