This leak wasn't about exposing some massive corruption about the US putting drugs in the water supply
Of course it wasn't, although why you would expect such a specific, out of nowhere, scandal to appear within the material is anyone's guess.
It was about releasing a bunch of documents, mostly about either relatively mundane topics or communications between countries or embassies.
...which is a little like writing "It was about releasing a bunch of documents, mostly about either relatively mundane topics, or court documents from major trials", or "It was about releasing a bunch of documents, mostly about either relatively mundane topics, or scientific documents relating to atomic research." That second bit can, and in this case, does contain significant issues, including actual government scandals (rather than made up ones like the water supply thing.)
The US putting pressure on Germany not to openly prosecute CIA operatives for murder and to demand their complicity in a cover-up, for example, would strike me as a major scandal. And while it was heavily rumored that Spain had similar pressure put upon it not to prosecute CIA operatives for kidnapping and torturing one of its citizens, having the evidence that it did in black and white changes rumor to fact.
Think for a moment what that means:
Officials for the US government engaged in some utterly despicable crimes.
The US government, rather than holding such people to account, has done the opposite, the individuals involved being freed from the consequences of their actions. (And, in the Spanish case at least, it seems that the officials involved were doing so under orders, so this one goes to the top.)
The US government is engaged in a cover-up in both cases
The US government is pressuring other governments to cover up major crimes in their own countries, undermining the local rule of law in those countries
Not exactly mundane.
Your problem, if I can offer some personal criticism for a moment (although it applies to just about everyone who's responded to you here too, so don't take it too personally!), is you bought the lie. You have a mass media absolutely intent on preventing accountable government, because no major US media organization would benefit its owners from having a major political scandal break, and so the vast majority, especially those that lean right, has smeared Wikileaks as a peddler of diplomatic gossip. They've focused on the reveals that are embarrassing in trivial ways, diplomats posting unflattering portraits of government officials, royal family members doing what royals do, etc, promoting these as allegations that the mere existence of will cause tensions between allies (they won't. However embarrassing, these memos are pretty much exactly what each government would expect other governments to be doing - because they do it themselves!), in an attempt to paint the leaks as deeply damaging and irresponsible.
But the more serious allegations have been glossed over, if not virtually ignored, except by the occasional independent media organization (such as Britain's Guardian newspaper) and the blogosphere, and even the latter has been drowned out by those who are taking the MSM's take at face value.
I'm not asking you to disbelieve everything you read, but at least apply some intelligent skepticism. The US has probably the worst media in the world at this time in history: it is fundamentally subservient to the establishment, participates in cover-ups, promotes voices that promote government malfeasance, and, unlike other medias in other countries, does so without the fear that any rise in journalistic standards would result in imprisonment or execution - it does this willingly.
And if it didn't, if the damned media did its damned job, there'd be no need for Wikileaks, and the probability is that Wikileaks wouldn't even exist.
1999 called. They want their attitudes towards GNU/Linux back. Before you respond to this, download the latest version of Ubuntu and install it. My suspicion is that you'll not find a single significant problem with out concerning either user-friendliness or hardware compatability. Indeed, you'll find it"just works" w with considerably more hardware out of the box than your Mac.
It's hardly direct if it deliberately misquotes the parent (such as the digging ditches comments.) It's a lot of uncited handwaving, and as the GPP implies, it's a lot of Fox News talking points that deliberately misrepresents what Krugman actually writes.
Honeycomb doesn't exist yet, so I suspect the author intended the tenses in the sentence to matter. The author doesn't know what version the tablet is running right now. Once Honeycomb is ready, it will be shipped with Honeycomb.
If you look at what these do, they are indeed FM amplifiers. The clue is that they're spec'd by spectrum, not by cellular standard. The work you'd do in repeating, up the stack and back down, an IS-95 signal, is entirely different and unrelated to that you'd use for a W-CDMA (or HS*PA) signal, which in turn is different from a GSM signal. The three standards are pretty close to entirely unrelated at the radio level.
The moment you start getting into a pissing fight with China about who has better human rights, you've already lost. Being "better than China" is nothing to boast about. If you're concerned about hyperbole in comparisons with that country, then you're fiddling while Rome burns.
Perhaps because a GSM phone conforms to the GSM mobile phone standard, whereas a signal booster is a device that retransmits all radio signals in a certain part of the spectrum?
Or to use the car analogy: there's a reason why Amtrak would get annoyed at you trying to drive your Honda Odyssey over its rails, despite the large number of different locomotives that work on it.
I think you're looking at it the wrong way. The IBM PC was a combination of an open architecture hardware, and Microsoft's MS DOS operating system that was available to all PC manufacturers. Yes, MS DOS was replaced by Windows, and Woz used the term "Windows", but it's better to think of "Microsoft's operating system" in this instance, rather than "Windows" (just as thinking "Windows 3.1" rather than "Windows" would be silly.)
The situation with Android is very similar. Google has produced an operating system available to anyone who produces hardware capable of supporting it. Even better, it's free (an advantage MS DOS didn't have.) In mobile phone terms, it's the MS DOS (and successors to MS DOS) of the phone world. By comparison, Apple - following in the footsteps of, uh, Apple, and Commodore, and Atari, and Sinclair, etc) is producing an entirely closed ecosystem - indeed, they're doing things none of those companies did. iOS isn't available to any manufacturers other than Apple. There's plenty of hardware out there that would be capable of running it, but it's just not going to happen. The Apple phones themselves are closed architecture, right down to having proprietary connectors instead of standard USB ports.
If the Android phones are the IBM PCs and its clones of the 1980s, then the iPhone is, in very real terms, the TI99-4a - a closed architecture machine, whose software availability was strictly controlled by its manufacturer.
No, he's right. I have plenty of region controlled discs, and yet to find one I can't play with VLC immediately, without reconfiguring my DVD drive. This is on recent, semi-recent, and not-so-recent DVD drives (I've been using them since, I dunno, 2001? The most recent one I bought I bought last year.)
I'm wondering actually at what level the region code is actually interpreted. I know the drive is supposed to store a code, but it may be linked to whatever CSS decoder you're using, as opposed to the drive physically preventing the encrypted data from leaving the disc.
Just to point out the obvious: Jobs is not "Judeo-Christian". Nobody is (it's a family of religions, not a religion.) The GP accused the Apple iPhone Store of pushing the Judeo-Christian mores, which is quite a bit different to being of a particular religion. Rather a lot of people who aren't Jewish, Christian, or Muslim (the three major JC religions) are involved in that pushing.
Yes and know. Languages also converge given the right circumstances. That's what's terrifying some French culturalists, for example: when English words started to creep into generic French some decades ago, there was a pushback by those worried that ultimately the French language would become diluted, and ultimately redundant. Laws were passed to protect the French language.
It's hard to believe now, but in Britain as recently as fifty years ago, people in many parts of the country couldn't understand the dialects used in others, and vice versa. As mass audio mediums, from TV and radio to pre-recorded audio, have spread, dialects have slowly merged together. In the mean time, in non-English speaking countries, the prolific audio cultural output of the English speaking world, in particular the US, has meant that many have effectively gone bi-lingual, especially throughout Europe.
I don't think a common language will happen overnight, but I think that unless somehow the English speaking world's movie, TV, and music producing machine somehow loses its dominance, a huge portion of the world will be English speaking by the end of the Century, if not earlier. There will be push-back, as we've seen in France, but it'll happen, because an increasing number of the voices people want to hear will be English-speaking.
: I can convert it to any format with ease, but if (legal) downloadable content was DRM free then I would not buy CDs either
FWIW, there are plenty of non-DRM options these days. I personally use Amazon.com. Amazon even has a GNU/Linux app (with a suitable Ubuntu.deb) that takes care of downloading multitrack albums automatically (why they can't just send you a zip is anyone's guess.)
The bigger problem is one of quality, but, personally, my ears aren't sensitive to know the difference between a well encoded MP3 and a CD.
Google doesn't go "out of its way to make use of the Java libraries". It provides an implementation of the Java programming language with its own libraries that implement a subset of the Java APIs, but otherwise the technology is unrelated to Java. And Oracle's patents (I've read the suit) aren't even over Java, they're over general managed code concepts, such as JIT compilation. Google could remove everything Java-like from the system, replacing the language with C# or Scala, the APIs with something completely bespoke, etc, and Oracle would still sue them.
The biggest myth here is that this has anything to do with Google "copying" anything from Oracle or Sun. This is a pure money grab, and the only way Google could have avoided it would have been to require people compile their apps to machine code.
Under $34,000, the taxable income is less than 15% by far, more if you consider the initial deduction, which is over $10k for a single individual.
15% is where it maxes out, capital gains is not a flat rate. If you're not paying anything in income tax, you'd probably pay nothing in CGT too, at the current rates (it does go up next year though.)
Long term capital gains (which is what this would fall under) maxes out at 20% (15% this year, but it's going up next year.), with the tax being applied to the difference between the cost bought and the cost sold. It's (much!) less than income tax, which doesn't apply to capital gains at all.
Android isn't even $25 once, it's just $25 if you want to submit your app to the Market. As you don't have to submit the app to the market in order to redistribute it (it's nicer for your users if you do, but there's certainly no requirement to), even that, rather minor, $25 isn't required.
You don't have to use Eclipse for development, you can even develop from the command line if you want. Of course, if I point out there's a plug-in for Netbeans... still, I prefer the latter. As I've said before, development using Netbeans is like being hit repeatedly across the knees with a baseball bat. Whereas Eclipse is like being hit across the head...
Well, gotta waste more time here because nobody could possibly write anything worthwhile in four minutes, so can I just point out that Pudge is an utter turd? Seriously, this crap has been in/code for... how long? Is there any evidence that making it hard to have an on-topic conversation actually improves the signal to noise ratio here?
But developers do, and they're the ones who write the apps. What the "end users" think is irrelevant, they'll end up having to chose the platform the developers adopt.
There's only one reason to develop for iOS: you're retarded. At this point, you're facing a situation where you can do all the development you want, develop something Steve Jobs has actively solicited (like an iOS equivalent of Hypercard), develop something people really want, and have your app blocked by some idiot at Apple, or some non-idiot who's following the letter of a rule sheet you'll never see.
If Apple wants to lock down the platform, fine: it has the option of doing so morally if it follows the same model as the console makers: work with the developers, make sure everyone's aware what the rules are to begin with, and if a developer wants to release something and it's not quite right, work with them until it is.
As it is, quite honestly, it's time the telcos started helping iPhone owners jailbreak their phones (for comparison: T-Mobile USA provides forums on how to root their Android phones, and Android phones don't have iPhone-like restrictions, you pretty much only need to root an Android phone if you want to tweak the operating system/do something that requires an OS tweak.) Until then, developers should be steering well clear of putting their nuts in the hands of an abusive control freak with an axe.
With respect, of course it's about piracy. If it wasn't, what would be the selling point?
You can make an HDMI device that doesn't support HDCP, that's legal, and while you have to license various technologies from various patent holders to do so, they don't care what you do with it. I would hazard a guess that quite a few of the cheaper monitors that have an HDMI in have no HDCP support
The only reason to license HDCP itself is if you plan to sell your monitor for the express purpose of showing Blu-ray (or similar), or encrypted cable content. In both cases, the use of HDCP was decided upon by the content providers, who required HDCP be used because they believed that an encrypted connection would prevent piracy.
This certainly isn't about Intel raking in the cash, although that's a side effect, any more than Macrovision's various content control systems are to do with Macrovision raking in the cash. Intel makes the technology, it doesn't require anyone use it. The people requiring it, as in "We're not going to let this play on that without it" are the cabal of studios, the same fuck-wits that decided that the media format of the future would be the one with mandatory encryption and a Java equivalent of the crap 1980s home computer game writers would shove in their games to determine whether someone had a copying device plugged into the back of their Sinclair.
Cracking the HDMI key is of no value in decrypting Blu Ray. It's value is in allowing timeshifting of cable and satellite content. The timeshifting is legal.
Its value is in both. Obviously HDMI is not as good as getting the "raw" MPEG off of a BD, but the same is true of cable and satellite content, or do you think they're sent uncompressed!
HDMI decryption ensures you can make a perfect copy of what a viewer would see. What you do with that content is, well, another matter.
Not necessarily. Look at it this way: the AMD MegaCore 3000 and the Intel Leelu Multicore are equivalent CPUs. The MegaCore costs OEMs $99, and the Multicore $105. You're a laptop maker, which chip do you order a million of?
Now, change the equation a little: the Leelu Multicore Lite costs $85, and while less powerful than the MegaCore, can be upgraded (by the OEM if necessary) for $50. The OEM can order a million, and knows that (a) many consumers will buy the slightly less powerful machine anyway knowing they can upgrade it later for $50, and (b) they can serve that minority that both (a) needs the extra power and (b) isn't prepared to wait by making a slightly more expensive laptop for $50 more (and cater to that market in real time based upon actual, rather than predicted, demand) by upgrading the CPUs they've already ordered a million of.
End users may want to get the most powerful CPU they can get, but OEMs don't, and OEMs make the majority of chip buying decisions. This might very well help Intel in the long run.
You don't have to go that far back. Windows 7 is entirely driven by the principle. That computer you bought comes with Home Premium and you need Professional? Just select the option from Add/Remove Programs (or whatever it's called these days), buy the updated key, and all those features that are "only in the Professional edition" suddenly become available. I believe the same applies to Office these days, the CD contains the entire version, the key defines what gets installed and what you're allowed to run.
Nope. Capitalism is about private ownership. The "Freedom" crap its proponents pretend to be in favour of only exists for a small minority. those who own, and who can afford to own much.
As the old communist joke goes: In Capitalism, man exploits his fellow man. In communism, it's the other way around.
The "people who own" in this version of capitalism aren't even people, they're corporations, owned by pension funds, and those funds are funded by so many individuals there is no practical way to make them work for anything other than the most basic purpose - to generate money.
Slashdot Mirror
Of course it wasn't, although why you would expect such a specific, out of nowhere, scandal to appear within the material is anyone's guess.
The US putting pressure on Germany not to openly prosecute CIA operatives for murder and to demand their complicity in a cover-up, for example, would strike me as a major scandal. And while it was heavily rumored that Spain had similar pressure put upon it not to prosecute CIA operatives for kidnapping and torturing one of its citizens, having the evidence that it did in black and white changes rumor to fact.
Think for a moment what that means:
Not exactly mundane.
Your problem, if I can offer some personal criticism for a moment (although it applies to just about everyone who's responded to you here too, so don't take it too personally!), is you bought the lie. You have a mass media absolutely intent on preventing accountable government, because no major US media organization would benefit its owners from having a major political scandal break, and so the vast majority, especially those that lean right, has smeared Wikileaks as a peddler of diplomatic gossip. They've focused on the reveals that are embarrassing in trivial ways, diplomats posting unflattering portraits of government officials, royal family members doing what royals do, etc, promoting these as allegations that the mere existence of will cause tensions between allies (they won't. However embarrassing, these memos are pretty much exactly what each government would expect other governments to be doing - because they do it themselves!), in an attempt to paint the leaks as deeply damaging and irresponsible.
But the more serious allegations have been glossed over, if not virtually ignored, except by the occasional independent media organization (such as Britain's Guardian newspaper) and the blogosphere, and even the latter has been drowned out by those who are taking the MSM's take at face value.
I'm not asking you to disbelieve everything you read, but at least apply some intelligent skepticism. The US has probably the worst media in the world at this time in history: it is fundamentally subservient to the establishment, participates in cover-ups, promotes voices that promote government malfeasance, and, unlike other medias in other countries, does so without the fear that any rise in journalistic standards would result in imprisonment or execution - it does this willingly.
And if it didn't, if the damned media did its damned job, there'd be no need for Wikileaks, and the probability is that Wikileaks wouldn't even exist.
1999 called. They want their attitudes towards GNU/Linux back. Before you respond to this, download the latest version of Ubuntu and install it. My suspicion is that you'll not find a single significant problem with out concerning either user-friendliness or hardware compatability. Indeed, you'll find it"just works" w with considerably more hardware out of the box than your Mac.
It's hardly direct if it deliberately misquotes the parent (such as the digging ditches comments.) It's a lot of uncited handwaving, and as the GPP implies, it's a lot of Fox News talking points that deliberately misrepresents what Krugman actually writes.
Honeycomb doesn't exist yet, so I suspect the author intended the tenses in the sentence to matter. The author doesn't know what version the tablet is running right now. Once Honeycomb is ready, it will be shipped with Honeycomb.
If you look at what these do, they are indeed FM amplifiers. The clue is that they're spec'd by spectrum, not by cellular standard. The work you'd do in repeating, up the stack and back down, an IS-95 signal, is entirely different and unrelated to that you'd use for a W-CDMA (or HS*PA) signal, which in turn is different from a GSM signal. The three standards are pretty close to entirely unrelated at the radio level.
Seriously, shut-up.
The moment you start getting into a pissing fight with China about who has better human rights, you've already lost. Being "better than China" is nothing to boast about. If you're concerned about hyperbole in comparisons with that country, then you're fiddling while Rome burns.
Perhaps because a GSM phone conforms to the GSM mobile phone standard, whereas a signal booster is a device that retransmits all radio signals in a certain part of the spectrum?
Or to use the car analogy: there's a reason why Amtrak would get annoyed at you trying to drive your Honda Odyssey over its rails, despite the large number of different locomotives that work on it.
I think you're looking at it the wrong way. The IBM PC was a combination of an open architecture hardware, and Microsoft's MS DOS operating system that was available to all PC manufacturers. Yes, MS DOS was replaced by Windows, and Woz used the term "Windows", but it's better to think of "Microsoft's operating system" in this instance, rather than "Windows" (just as thinking "Windows 3.1" rather than "Windows" would be silly.)
The situation with Android is very similar. Google has produced an operating system available to anyone who produces hardware capable of supporting it. Even better, it's free (an advantage MS DOS didn't have.) In mobile phone terms, it's the MS DOS (and successors to MS DOS) of the phone world. By comparison, Apple - following in the footsteps of, uh, Apple, and Commodore, and Atari, and Sinclair, etc) is producing an entirely closed ecosystem - indeed, they're doing things none of those companies did. iOS isn't available to any manufacturers other than Apple. There's plenty of hardware out there that would be capable of running it, but it's just not going to happen. The Apple phones themselves are closed architecture, right down to having proprietary connectors instead of standard USB ports.
If the Android phones are the IBM PCs and its clones of the 1980s, then the iPhone is, in very real terms, the TI99-4a - a closed architecture machine, whose software availability was strictly controlled by its manufacturer.
I thought Kin was the first version of this "rewrite"?
No, he's right. I have plenty of region controlled discs, and yet to find one I can't play with VLC immediately, without reconfiguring my DVD drive. This is on recent, semi-recent, and not-so-recent DVD drives (I've been using them since, I dunno, 2001? The most recent one I bought I bought last year.)
I'm wondering actually at what level the region code is actually interpreted. I know the drive is supposed to store a code, but it may be linked to whatever CSS decoder you're using, as opposed to the drive physically preventing the encrypted data from leaving the disc.
If they're not using X11 under Windows, why would they under Mac OS X?
Just to point out the obvious: Jobs is not "Judeo-Christian". Nobody is (it's a family of religions, not a religion.) The GP accused the Apple iPhone Store of pushing the Judeo-Christian mores, which is quite a bit different to being of a particular religion. Rather a lot of people who aren't Jewish, Christian, or Muslim (the three major JC religions) are involved in that pushing.
Yes and know. Languages also converge given the right circumstances. That's what's terrifying some French culturalists, for example: when English words started to creep into generic French some decades ago, there was a pushback by those worried that ultimately the French language would become diluted, and ultimately redundant. Laws were passed to protect the French language.
It's hard to believe now, but in Britain as recently as fifty years ago, people in many parts of the country couldn't understand the dialects used in others, and vice versa. As mass audio mediums, from TV and radio to pre-recorded audio, have spread, dialects have slowly merged together. In the mean time, in non-English speaking countries, the prolific audio cultural output of the English speaking world, in particular the US, has meant that many have effectively gone bi-lingual, especially throughout Europe.
I don't think a common language will happen overnight, but I think that unless somehow the English speaking world's movie, TV, and music producing machine somehow loses its dominance, a huge portion of the world will be English speaking by the end of the Century, if not earlier. There will be push-back, as we've seen in France, but it'll happen, because an increasing number of the voices people want to hear will be English-speaking.
FWIW, there are plenty of non-DRM options these days. I personally use Amazon.com. Amazon even has a GNU/Linux app (with a suitable Ubuntu .deb) that takes care of downloading multitrack albums automatically (why they can't just send you a zip is anyone's guess.)
The bigger problem is one of quality, but, personally, my ears aren't sensitive to know the difference between a well encoded MP3 and a CD.
Google doesn't go "out of its way to make use of the Java libraries". It provides an implementation of the Java programming language with its own libraries that implement a subset of the Java APIs, but otherwise the technology is unrelated to Java. And Oracle's patents (I've read the suit) aren't even over Java, they're over general managed code concepts, such as JIT compilation. Google could remove everything Java-like from the system, replacing the language with C# or Scala, the APIs with something completely bespoke, etc, and Oracle would still sue them.
The biggest myth here is that this has anything to do with Google "copying" anything from Oracle or Sun. This is a pure money grab, and the only way Google could have avoided it would have been to require people compile their apps to machine code.
15% is where it maxes out, capital gains is not a flat rate. If you're not paying anything in income tax, you'd probably pay nothing in CGT too, at the current rates (it does go up next year though.)
Long term capital gains (which is what this would fall under) maxes out at 20% (15% this year, but it's going up next year.), with the tax being applied to the difference between the cost bought and the cost sold. It's (much!) less than income tax, which doesn't apply to capital gains at all.
Spongebob Squarepants is definitely worse than KISS.
Android isn't even $25 once, it's just $25 if you want to submit your app to the Market. As you don't have to submit the app to the market in order to redistribute it (it's nicer for your users if you do, but there's certainly no requirement to), even that, rather minor, $25 isn't required.
You don't have to use Eclipse for development, you can even develop from the command line if you want. Of course, if I point out there's a plug-in for Netbeans... still, I prefer the latter. As I've said before, development using Netbeans is like being hit repeatedly across the knees with a baseball bat. Whereas Eclipse is like being hit across the head...
Well, gotta waste more time here because nobody could possibly write anything worthwhile in four minutes, so can I just point out that Pudge is an utter turd? Seriously, this crap has been in /code for... how long? Is there any evidence that making it hard to have an on-topic conversation actually improves the signal to noise ratio here?
But developers do, and they're the ones who write the apps. What the "end users" think is irrelevant, they'll end up having to chose the platform the developers adopt.
There's only one reason to develop for iOS: you're retarded. At this point, you're facing a situation where you can do all the development you want, develop something Steve Jobs has actively solicited (like an iOS equivalent of Hypercard), develop something people really want, and have your app blocked by some idiot at Apple, or some non-idiot who's following the letter of a rule sheet you'll never see.
If Apple wants to lock down the platform, fine: it has the option of doing so morally if it follows the same model as the console makers: work with the developers, make sure everyone's aware what the rules are to begin with, and if a developer wants to release something and it's not quite right, work with them until it is.
As it is, quite honestly, it's time the telcos started helping iPhone owners jailbreak their phones (for comparison: T-Mobile USA provides forums on how to root their Android phones, and Android phones don't have iPhone-like restrictions, you pretty much only need to root an Android phone if you want to tweak the operating system/do something that requires an OS tweak.) Until then, developers should be steering well clear of putting their nuts in the hands of an abusive control freak with an axe.
With respect, of course it's about piracy. If it wasn't, what would be the selling point?
You can make an HDMI device that doesn't support HDCP, that's legal, and while you have to license various technologies from various patent holders to do so, they don't care what you do with it. I would hazard a guess that quite a few of the cheaper monitors that have an HDMI in have no HDCP support
The only reason to license HDCP itself is if you plan to sell your monitor for the express purpose of showing Blu-ray (or similar), or encrypted cable content. In both cases, the use of HDCP was decided upon by the content providers, who required HDCP be used because they believed that an encrypted connection would prevent piracy.
This certainly isn't about Intel raking in the cash, although that's a side effect, any more than Macrovision's various content control systems are to do with Macrovision raking in the cash. Intel makes the technology, it doesn't require anyone use it. The people requiring it, as in "We're not going to let this play on that without it" are the cabal of studios, the same fuck-wits that decided that the media format of the future would be the one with mandatory encryption and a Java equivalent of the crap 1980s home computer game writers would shove in their games to determine whether someone had a copying device plugged into the back of their Sinclair.
Its value is in both. Obviously HDMI is not as good as getting the "raw" MPEG off of a BD, but the same is true of cable and satellite content, or do you think they're sent uncompressed!
HDMI decryption ensures you can make a perfect copy of what a viewer would see. What you do with that content is, well, another matter.
Not necessarily. Look at it this way: the AMD MegaCore 3000 and the Intel Leelu Multicore are equivalent CPUs. The MegaCore costs OEMs $99, and the Multicore $105. You're a laptop maker, which chip do you order a million of?
Now, change the equation a little: the Leelu Multicore Lite costs $85, and while less powerful than the MegaCore, can be upgraded (by the OEM if necessary) for $50. The OEM can order a million, and knows that (a) many consumers will buy the slightly less powerful machine anyway knowing they can upgrade it later for $50, and (b) they can serve that minority that both (a) needs the extra power and (b) isn't prepared to wait by making a slightly more expensive laptop for $50 more (and cater to that market in real time based upon actual, rather than predicted, demand) by upgrading the CPUs they've already ordered a million of.
End users may want to get the most powerful CPU they can get, but OEMs don't, and OEMs make the majority of chip buying decisions. This might very well help Intel in the long run.
You don't have to go that far back. Windows 7 is entirely driven by the principle. That computer you bought comes with Home Premium and you need Professional? Just select the option from Add/Remove Programs (or whatever it's called these days), buy the updated key, and all those features that are "only in the Professional edition" suddenly become available. I believe the same applies to Office these days, the CD contains the entire version, the key defines what gets installed and what you're allowed to run.
Nope. Capitalism is about private ownership. The "Freedom" crap its proponents pretend to be in favour of only exists for a small minority. those who own, and who can afford to own much.
As the old communist joke goes: In Capitalism, man exploits his fellow man. In communism, it's the other way around.
The "people who own" in this version of capitalism aren't even people, they're corporations, owned by pension funds, and those funds are funded by so many individuals there is no practical way to make them work for anything other than the most basic purpose - to generate money.