We happily apologize-by-hellfire-missile to people in a dozen countries we're not at war with if someone there looks at us funny. The notion that the events in Libya went down as they did because Obama or some significant part of his command structure is unwilling to use force doesn't seem plausible.
It's likely that it was a fuck-up of some sort (not yet clear what sort), but it's not part of a pattern of squeamishness over *ahem* apologizing big-ass holes in people until they're dead.
Military officers catch massive amounts of shit if they disobey orders, even if the orders were dumb. I can't say that strikes me as unusual; more like standard procedure.
I didn't say he knew all the foreign policy answers, but even his ignorance is better than Obama apologizing for everything
I liked when we apologized the living fuck out of Libya.
Bin Laden didn't even acknowledge Obama's apology to him. What a dick.
We're apologizing all over Iran's economy right now. Fun!
I'd be shocked if we're not doing some serious apologizing to Syria via proxies. Gotta be careful on that one, or we might end up apologizing to the Russians.
Of all the weird propaganda to come out of the last four years, the idea that this president has been insufficiently assertive on the international stage is easily among the strangest and most terrifying.
Linux is great on the server. In fact, I was responding specifically to the sentiment that it doesn't make sense to develop on OSX when you target Linux on the server. That's why I brought up commercial software (desktop software, that is) at all.
We've got one OSX server where I work, by necessity. Believe me, everyone wishes it were Linux. No-one wishes our laptops were Linux, even though the entire tech department consists of long-time Linux geeks and all the rest of our servers run Linux. We all spend plenty of time using Linux where it excels—the command prompt, via SSH. If we really need it locally, there's always VirtualBox.
Linux on our laptops would almost certainly mean more time in configuration and procurement of new hardware. Doesn't take much of that before you've wasted enough money to have purchased Macbooks instead.
Similar story here; I was a Linux geek who reluctantly used Windows for gaming for about a decade. I wasn't an Apple fan—I recalled the 90s and Apple fanboys telling me Macs were faster and more stable than my Win95 and 98 boxes, while every experience I had with them told me the opposite. I hadn't seen anything special in OSX the few times I'd used it.
Then I was given a Macbook for work.
Now I don't consider anything else to be "serious" work hardware/software. I wish there were an alternative (Mac ain't cheap), but it's easily the best of the Big 3 at getting out of my way and letting me get work done. It's especially nice, as you note, that sleep/hibernate/wake finally goddamn works every time, out of the box, on a *nix system, though to be fair even Windows only recently got that (mostly) ironed out.
Of course, in a perfect world, we'd all be running BeOS:-)
The difference is that, in an unfamiliar situation, when OSX breaks you're surprised; when Linux works you're relieved.
I'm responding to a poster who didn't understand why someone might develop on OSX if they're not targetting that platform. One reason is that not everyone develops in their basement, or likes messing with system configuration crap, even if they know how. Since the other option is Windows... yeah, some of us go with Apple. Go to a meeting with your MacBook and it'll probably do anything you need it to, and if it doesn't no one blames you; go with a Lenovo running Linux and if you can't get it to read some file or talk to some hardware in a matter of seconds, you look like an asshole.
Right tool for the job. OSX is stable, well supported (you don't catch shit if it does break) and widely understood, plus it's *nix-y enough to get the job done. Linux is more likely to do something weird at an inconvenient time, is less widely understood, and doesn't have any natural blame-deflecting mojo.
Put it on the server, stick it in a VM, use it on workstations that don't move and have well-defined, limited roles and likelihood of needing to interact with unknown (at config time) hardware. Don't use it if a failure in sleep/wake, audio, video, networking (esp. wireless), or inability to talk to other hardware might inconvenience others or cost you money, even if you can fix it given some time.
You've never put Linux on a machine and discovered that it hard locks every time it tries to come out of hibernation? Never had X crash and restart while you were in the middle of something? Never tried to get a piece of hardware to work and ended up having to patch a kernel module and recompile?
Once it's working, Linux is alright. Getting it there sucks, and keeping it there if you ever need/want to plug anything else in to it sucks. Again, fine for tinkerers, but I'm out of (I won't say beyond—I don't look down on people who enjoy that kind of thing) that phase.
Gentoo, Ubuntu, any of them. Throw unknown hardware at them, put them in an unknown situation, and there's no telling what will happen.
If you have a workstation that sits at your desk, never needs to "just work" in some situation that you didn't have a chance to prepare for, and rarely needs to work with new/unexpected hardware, Linux might be OK. Things as simple as "hey, can I plug my phone in to your computer to get some photos off it?" are far more likely to turn in to an hour-long project than they are on OSX or Windows.
You're not going to be deploying any of that code on OSX, your target is almost always going to be Linux. So why not just develop on Linux?
Commercial programs without using WINE, rock-solid features—sleep/wake rarely-bordering-on-never breaks, hardware all works well, GUI never shits itself and shuts down, updates don't break your wireless, etc.—some gaming available without tons of dicking around to make it work (or you can boot to Windows in either case, obviously), *nix shell, high-quality displays, great power management, and so on.
Linux is for tinkerers, VM jails, and servers.
I ran Linux on the desktop/laptop for years, including Gentoo for a long stretch. It's a fucking pain in the ass, and if you aren't having problems it's because you've been damn lucky. You don't want to be the guy who can't get shit done because X decided you can go fuck yourself, or an upgrade broke wireless, or you need to give a presentation and your HDMI out is doing weird things or simply not working, even though it works on your monitor at home, and so on.
It's kind of like the whole "no one got fired for buying IBM". OSX works more often and more smoothly, and if it doesn't no-one blames you. Anyone who doesn't get a bit nervous when they need to use their Linux box in unfamiliar/untested settings or circumstances probably hasn't had to do it very often and therefore doesn't realize that they have very good reason to be nervous about it.
Yes increasing taxes on higher income individuals will stimulate the economy. If they take home less money, to maintain their standard of living they will have to earn more by growing their business.
That's actually kind of true, though I don't think that's the best way to illustrate it.
Say you've got a metrick fuckton of money to invest, but you've got enough employees and business infrastructure to handle current demand for whatever it is that you sell; demand is stagnant, and nothing you've done has helped, nor has anyone else in your industry been able to significantly affect spending on the products you all make. Say they're all sitting on a metric fuckton of money, too. Maybe they've got it in currency speculation, maybe in some low-yield foreign investment that's not as good a return as it would be in their core business if there were more demand, whatever. Not important.
Say the government taxes you at a higher rate. Now instead of a metric fuckton of cash you only have an 2.5 imperial fuckloads. But demand has ticked up a bit. Now, despite having less money, you actually invest more in your core business. Maybe you hire some more people, build another factory, etc. Your competition does the same. Other industries follow the same pattern. Bam, feedback loop, demand goes up even more from all the new jobs. It levels off eventually, but it certainly helps heat up the economy a bit.
It is absolutely possible for higher taxes on "job creators" to drive productive investment, if the money's spent the right way or given to the right people. Would it work that way in every conceivable situation? Not necessarily. Would it in our current situation? Done correctly, yeah, probably.
This is a sort of Ayn Rand-ish argument. The problem with this sort of argument is it sort of dissolves the whole concept of selfishness and altruism. Just because being altruistic can have selfish rewards, does not mean altruism does not exist and everything is selfishness.
Bingo. It's just bullshit wordplay.
Obviously when you define selfishness as "doing as you choose" it becomes easy to prove that anything one chooses to do is selfish, including any sort of self-sacrifice.
You can prove that a dog is a cat that way, too, but all it means is that you've diminished the usefulness of a couple of words, not that you've shown anything novel or noteworthy.
Now there's a small chance that we'll at least get transfers of the film reels from the early '90s THX-enhanced theater releases to BluRay, if not an even better cleaned-up version of the originals.
Thank God George "we destroyed all the pre-Special Edition copies in the course of making it" Lucas' lying ass is finally out of the way. Bring on the hi-def, unmolested (well, mostly unmolested, at least) original trilogy!
Disney loves money. Doing this will make them truckloads of money and cost very little.
Clearly Sweden is the utility-city that Europe set up with a bunch of incinerators, outbound power lines, and water pumps, then never plays, just buying services from it in nearby cities while it remains in a state of suspended animation.
For the vast majority of Christian bodies on earth (even many ones that identify as "fundamentalist"), as well as many other religions with their canon of texts, citations from Scripture are always understood in the light of references external to that text.
It's my understanding that that's precisely part of the problem; many Christians (especially in the U.S.) claim to believe in the literal truth of the entire Bible and that other sources or explanations of the truth are crutches at best, and misleading at worst. In fact, most (almost all, certainly) very obviously don't act as if they believe that, and hold many beliefs that stem from the traditions of their particular community, though they don't realize that this is the case.
This gives them all the certainty of Moses holding the tablets ("my religion is 100% based on the infallible, inerrant truth of the unchanging and eternal Bible! You can't argue with that!") and all the doctrinal inconsistency and absurdity of hundreds of years of half-baked "heretics" and armchair religious philosophers.
When these hodge-podge philosophies meet reality, we get insanity like recent Republican candidates' statements about rape and abortion, where their beliefs (entirely and inarguably supported by the Bible, I'm sure) that all life is sacred from the second sperm meets egg, and that God influences all events (certainly all conceptions!) met to form an abhorrent conclusion.
Hibernate/sleep is still like playing Russian roulette on most hardware. Only time I've had it working consistently was on an old IBM Thinkpad, and that was only because I'd set up a special partition that triggered a BIOS feature whereby it would take over hibernation functionality completely from the OS.
Windows, meanwhile, finally seems to have gotten it working well enough that I don't assume I'll lose anything I have open and unsaved or that it'll fuck up my screen resolution and font display, or crash the windowing system outright, or that anything else awful will happen when it comes back up. OSX is the best, of course, though they "cheat" by having a much smaller set of hardware to worry about and a custom BIOS.
Lots of other things still depend on having just the right hardware: video card accelerated video decoding, wifi without using Windows drivers (if at all), 3D drivers working acceptably well, etc. It's bad enough that I've banished Linux to a VM, since it's way worse/less stable for all non-code-editing tasks I do than Win7 is.
Yeah, I'm not getting how a starting wage that lets you survive without having to panhandle, and raises that bump up pay at a rate slightly higher than inflation, coupled with a decent enough pension that you'll be able to retire in moderate comfort (certainly not luxury) are reasons to hate teachers or teachers' unions.
Unless we're all jealous because almost most of us have been (have allowed ourselves to be) fucked out of those things, and many of us won't be able to retire at all unless we spend our last few working years making very, very high wages and/or win the stock market lottery, so we'd rather bitch about teachers holding on to the rudiments of a respectable wage and pension than fight for it ourselves.
Look up how much money you'll need to live the kind of lifestyle that $50,000/yr gets you now, in 2050. It's scary shit. That's assuming we fix the outrageous rates of increase in healthcare costs between now and then, too; if not, we're super fucked. We're headed either for developing nation status with a massive poor underclass, or some major social policy reforms along the lines of the New Deal.
If you want to learn a topic, you don't look it up in an encyclopedia, you read an introductory tutorial. Wikipedia is a reference for people that already know a thing or two about the subject.
Interesting perspective. I see a general-purpose encyclopedia as serving primarily as a resource for the non-expert, rather than a collection of many separate specialized resources for those already heavily invested in a given field. If it does more than that, fine, but to me that's the core mission of an encyclopedia, particularly for one the title of which isn't followed by the words "of [topic name here]".
Articles in regular Wikipedia on more advanced topics—especially in mathematics—could do with some work in that direction, too.
Certainly the articles don't need to be dumbed down overall, but it would be nice if at least the introductory paragraph were comprehensible to someone who hasn't spent years studying the topic, or hours following an ever-growing tree of other articles the summary links to (and others that those summaries link to, and so on) just to try to understand a majority of the nouns and verbs therein. It's often difficult to even guess at what kind of thing the article concerns without opening at least a half-dozen other tabs.
Maybe some of the articles can't be explained, even at a high level, in simpler language, but the sheer quantity of summaries that drive me to a link-following frenzy in an effort to grasp their basic meaning lead me to believe that a lot of the editors and authors in some areas of Wikipedia aren't good at explaining their field to laymen, don't care about doing so, or don't want anyone to do so.
Thank you so much. That James R. Newman collection appears to be exactly the kind of thing I'd been searching for (idly, I admit) for some time.
Googling for variations on "like Copleston's A History of Philosophy but for math" hadn't shown me anything useful:-)
Somewhat offtopic, but if anyone's got recommendations on similar, though not necessarily so large, works along those lines for other disciplines, I'd love to know of them.
Apple obviously doesn't want to do that because they make money from the 30% fee, but also because this is another case where dropping walls on the garden would weaken the user experience. Allow other stores, and big players will drop their offerings from the Apple store, other apps will bail in favor of those stores, and before long the first thing the user has to do to get the apps they want on their iPad is install Google Play and the Amazon store and so on, putting iDevices in the same boat as everyone else.
Slashdot Mirror
Is this inaccurate?
Focus Was on Tripoli in Requests for Security in Libya
Interesting article. Covers quite a bit more than the title implies.
We happily apologize-by-hellfire-missile to people in a dozen countries we're not at war with if someone there looks at us funny. The notion that the events in Libya went down as they did because Obama or some significant part of his command structure is unwilling to use force doesn't seem plausible.
It's likely that it was a fuck-up of some sort (not yet clear what sort), but it's not part of a pattern of squeamishness over *ahem* apologizing big-ass holes in people until they're dead.
Military officers catch massive amounts of shit if they disobey orders, even if the orders were dumb. I can't say that strikes me as unusual; more like standard procedure.
I liked when we apologized the living fuck out of Libya.
Bin Laden didn't even acknowledge Obama's apology to him. What a dick.
We're apologizing all over Iran's economy right now. Fun!
I'd be shocked if we're not doing some serious apologizing to Syria via proxies. Gotta be careful on that one, or we might end up apologizing to the Russians.
Of all the weird propaganda to come out of the last four years, the idea that this president has been insufficiently assertive on the international stage is easily among the strangest and most terrifying.
Linux is great on the server. In fact, I was responding specifically to the sentiment that it doesn't make sense to develop on OSX when you target Linux on the server. That's why I brought up commercial software (desktop software, that is) at all.
We've got one OSX server where I work, by necessity. Believe me, everyone wishes it were Linux. No-one wishes our laptops were Linux, even though the entire tech department consists of long-time Linux geeks and all the rest of our servers run Linux. We all spend plenty of time using Linux where it excels—the command prompt, via SSH. If we really need it locally, there's always VirtualBox.
Linux on our laptops would almost certainly mean more time in configuration and procurement of new hardware. Doesn't take much of that before you've wasted enough money to have purchased Macbooks instead.
Lasers for my nano sharks.
Similar story here; I was a Linux geek who reluctantly used Windows for gaming for about a decade. I wasn't an Apple fan—I recalled the 90s and Apple fanboys telling me Macs were faster and more stable than my Win95 and 98 boxes, while every experience I had with them told me the opposite. I hadn't seen anything special in OSX the few times I'd used it.
Then I was given a Macbook for work.
Now I don't consider anything else to be "serious" work hardware/software. I wish there were an alternative (Mac ain't cheap), but it's easily the best of the Big 3 at getting out of my way and letting me get work done. It's especially nice, as you note, that sleep/hibernate/wake finally goddamn works every time, out of the box, on a *nix system, though to be fair even Windows only recently got that (mostly) ironed out.
Of course, in a perfect world, we'd all be running BeOS :-)
The difference is that, in an unfamiliar situation, when OSX breaks you're surprised; when Linux works you're relieved.
I'm responding to a poster who didn't understand why someone might develop on OSX if they're not targetting that platform. One reason is that not everyone develops in their basement, or likes messing with system configuration crap, even if they know how. Since the other option is Windows... yeah, some of us go with Apple. Go to a meeting with your MacBook and it'll probably do anything you need it to, and if it doesn't no one blames you; go with a Lenovo running Linux and if you can't get it to read some file or talk to some hardware in a matter of seconds, you look like an asshole.
Right tool for the job. OSX is stable, well supported (you don't catch shit if it does break) and widely understood, plus it's *nix-y enough to get the job done. Linux is more likely to do something weird at an inconvenient time, is less widely understood, and doesn't have any natural blame-deflecting mojo.
Put it on the server, stick it in a VM, use it on workstations that don't move and have well-defined, limited roles and likelihood of needing to interact with unknown (at config time) hardware. Don't use it if a failure in sleep/wake, audio, video, networking (esp. wireless), or inability to talk to other hardware might inconvenience others or cost you money, even if you can fix it given some time.
You've never put Linux on a machine and discovered that it hard locks every time it tries to come out of hibernation? Never had X crash and restart while you were in the middle of something? Never tried to get a piece of hardware to work and ended up having to patch a kernel module and recompile?
Once it's working, Linux is alright. Getting it there sucks, and keeping it there if you ever need/want to plug anything else in to it sucks. Again, fine for tinkerers, but I'm out of (I won't say beyond—I don't look down on people who enjoy that kind of thing) that phase.
Gentoo, Ubuntu, any of them. Throw unknown hardware at them, put them in an unknown situation, and there's no telling what will happen.
If you have a workstation that sits at your desk, never needs to "just work" in some situation that you didn't have a chance to prepare for, and rarely needs to work with new/unexpected hardware, Linux might be OK. Things as simple as "hey, can I plug my phone in to your computer to get some photos off it?" are far more likely to turn in to an hour-long project than they are on OSX or Windows.
Commercial programs without using WINE, rock-solid features—sleep/wake rarely-bordering-on-never breaks, hardware all works well, GUI never shits itself and shuts down, updates don't break your wireless, etc.—some gaming available without tons of dicking around to make it work (or you can boot to Windows in either case, obviously), *nix shell, high-quality displays, great power management, and so on.
Linux is for tinkerers, VM jails, and servers.
I ran Linux on the desktop/laptop for years, including Gentoo for a long stretch. It's a fucking pain in the ass, and if you aren't having problems it's because you've been damn lucky. You don't want to be the guy who can't get shit done because X decided you can go fuck yourself, or an upgrade broke wireless, or you need to give a presentation and your HDMI out is doing weird things or simply not working, even though it works on your monitor at home, and so on.
It's kind of like the whole "no one got fired for buying IBM". OSX works more often and more smoothly, and if it doesn't no-one blames you. Anyone who doesn't get a bit nervous when they need to use their Linux box in unfamiliar/untested settings or circumstances probably hasn't had to do it very often and therefore doesn't realize that they have very good reason to be nervous about it.
That's actually kind of true, though I don't think that's the best way to illustrate it.
Say you've got a metrick fuckton of money to invest, but you've got enough employees and business infrastructure to handle current demand for whatever it is that you sell; demand is stagnant, and nothing you've done has helped, nor has anyone else in your industry been able to significantly affect spending on the products you all make. Say they're all sitting on a metric fuckton of money, too. Maybe they've got it in currency speculation, maybe in some low-yield foreign investment that's not as good a return as it would be in their core business if there were more demand, whatever. Not important.
Say the government taxes you at a higher rate. Now instead of a metric fuckton of cash you only have an 2.5 imperial fuckloads. But demand has ticked up a bit. Now, despite having less money, you actually invest more in your core business. Maybe you hire some more people, build another factory, etc. Your competition does the same. Other industries follow the same pattern. Bam, feedback loop, demand goes up even more from all the new jobs. It levels off eventually, but it certainly helps heat up the economy a bit.
It is absolutely possible for higher taxes on "job creators" to drive productive investment, if the money's spent the right way or given to the right people. Would it work that way in every conceivable situation? Not necessarily. Would it in our current situation? Done correctly, yeah, probably.
If you were forced to vote,
and election day were not a national holiday,
and voting could take days, weeks, or even months?
Yes.
Bingo. It's just bullshit wordplay.
Obviously when you define selfishness as "doing as you choose" it becomes easy to prove that anything one chooses to do is selfish, including any sort of self-sacrifice.
You can prove that a dog is a cat that way, too, but all it means is that you've diminished the usefulness of a couple of words, not that you've shown anything novel or noteworthy.
They don't typically do that with their subsidiary studios, though, do they? Have they sent any of the Marvel movies to "the vault", for instance?
Are you kidding? Great news!
Now there's a small chance that we'll at least get transfers of the film reels from the early '90s THX-enhanced theater releases to BluRay, if not an even better cleaned-up version of the originals.
Thank God George "we destroyed all the pre-Special Edition copies in the course of making it" Lucas' lying ass is finally out of the way. Bring on the hi-def, unmolested (well, mostly unmolested, at least) original trilogy!
Disney loves money. Doing this will make them truckloads of money and cost very little.
Clearly Sweden is the utility-city that Europe set up with a bunch of incinerators, outbound power lines, and water pumps, then never plays, just buying services from it in nearby cities while it remains in a state of suspended animation.
It's my understanding that that's precisely part of the problem; many Christians (especially in the U.S.) claim to believe in the literal truth of the entire Bible and that other sources or explanations of the truth are crutches at best, and misleading at worst. In fact, most (almost all, certainly) very obviously don't act as if they believe that, and hold many beliefs that stem from the traditions of their particular community, though they don't realize that this is the case.
This gives them all the certainty of Moses holding the tablets ("my religion is 100% based on the infallible, inerrant truth of the unchanging and eternal Bible! You can't argue with that!") and all the doctrinal inconsistency and absurdity of hundreds of years of half-baked "heretics" and armchair religious philosophers.
When these hodge-podge philosophies meet reality, we get insanity like recent Republican candidates' statements about rape and abortion, where their beliefs (entirely and inarguably supported by the Bible, I'm sure) that all life is sacred from the second sperm meets egg, and that God influences all events (certainly all conceptions!) met to form an abhorrent conclusion.
Hibernate/sleep is still like playing Russian roulette on most hardware. Only time I've had it working consistently was on an old IBM Thinkpad, and that was only because I'd set up a special partition that triggered a BIOS feature whereby it would take over hibernation functionality completely from the OS.
Windows, meanwhile, finally seems to have gotten it working well enough that I don't assume I'll lose anything I have open and unsaved or that it'll fuck up my screen resolution and font display, or crash the windowing system outright, or that anything else awful will happen when it comes back up. OSX is the best, of course, though they "cheat" by having a much smaller set of hardware to worry about and a custom BIOS.
Lots of other things still depend on having just the right hardware: video card accelerated video decoding, wifi without using Windows drivers (if at all), 3D drivers working acceptably well, etc. It's bad enough that I've banished Linux to a VM, since it's way worse/less stable for all non-code-editing tasks I do than Win7 is.
Yeah, I'm not getting how a starting wage that lets you survive without having to panhandle, and raises that bump up pay at a rate slightly higher than inflation, coupled with a decent enough pension that you'll be able to retire in moderate comfort (certainly not luxury) are reasons to hate teachers or teachers' unions.
Unless we're all jealous because almost most of us have been (have allowed ourselves to be) fucked out of those things, and many of us won't be able to retire at all unless we spend our last few working years making very, very high wages and/or win the stock market lottery, so we'd rather bitch about teachers holding on to the rudiments of a respectable wage and pension than fight for it ourselves.
Look up how much money you'll need to live the kind of lifestyle that $50,000/yr gets you now, in 2050. It's scary shit. That's assuming we fix the outrageous rates of increase in healthcare costs between now and then, too; if not, we're super fucked. We're headed either for developing nation status with a massive poor underclass, or some major social policy reforms along the lines of the New Deal.
Interesting perspective. I see a general-purpose encyclopedia as serving primarily as a resource for the non-expert, rather than a collection of many separate specialized resources for those already heavily invested in a given field. If it does more than that, fine, but to me that's the core mission of an encyclopedia, particularly for one the title of which isn't followed by the words "of [topic name here]".
Articles in regular Wikipedia on more advanced topics—especially in mathematics—could do with some work in that direction, too.
Certainly the articles don't need to be dumbed down overall, but it would be nice if at least the introductory paragraph were comprehensible to someone who hasn't spent years studying the topic, or hours following an ever-growing tree of other articles the summary links to (and others that those summaries link to, and so on) just to try to understand a majority of the nouns and verbs therein. It's often difficult to even guess at what kind of thing the article concerns without opening at least a half-dozen other tabs.
Maybe some of the articles can't be explained, even at a high level, in simpler language, but the sheer quantity of summaries that drive me to a link-following frenzy in an effort to grasp their basic meaning lead me to believe that a lot of the editors and authors in some areas of Wikipedia aren't good at explaining their field to laymen, don't care about doing so, or don't want anyone to do so.
Haha, very close to the advice I was going to offer—my two-step plan to defeating arrogance:
1. Understand that people are, universally, completely fucking stupid.
2. Understand that you are a person.
Done.
Thank you so much. That James R. Newman collection appears to be exactly the kind of thing I'd been searching for (idly, I admit) for some time.
Googling for variations on "like Copleston's A History of Philosophy but for math" hadn't shown me anything useful :-)
Somewhat offtopic, but if anyone's got recommendations on similar, though not necessarily so large, works along those lines for other disciplines, I'd love to know of them.
Apple obviously doesn't want to do that because they make money from the 30% fee, but also because this is another case where dropping walls on the garden would weaken the user experience. Allow other stores, and big players will drop their offerings from the Apple store, other apps will bail in favor of those stores, and before long the first thing the user has to do to get the apps they want on their iPad is install Google Play and the Amazon store and so on, putting iDevices in the same boat as everyone else.
I'd bet the nicer docs and generally better API save way more than $100 in developer time anyway.