Why do people use Outlook and Exchange? Because Outlook is more full-featured than any other email client out there (I admit, this isn't always a good thing, but just try getting someone who *wants* those features to use a generic IMAP application. And Outlook will *never* do IMAP right, because that eliminates most of the reason to buy Exchange), and because Exchange gives you the calendaring and scheduling side of things in a way that is far superior to any other application out there except for the old CS&T/Netscape/Steltor/Oracle Calendar Server.
How is it that the entire software industry has sat back and allowed Microsoft to completely dominate with Exchange and Outlook for the last ten fscking years? What the F are people thinking? Of course, once again, it's Apple that has to pull everybody's collective asses out of the fire, and no one will end up appreciating it.
Then I started using Zimbra. It doesn't make sense to have thick clients anymore,
Umm...you think Zimbra is "thin"??? Zimbra is a huge resource hog, and Zimbra Desktop is even worse!
That said, Zimbra is still pretty cool. I have a test system up right now running of a Power Mac G4, and it's awfully slow. I have another client with Cyrus/SquirrelMail/Sendmail running on similar hardware, and it works much faster. Granted, it doesn't have the feature set of Zimbra, but with the combination of IMAP and webmail, you can get your mail just about anywhere from just about any device.
Congress wasted time on this bill that could have been spent getting something important done, such as finally hammering out a definate government policy on Stem Cell research, abortions, or actually making a true impact on the energy issue we face.
This may come as a shock to you, but the Supreme Court of the United States hammered out a definite policy on abortion way back in 1973.
One point that I find rather interesting...if you want to run Boot Camp or Parallels to run any version of Windows, you have to buy a retail copy of Windows. This means that Microsoft is then obligated to provide you with technical support. Microsoft's main business is selling OEM copies to hardware manufacturers, and under the agreements they use, the OEM is the one responsible for technical support of Windows. The retail license is also transferrable in a way that the OEM licenses are not, so this means that Microsoft might end up supporting that retail copy far longer than the OEM would be supporting the OEM copy.
I wonder how much impact it would have on Microsoft and their technical support people if ever larger numbers of Apple customers begin buying retail copies of Windows. I've bought two myself, for my new Core 2 Duo iMac and MacBook, and I know that several of my clients have done the same.
Can Microsoft deal with it?
BTW, I've also made the switch to OpenOffice with the new version. I've realized that I never really use the copies of Office v.X that I bought with my last two Macs (at a good promotional price), except for my occasional use of Excel as glorified graph paper, so there's nothing preventing me from moving to OpenOffice. Now my documents can move seamlessly among all three of my installed OS's: Fedora Core 6, Windows XP Pro, and Mac OS X.
What it says (and I urge you to read the whole Constitution, and well as the Declaration fo Independence, even if it is not legally a governing document) is:
"A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed."
The meaning of the word "militia" is well documented, both in the writings of the time and in the United States Code. It includes both organized and unorganized branches. Other posters here have already given the citation.
This does not in any way excuse the fact that elected officials have a responsibility to represent the will of the people, and that they'd better damned well have a reason stronger than a "gut feeling" to countermand that will (meaning a solid legal foundation for such), especially in a case where the people have voted directly on the issue at hand.
The reason we have representative government in this country is to prevent a "tyranny of the masses", but this does not mean that any given representative is justified in denying the will of the masses arbitrarily, though it is certainly a danger. In order for such justification to exist, the representative would need to show, for example, that the individual liberties of another citizen would be unjustly infringed by a particular act of the people. This does not seem to be the case in this particular circumstance.
OMG, you couldn't be more wrong about the book unless your name were Paul Verhoeven.
Starship Troopers was a treatise on morality. If you didn't understand this, then you missed the whole point of the book.
Heinlein's essential point was that the only truly workable basis for a system of morality was to base it upon the instinct for self-preservation, and to use scientific and logical principles to develop successively higher levels of a moral code. His examination of the right of the sovereign power of the citizen, IMO, is one of the most important philosophical statements of the 20th Century. In the society of ST, the sovereign franchise is granted only to those persons who have demonstrated the willingness to place their own lives at risk for the preservation and/or advancement of society. No person, by the laws of that society, can legally be denied the opportunity to demonstrate such willingness, just as conversely, no person can be forced to do so.
Given that Ender's Game takes place during a war, I think it's rather likely that the movie will be skewed toward action sequences. Those sequences will probably be fairly good taken on their own, but they almost assuredly won't have much to do with the overall story of the book, which as I recall had quite a lot to do with the consequences of xenophobia. It will hopefully be better than Verhoeven's Starship Troopers (God, I just love to bash him for that!).
Rest assured, there will be absolutely no coverage of Ender's incestuous obsession with Valentine. Can't offend the plebs, after all...
I've got a Sony KV-32FS100 that I bought about 4.5 years ago that has both squeeze and component (even supports 480p). I'd like to get an Apple TV, but it supposedly doesn't work with all 480i and 480p sets.
But those in the XIX century who were willing to go out and pay to listen to live music also were a minority.
Perhaps "pay" wasn't the most effective word to use there. In the 19th Century, nearly all music was enjoyed in a live fashion, for the simple reason that recording technology wasn't invented until the latter helf of the century, and even then did not enjoy widespread adoption.
Things such as copyright are attempts at short-circuiting certain steps in this process by making valuable that which has no economic value.
Cultural pursuits have no economic value? I realize that's not exactly what you're saying here, but that's the inevitable result.
The simple fact, as I stated in that thread, is that whatever is in infinite supply has a value of $0.
Ah, but what's not in infinite supply is time. The consumer desires entertainment, which has a certain value, given that it is in the consumer's best interest to fill his limited entertainable time with a quality product. A musician provides such a product which fulfills that desire, and therefore is justified in claiming compensation for his efforts.
The point of my post being that time constraints being what they are in the modern world, most people cannot afford to spend their available leisure on live entertainment. They substitute an acceptable product, namely recordings. If a musician provides a product to a customer which so clearly has value to that customer, should he not be compensated for his efforts?
Unfortunately, with digital technology, there is no way that the customer can be compelled to exchange anything of value for that recording. Given the constraints outlined, which I am sure most will agree with, how can the argument be made that musicians will simply have to struggle with live performance as the only viable means of income from their craft? Just because something can be had for free with a relative lack of consequences doesn't make it morally right to take it.
In the end, it's clear that the recording profit model is no longer viable, and we will all have to cope with the inevitable results of that sad fact. Personally, I believe that it will be a net harm to society.
The Constitution of the United States, the United States Code, and the Berne Convention, among others, disagree with you on the subject of IP rights (You may call them "privileges" if you like, but the net result is the same. In fact, the word in the Constitution is "Right"). And yes, it *was* meant to be a cash cow. What else did you think the phrase "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;" meant?
The rest of your post is correct, however, and in no way am I claiming that the RIAA and MPAA are "benign victims", but there is a larger issue at stake here than how pissed off at the record companies or movie studios any of us are.
You just keep telling yourself that. This is a result of piracy, plain and simple. People like yourself keep trying to justify it by saying that if only the labels would make something you want, then everything would be hunky-dory...except for that fact that the vast majority of the files being traded out there were produced by those self-same labels, ergo, the labels are producing product that consumers want. Only a complete fool would conclude from the available evidence that rampant piracy isn't the major factor in declining music sales.
Yes, the major labels suck. We all know this already. Unfortunately, the very thing that's leading to their demise is not only going to take down the RIAA, but any kind of cultural output that can be stored and enjoyed in a digital fashion. The only thing that keeps the software industry going is the fact that corporate users of software are willing to shell out license fees to ensure they don't get prosecuted, which is only worth doing because they can be easily found and the potential value is high. Musicians and artists have no such protection, because the consumers of their goods are by and large the common people, against the predations of whom the only possible defense is morality--and you can see how well that's working.
Guess what, Mr. Economic Genius, customers don't want live performance. They want recordings, and they want them for free. Yes, there is always going to be a small subset of the music-consuming population that is willing to take the time out of their lives to see live, original music (assuming it's even an option where they live), but they are in the extreme minority.
A question for you and everyone who agrees with you:
How many live acts have you paid to see in the past month, how much did you spend, and how many of the people you know have done the same?
You're forgetting cultural mediation. Not that the record companies have been doing such a bang-up job of it, but there is a need for mediation. Also not that the record companies necessarily need to be the ones doing this in the future. They just happen to be the current middlemen.
That's a nice quote, and I'm a big Heinlein fan, but the quote doesn't apply here. The core of the situation is protection of intellectual property rights. While there are those who make the argument that we shouldn't have such rights in the first place, such people are not taken seriously by very many others. It is a well-established principle that creators, inventors, and authors should be allowed a limited monopoly to profit from the fruits of their labor. The Framers of the Constitution evidently considered this idea to be so important that they specifically enumerated the power to guarantee such protection to Congress.
So, in fact, the government and courts, *are* charged to protect this model. Now, I will agree that thanks to the efforts of certain large corporations with a vested interest in the matter this protection has been expanded to the point where it constitutes severe abuse of the public trust, but that doesn't invalidate the original concept.
Of course, what's really the problem here is not a question of whether or not the protection ought to exist, but the simple fact that in the digital world, there are no effective means of doing so. No one is asking for the clock to be stopped or turned back. Holders of IP rights *are*, however, asking that their rights be honored, and protected if possible.
Stop making this discussion into a meaningless venting of hatred against the RIAA, or whatever industry association is the currently popular scapegoat.
Yes, I am a musician, myself, but not a proponent of the RIAA.
Would you care to guess what percentage of the live venues in this country are controlled by media conglomerates like Clear Channel? I don't have exact numbers, myself, but the number is high. Companies like Clear Channel have been spending massive amounts of money for years buying up live venues, from the big stadiums all the way down to the local dive bars that have been the traditional homes of independent music.
Here's an exercise for the reader. Go start or join a band that plays live original music. Go try to make money at it. Then, and only then, can you spout off on the Internet about how wonderful the world will be when no one can make money off selling recordings anymore. Then, and only then, do you have the experience to talk about how wonderful a life of slogging through gigs will be.
Out of curiosity, what sort of *bands* do you book? Because I've been playing out for over 15 years, and over those years, I've known *a lot* of bands that play *original* music, both signed and unsigned, and the numbers you quote are wildly out of touch with my real experience.
You don't see the flaw in your logic, do you? Sure, the acts which have already established themselves as money makers might do well in a post-recording sales world, but it's not going to be as easy as all that. How much do you actually know about the live entertainment industry? From your comment, it would seem you know very little.
Ah, finally *somebody* sees where all this is going...
A huge amount of cultural output is going to be lost in the coming years, because there will simply be very few avenues by which to profit from such activity. What's left will be exactly the same sort of crap the RIAA has been force-feeding the public for decades, there will just be less of it that is more concentrated.
Companies like Clear Channel already dominate most of the live venues in this country.
People aren't going to suddenly start spending more time listening to live music. Modern society dictates against this. Anybody who's actually played in a band since the invention of recordings knows this intimately.
The musical instrument industry will eventually suffer the same effects.
The rest of the media industry will soon follow the same path right off a cliff.
Am I missing something here? Did you mean The Cherry Hill Gang, or The Cherry Hill Gang (see entry dated March 9, 1985), or some other group entirely? I fail to see what either of these groups has to do with music.
...claiming that illegal digital publishing isn't causing the loss of sales...
It is effectively impossible to protect digital media from copyright infringement. The software industry figured this one out a long time ago. We are witnessing the end of an era, for better or worse, only time will tell.
Robert Heinlein has been trying to tell people for at 48 years now that a moral code, for it to be consistent with nature, must be based on the instinct for self-preservation, and that higher forms of morality are reached through the development of high forms of preservation. Family, community, nation, species, and so forth. He went so far as to describe (thought not in a very detailed fashion) a system of morality that was rooted in these ideas and constructed on logical, scientific principles, and he makes a very good case.
Go read Starship Troopers. Ignore the less than insightful pundits out there who would have you believe that Heinlein was a militarist and a fascist. Curse Paul Verhoeven.
Starship Troopers, at its core, was a treatise on morality, not a bug hunt. I frankly find it disturbing how many poepl fail to recognize this simple fact.
Just to let you know, I've had no trouble with my two new Macs, both Core 2 Duo machines, an iMac and a MacBook. Both of mine have the 802.11n draft chipsets, and both have been upgraded with the Enabler patch. All subsequent patches have been applied.
The only issue I have is that when I try to use Internet Sharing on the MacBook for my Nokia 770, the MacBook never gives out a DHCP OFFER packet, which isn't widely documented, but is a known problem. None of the recent updates to the AirPort drivers have affected my wireless performance, either in a positive fashion or a negative fashion, from what I can see. Sure, I can probably attach to N networks now, but I'd have to find one in order to try it.
I wonder if the source of the problem is that Apple focused too much on the latest chipset, and didn't do enough regression testing?
My access points are Linksys WRT54GS's running third party firmware, and an AirPort Express. I don't use ad hoc networks much, but I haven't had any problems with them other than the known DHCP server issue above.
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If only we could convince someone to write the Exchange competitor on an open database...
What, like this?
Why do people use Outlook and Exchange? Because Outlook is more full-featured than any other email client out there (I admit, this isn't always a good thing, but just try getting someone who *wants* those features to use a generic IMAP application. And Outlook will *never* do IMAP right, because that eliminates most of the reason to buy Exchange), and because Exchange gives you the calendaring and scheduling side of things in a way that is far superior to any other application out there except for the old CS&T/Netscape/Steltor/Oracle Calendar Server.
How is it that the entire software industry has sat back and allowed Microsoft to completely dominate with Exchange and Outlook for the last ten fscking years? What the F are people thinking? Of course, once again, it's Apple that has to pull everybody's collective asses out of the fire, and no one will end up appreciating it.
Then I started using Zimbra. It doesn't make sense to have thick clients anymore,
Umm...you think Zimbra is "thin"??? Zimbra is a huge resource hog, and Zimbra Desktop is even worse!
That said, Zimbra is still pretty cool. I have a test system up right now running of a Power Mac G4, and it's awfully slow. I have another client with Cyrus/SquirrelMail/Sendmail running on similar hardware, and it works much faster. Granted, it doesn't have the feature set of Zimbra, but with the combination of IMAP and webmail, you can get your mail just about anywhere from just about any device.
Congress wasted time on this bill that could have been spent getting something important done, such as finally hammering out a definate government policy on Stem Cell research, abortions, or actually making a true impact on the energy issue we face.
This may come as a shock to you, but the Supreme Court of the United States hammered out a definite policy on abortion way back in 1973.
One point that I find rather interesting...if you want to run Boot Camp or Parallels to run any version of Windows, you have to buy a retail copy of Windows. This means that Microsoft is then obligated to provide you with technical support. Microsoft's main business is selling OEM copies to hardware manufacturers, and under the agreements they use, the OEM is the one responsible for technical support of Windows. The retail license is also transferrable in a way that the OEM licenses are not, so this means that Microsoft might end up supporting that retail copy far longer than the OEM would be supporting the OEM copy.
I wonder how much impact it would have on Microsoft and their technical support people if ever larger numbers of Apple customers begin buying retail copies of Windows. I've bought two myself, for my new Core 2 Duo iMac and MacBook, and I know that several of my clients have done the same.
Can Microsoft deal with it?
BTW, I've also made the switch to OpenOffice with the new version. I've realized that I never really use the copies of Office v.X that I bought with my last two Macs (at a good promotional price), except for my occasional use of Excel as glorified graph paper, so there's nothing preventing me from moving to OpenOffice. Now my documents can move seamlessly among all three of my installed OS's: Fedora Core 6, Windows XP Pro, and Mac OS X.
What it says (and I urge you to read the whole Constitution, and well as the Declaration fo Independence, even if it is not legally a governing document) is:
"A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed."
The meaning of the word "militia" is well documented, both in the writings of the time and in the United States Code. It includes both organized and unorganized branches. Other posters here have already given the citation.
This does not in any way excuse the fact that elected officials have a responsibility to represent the will of the people, and that they'd better damned well have a reason stronger than a "gut feeling" to countermand that will (meaning a solid legal foundation for such), especially in a case where the people have voted directly on the issue at hand.
The reason we have representative government in this country is to prevent a "tyranny of the masses", but this does not mean that any given representative is justified in denying the will of the masses arbitrarily, though it is certainly a danger. In order for such justification to exist, the representative would need to show, for example, that the individual liberties of another citizen would be unjustly infringed by a particular act of the people. This does not seem to be the case in this particular circumstance.
OMG, you couldn't be more wrong about the book unless your name were Paul Verhoeven.
Starship Troopers was a treatise on morality. If you didn't understand this, then you missed the whole point of the book.
Heinlein's essential point was that the only truly workable basis for a system of morality was to base it upon the instinct for self-preservation, and to use scientific and logical principles to develop successively higher levels of a moral code. His examination of the right of the sovereign power of the citizen, IMO, is one of the most important philosophical statements of the 20th Century. In the society of ST, the sovereign franchise is granted only to those persons who have demonstrated the willingness to place their own lives at risk for the preservation and/or advancement of society. No person, by the laws of that society, can legally be denied the opportunity to demonstrate such willingness, just as conversely, no person can be forced to do so.
Given that Ender's Game takes place during a war, I think it's rather likely that the movie will be skewed toward action sequences. Those sequences will probably be fairly good taken on their own, but they almost assuredly won't have much to do with the overall story of the book, which as I recall had quite a lot to do with the consequences of xenophobia. It will hopefully be better than Verhoeven's Starship Troopers (God, I just love to bash him for that!).
Rest assured, there will be absolutely no coverage of Ender's incestuous obsession with Valentine. Can't offend the plebs, after all...
I've got a Sony KV-32FS100 that I bought about 4.5 years ago that has both squeeze and component (even supports 480p). I'd like to get an Apple TV, but it supposedly doesn't work with all 480i and 480p sets.
But those in the XIX century who were willing to go out and pay to listen to live music also were a minority.
Perhaps "pay" wasn't the most effective word to use there. In the 19th Century, nearly all music was enjoyed in a live fashion, for the simple reason that recording technology wasn't invented until the latter helf of the century, and even then did not enjoy widespread adoption.
Things such as copyright are attempts at short-circuiting certain steps in this process by making valuable that which has no economic value.
Cultural pursuits have no economic value? I realize that's not exactly what you're saying here, but that's the inevitable result.
The simple fact, as I stated in that thread, is that whatever is in infinite supply has a value of $0.
Ah, but what's not in infinite supply is time. The consumer desires entertainment, which has a certain value, given that it is in the consumer's best interest to fill his limited entertainable time with a quality product. A musician provides such a product which fulfills that desire, and therefore is justified in claiming compensation for his efforts.
The point of my post being that time constraints being what they are in the modern world, most people cannot afford to spend their available leisure on live entertainment. They substitute an acceptable product, namely recordings. If a musician provides a product to a customer which so clearly has value to that customer, should he not be compensated for his efforts?
Unfortunately, with digital technology, there is no way that the customer can be compelled to exchange anything of value for that recording. Given the constraints outlined, which I am sure most will agree with, how can the argument be made that musicians will simply have to struggle with live performance as the only viable means of income from their craft? Just because something can be had for free with a relative lack of consequences doesn't make it morally right to take it.
In the end, it's clear that the recording profit model is no longer viable, and we will all have to cope with the inevitable results of that sad fact. Personally, I believe that it will be a net harm to society.
The Constitution of the United States, the United States Code, and the Berne Convention, among others, disagree with you on the subject of IP rights (You may call them "privileges" if you like, but the net result is the same. In fact, the word in the Constitution is "Right"). And yes, it *was* meant to be a cash cow. What else did you think the phrase "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;" meant?
The rest of your post is correct, however, and in no way am I claiming that the RIAA and MPAA are "benign victims", but there is a larger issue at stake here than how pissed off at the record companies or movie studios any of us are.
You just keep telling yourself that. This is a result of piracy, plain and simple. People like yourself keep trying to justify it by saying that if only the labels would make something you want, then everything would be hunky-dory...except for that fact that the vast majority of the files being traded out there were produced by those self-same labels, ergo, the labels are producing product that consumers want. Only a complete fool would conclude from the available evidence that rampant piracy isn't the major factor in declining music sales.
Yes, the major labels suck. We all know this already. Unfortunately, the very thing that's leading to their demise is not only going to take down the RIAA, but any kind of cultural output that can be stored and enjoyed in a digital fashion. The only thing that keeps the software industry going is the fact that corporate users of software are willing to shell out license fees to ensure they don't get prosecuted, which is only worth doing because they can be easily found and the potential value is high. Musicians and artists have no such protection, because the consumers of their goods are by and large the common people, against the predations of whom the only possible defense is morality--and you can see how well that's working.
Guess what, Mr. Economic Genius, customers don't want live performance. They want recordings, and they want them for free. Yes, there is always going to be a small subset of the music-consuming population that is willing to take the time out of their lives to see live, original music (assuming it's even an option where they live), but they are in the extreme minority.
A question for you and everyone who agrees with you:
How many live acts have you paid to see in the past month, how much did you spend, and how many of the people you know have done the same?
Let me assure you, there are quite a lot of people out there who are better trained in musical aesthetics than you that disagree with your rant.
You're forgetting cultural mediation. Not that the record companies have been doing such a bang-up job of it, but there is a need for mediation. Also not that the record companies necessarily need to be the ones doing this in the future. They just happen to be the current middlemen.
That's a nice quote, and I'm a big Heinlein fan, but the quote doesn't apply here. The core of the situation is protection of intellectual property rights. While there are those who make the argument that we shouldn't have such rights in the first place, such people are not taken seriously by very many others. It is a well-established principle that creators, inventors, and authors should be allowed a limited monopoly to profit from the fruits of their labor. The Framers of the Constitution evidently considered this idea to be so important that they specifically enumerated the power to guarantee such protection to Congress.
So, in fact, the government and courts, *are* charged to protect this model. Now, I will agree that thanks to the efforts of certain large corporations with a vested interest in the matter this protection has been expanded to the point where it constitutes severe abuse of the public trust, but that doesn't invalidate the original concept.
Of course, what's really the problem here is not a question of whether or not the protection ought to exist, but the simple fact that in the digital world, there are no effective means of doing so. No one is asking for the clock to be stopped or turned back. Holders of IP rights *are*, however, asking that their rights be honored, and protected if possible.
Stop making this discussion into a meaningless venting of hatred against the RIAA, or whatever industry association is the currently popular scapegoat.
Yes, I am a musician, myself, but not a proponent of the RIAA.
Would you care to guess what percentage of the live venues in this country are controlled by media conglomerates like Clear Channel? I don't have exact numbers, myself, but the number is high. Companies like Clear Channel have been spending massive amounts of money for years buying up live venues, from the big stadiums all the way down to the local dive bars that have been the traditional homes of independent music.
Here's an exercise for the reader. Go start or join a band that plays live original music. Go try to make money at it. Then, and only then, can you spout off on the Internet about how wonderful the world will be when no one can make money off selling recordings anymore. Then, and only then, do you have the experience to talk about how wonderful a life of slogging through gigs will be.
Out of curiosity, what sort of *bands* do you book? Because I've been playing out for over 15 years, and over those years, I've known *a lot* of bands that play *original* music, both signed and unsigned, and the numbers you quote are wildly out of touch with my real experience.
You don't see the flaw in your logic, do you? Sure, the acts which have already established themselves as money makers might do well in a post-recording sales world, but it's not going to be as easy as all that. How much do you actually know about the live entertainment industry? From your comment, it would seem you know very little.
Ah, finally *somebody* sees where all this is going...
A huge amount of cultural output is going to be lost in the coming years, because there will simply be very few avenues by which to profit from such activity. What's left will be exactly the same sort of crap the RIAA has been force-feeding the public for decades, there will just be less of it that is more concentrated.
Companies like Clear Channel already dominate most of the live venues in this country.
People aren't going to suddenly start spending more time listening to live music. Modern society dictates against this. Anybody who's actually played in a band since the invention of recordings knows this intimately.
The musical instrument industry will eventually suffer the same effects.
The rest of the media industry will soon follow the same path right off a cliff.
Am I missing something here? Did you mean The Cherry Hill Gang, or The Cherry Hill Gang (see entry dated March 9, 1985), or some other group entirely? I fail to see what either of these groups has to do with music.
You really don't know *anything* about musician's lives, do you?
...claiming that illegal digital publishing isn't causing the loss of sales...
It is effectively impossible to protect digital media from copyright infringement. The software industry figured this one out a long time ago. We are witnessing the end of an era, for better or worse, only time will tell.
Robert Heinlein has been trying to tell people for at 48 years now that a moral code, for it to be consistent with nature, must be based on the instinct for self-preservation, and that higher forms of morality are reached through the development of high forms of preservation. Family, community, nation, species, and so forth. He went so far as to describe (thought not in a very detailed fashion) a system of morality that was rooted in these ideas and constructed on logical, scientific principles, and he makes a very good case.
Go read Starship Troopers. Ignore the less than insightful pundits out there who would have you believe that Heinlein was a militarist and a fascist. Curse Paul Verhoeven.
Starship Troopers, at its core, was a treatise on morality, not a bug hunt. I frankly find it disturbing how many poepl fail to recognize this simple fact.
Just to let you know, I've had no trouble with my two new Macs, both Core 2 Duo machines, an iMac and a MacBook. Both of mine have the 802.11n draft chipsets, and both have been upgraded with the Enabler patch. All subsequent patches have been applied.
The only issue I have is that when I try to use Internet Sharing on the MacBook for my Nokia 770, the MacBook never gives out a DHCP OFFER packet, which isn't widely documented, but is a known problem. None of the recent updates to the AirPort drivers have affected my wireless performance, either in a positive fashion or a negative fashion, from what I can see. Sure, I can probably attach to N networks now, but I'd have to find one in order to try it.
I wonder if the source of the problem is that Apple focused too much on the latest chipset, and didn't do enough regression testing?
My access points are Linksys WRT54GS's running third party firmware, and an AirPort Express. I don't use ad hoc networks much, but I haven't had any problems with them other than the known DHCP server issue above.