The Libertarians are the true conservatives, and deserve the capital "C". Some Republicans do, too, but they're a minority in the party.
I'm personally torn. I think we need a little more government than the Libertarians want. I think we need a lot less than the Democrats want. I think we need more personal freedoms than the Democrats or Republicans want, but more responsibility to those around us than the Republicans or Libertarians want. I'm not an independent because I'm halfway between the two major parties. I'm independent because the two major parties are inconsistent and apparently largely dishonest about their goals.
I think we need to spend less not because we need to gut the necessities and privatize them, but because the government is wasteful and bloated. I think we don't need fewer things regulated, but that regulations should be simpler and often applied to different resources than they now are.
I need to start a party, I guess. One more to fracture the "outsider" political scene and ensure the dominant duopoly continues...
Well, that the tax exists in addition to the seller paying taxes on the income from the sale and the buyer paying a percentage of income which leaves him only X amount of money to make the purchases is probably not correct.
Your employer pays its taxes. Then they pay their share of your taxes. Then you pay your share of your taxes. Then repeat all three steps for the state.
Then, you spend your income. You get taxed on the purchase. You then get taxed to keep several of the items you buy in many states (home, car, etc). Then you pay taxes to use your phone, even though your tax dollars helped pay for the infrastructure for the phone company in the first place. You pay a tax on your car's fuel, to register it, on top of the insurance premium you're required to have for it, and on any parts and labor to maintain it.
If you buy an investment and it actually does return money, you get taxed on that even though the company that issued the bond or stock pays revenue and profit taxes or that you're paying property taxes on real estate investmenats.
This really only scratches the surface. If everything was a simple, one-step tax, people would be horrified at the amount they pay.
What needs to be done is the same thing as physical stores -- charge the tax of the locality of the seller rather than where it's being shipped. Then, though, you'd probably get arguments about paying the merchant's local Connecticut sales tax on goods delivered to Ohio from a warehouse in Indiana and how that, too, violates the interstate commerce clause.
What's really silly is that in some way, the state where the customer is, the state where the merchant is, the state where the server is, the state where the warehouse is, the state where the payment is processed, and the state where the bank the payment gets deposited into really want to be able to collect their own tax on the transaction. There's no way that's going to work. That's especially true since many businesses ship one product out of one warehouse and another out of another and different payment methods are often processed by different processing companies.
There are also companies registered as corporations in Nevada or Delaware with nothing more than a registered agent in those states. If I'm in one state, incorporated in another, which one gets my tax dollars for an Internet sale?
His state doesn't deserve it. His state didn't provide the infrastructure used to sell or buy it. His state does collect it, though, and as a voter in his state he's partly (a small part) responsible for that fact.
Apparently you've never driven in Chicago or Atlanta.;-)
There are some things about cities that are inefficient, and some things that are efficient.
It's more efficient to operate light rail in a city, obviously. You need enough people close enough to the tracks and stations to make it worthwhile.
It's less efficient to drive a car. When I say "20 minutes by car", I might mean 15 or 20 miles in downstate Illinois or 3 to 5 miles in Chicago. I know people who work from 5 or 6 am to 2 or 3 pm instead of 8 to 5 because doing so cuts their commute from 2 hours to 45 minutes.
It's more efficient to run power and communications lines in a city when measured by miles of cable. It's more efficient when measured in labor and regulations per mile of cable to lay it in suburbs and small towns.
A big reason why taxes get distributed from areas of dense populations to areas of sparse population is that it is one country, and there's a network effect. A trip from New York to LA cannot be taken by road and rail without roads and rails being laid across the country. They cannot be interconnected with power on a national grid unless the grid is national in scope. Much of the food consumed in New York City and LA is not grown in New York State and California. The food has to get from farms to plates, and the farms in the South, Midwest, and Plains states have to have a way to ship.
Another reason is that the IRS is ordered by Congress to collect based on the same income scale across the entire country. The cost of living in a large city is higher (so much for overall efficiency) and therefore the incomes are higher. Since the incomes are higher, those people pay more in taxes. With a tiered income tax, they pay even more taxes.
Cities tend to build their own roads. The roads that connect cities are built by states and the Federal government. The roads that connect those roads to each other and that connect states are Federally funded as well. Areas that have roads running through them but which have few people are still a necessary part of the roadway network. That's a big part of Federal spending, and of course a four-lane highway in a state costs more per capita in a state with fewer people.
Your point is, in case you haven't realized it yet, that taxes based on income -- especially tiered brackets based on income -- are inherently unfair when levied equally against people in areas of entirely divergent costs of living.
When the average income in NY state is much higher than the average income in Montana, but only because the cost of living in NY State is equally higher, then the collection of a higher percentage of a New Yorker's income is inherently unfair.
The minimum deductions and itemized deductions mitigate this somewhat, but not to the point it's equal to a flat percentage tax. The minimum deduction actually favors the one with the lower income, even in areas where the lower income offers a better standard of living.
A flat tax would solve many of these issues. However, it would not solve the simple fact that roads and bridges which serve the entire country, especially the highly populated areas, run through lower populated areas. These roads need to be safe and effective in Missouri and Iowa as much as in California and New York. They are more heavily trafficked per the population in Missouri because of interstate trucking, but the goods mostly pass through to people in other states. The whole country helps pay for those roads because the whole country uses them, even if indirectly.
Federal taxes probably shouldn't pay for direct welfare distributions. The states should be required to do something about it that pleases a very small Federal oversight agency. That way, less money that's not paying for things the whole country uses would be paid for by the whole country.
Given sufficient knowledge and time, physical access does indeed mean a complete lack of security. Any phone can be rebooted, JTAG accessed, or have the complete firmware and user memory copied off the hardware.
What's startling here is how quickly and easily the access is, and that it's only access to the actual user interface that's required.
What regulation? Is the ASA suddenly a government body that sets regulations for the definitions of technical terms?
What Apple is being accused of is making a false statement. The statement is not false. Ergo, the claim against them is false.
If the ASA was saying that the lay public sometimes misunderstands technical terminology and issues, and that some people might be confused about statements containing terms they misunderstand then that's true. There's also not much to be done about that other than education, and it's not Apple alone's job to educate the buying public.
Does your mother understand the difference between a megapixel sensor and the supported image sizes a camera will save? Does she understand that a 0 to 100 km/h acceleration test depends on good tires, good suspension, and near perfect driving skill? Does she understand the difference between a coaxial audio cable with RCA-type plugs and coaxial television cables with type-F connectors?
People misunderstand technical topics all the time. That misunderstanding doesn't make a true statement false. If the ASA wants to say that Apple could make their statement more lucid to lay people, then they might have a point. To say the statement was false shows a probable misunderstanding of the issue on their own part.
It doesn't say it can display everything you can get to on the Internet. It just says you can get to everything on the Internet. That's an important distinction.
It's also an important distinction from, say, my cell phone. I can browse the whole Web for an extra $5 a month on top of my data plan, or for just the price of the data plan I can only surf the sites for which my provider runs WAP proxies.
I'd be much more critical of the "all of the Internet" claims if I found out it doesn't support telnet or NNTP rather than not being able to run Flash content out of the box.
The Internet is a communications medium and content delivery system. Flash and Java are content. The iPhone doesn't restrict people to WAP proxies and a limited number of preselected sites like some cell phones. What you can do with the content once you get it has no bearing on whether or not you have access to the site it's on.
Please learn how the Internet works. Flash and Java are content.They are not Internet hosts, domains, protocols, nor other infrastructure.
To require that "all parts of the Internet" means "all content on the Internet is immediately useful to you" means that Apple would have to teach you to read Russian and Chinese content, that they provide emulators for hundreds of computer models, and that you can run applications written in thousands of toy programming languages that have their own hobby sites.
Flash and Java are not parts of the Internet. They are content served across it. You can download them without the applications in place to use them, even.
"Apple has been running an iPhone ad saying 'all parts of the internet are on the iPhone', but it had to be withdrawn after Britain's Advertising Standards Authority ruled that it gave 'a misleading impression of the internet capabilities of the iPhone' because the iPhone cannot access Flash or Java â" features that are essential to some websites. This raises an interesting issue of where do you draw the line between essential and non-essential features of websites. What should the web look like? Should government authorities be the ones making that decision?"
"You never know which part of the internet you'll need. The do you need sun cream part? The what's the quickest way to the airport part? The what about an ocean view room part? Or the can you really afford this part? Which is why all the parts of the internet are on the iPhone".
Java and Flash are not parts of the Internet. They are specific application languages that appear on some sites, which are generally served by HTTP. HTTP is a part of the Internet. Flash and Java are parts of the sites on the Internet.
Still, though, I do want my Gopher, WAIS, Archie, telnet, NNTP, SIP, OSPF, BGP, IRC, GRE, and L2TP to just work if I'm told the whole Internet is available on the stock version of a system.
The developer in the middle, who takes the code the original developer wrote and provides it to the end user, is free to choose not to select GPLed software as the basis of his work.
He can write it himself, or he can choose a BSD/MIT style license.
This means the last developer in the chain has a choice of using GPLed code at the expense of having to provide the source (if the end user even wants it) or to not use GPLed code.
Considering you're giving someone a choice of whether or not to do something and asking for a very small consideration on their part, I do not see how that diminishes their freedom. It's an extra option, not a reduction of options.
If all software was forced to be GPL, that would be a reduction in options and I'd agree it was a reduction in freedom.
Your definition of freedom seems to come down to one of two things. One is that there must be no costs or conditions to any act. The other possibility is that people must not be allowed to negotiate consideration or contracts. Either of these options provides more freedom for one party in the short term, but less for the other. In the long run, either one comes down to a loss of overall freedom, because nobody really is free if they cannot protect the fruits of their own labor.
The real losers would be Via and AMD. If NVidia made a big entry into the x86/x86-64 space, they would take as much ore more market share from the smaller players as from Intel. NVidia would be poorly served by knocking Via out and especially by knocking AMD out. Even though those companies compete for graphics dollars, they give NVidia somewhere to put its graphics and chipsets other than on Intel-CPU boards.
You're not just looking at media encoding, but also media decoding. That's a pretty common task these days. Hell, media encoding is pretty common, too. YouTube is evidence of that.
The typical hand-held computing device these days is the cell phone. Voice calls, multimedia messaging, video recording using the camera, and mobile video streaming (like VCast) all have to do with encoding and/or decoding streams of data.
Database applications can search through thousands of rows even in something as simple as an address book or to-do list. Indexing helps, but a partial string match search can outstrip a cache quickly. Big databases that don't get used on hand-held devices use even more memory quickly.
I think your analysis of the application types is good. I think you're either overestimating the amount of cache you've got (unlikely) or you're overlooking how people use their systems (more likely).
They should feel free to do that. They should also feel free to sell machines with EFI or with emulated EFI and provide a link to instructions on how to install OS X, IMO. If OS X actually had fully licensed retail packages, they should feel free to resell those, too.
Where they go wrong is selling an upgrade copy as a fully licensed copy.
I agree with their countersuit about tying OS X and the Mac in principle. I don't think you violate the license and then countersue in your own defense, though. I think if they wanted to sue Apple over the tying argument they should have done that part first. After the tying arrangement is broken and Apple actually sets a retail (or less likely, an OEM price), then they could use it with no problems.
Now, I said I agree in principle. In the specific case of the Mac and OS X, I think there are plenty of other OSes out there. I think there are plenty of other OSes one can run on the Mac. You can even run versions of OS X on non-Mac products, although those are also Apple hardware.
Is it really tying, in the sense the law was written to counter, if it's a one-way tie? It's not like they're saying both that you must use OS X only with Apple hardware and use Apple hardware only with OS X. It's for this kind of situation that lawyers and judges study the law and court procedures so deeply. It's going to take much better than a lay discussion about the law to hash this thing out.
Well, it can work -- sort of. You lose CPU cycles to do the compression and decompression. You have to use part of your uncompressed memory to store the compression and decompression routines.
Not everything compresses very tightly. In the case of lots of audio, video, and still graphics formats you're trying to compress an already compressed format, and decompress it twice for working with it (once from the RAM compression, which barely compressed anything anyway, and once in the viewing or editing package) instead of once.
The thing is, if you're already tight on memory, using a good portion of it to double what's left may not gain you much. Something like this should cost a lower percentage of memory then on a 1 megabyte or 4 megabyte system, because the compression and decompression itself shouldn't need to be that much bigger than it was ten or twenty years ago.
The thing is, even if you're getting double the effective RAM, you're still burning all kinds of cycles if you're doing this on the CPU. If you're doing it in the controller, you'd better be able to do it faster than the CPU needs the bits, because memory throughput is already the bottleneck for most applications.
People put more memory into their machines for better performance. The virtual memory swapping to disk/flash is a problem long solved, after all. For this scheme to be worthwhile, several things have to work out:
The RAM plus the compression scheme must be cheaper than just buying and slotting twice the RAM.
The compression scheme can't raise too much contention for space on the motherboard vs. other components, or it'll drive the price of the device up past the point where the cost of more RAM would.
It has to perform better and faster than swapping to disk or flash, or be a hell of a lot cheaper.
It has to work flawlessly, because it's an extra layer of complexity that slotting double the RAM doesn't bring. If it has a single bug that bites 0.001% of the time, the cost to productivity outweighs the cost of extra RAM.
The compression and decompression has to work faster than the bus transfers the data to and from the CPU, or you're losing the performance of your RAM and might as well use a swap file.
If they patent it and there's a licensing cost, the price drops in RAM will overcome the price disparity this offers over doubling the physical RAM in short order.
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The Libertarians are the true conservatives, and deserve the capital "C". Some Republicans do, too, but they're a minority in the party.
I'm personally torn. I think we need a little more government than the Libertarians want. I think we need a lot less than the Democrats want. I think we need more personal freedoms than the Democrats or Republicans want, but more responsibility to those around us than the Republicans or Libertarians want. I'm not an independent because I'm halfway between the two major parties. I'm independent because the two major parties are inconsistent and apparently largely dishonest about their goals.
I think we need to spend less not because we need to gut the necessities and privatize them, but because the government is wasteful and bloated. I think we don't need fewer things regulated, but that regulations should be simpler and often applied to different resources than they now are.
I need to start a party, I guess. One more to fracture the "outsider" political scene and ensure the dominant duopoly continues...
Well, that the tax exists in addition to the seller paying taxes on the income from the sale and the buyer paying a percentage of income which leaves him only X amount of money to make the purchases is probably not correct.
Only twice?
Your employer pays its taxes. Then they pay their share of your taxes. Then you pay your share of your taxes. Then repeat all three steps for the state.
Then, you spend your income. You get taxed on the purchase. You then get taxed to keep several of the items you buy in many states (home, car, etc).
Then you pay taxes to use your phone, even though your tax dollars helped pay for the infrastructure for the phone company in the first place. You pay a tax on your car's fuel, to register it, on top of the insurance premium you're required to have for it, and on any parts and labor to maintain it.
If you buy an investment and it actually does return money, you get taxed on that even though the company that issued the bond or stock pays revenue and profit taxes or that you're paying property taxes on real estate investmenats.
This really only scratches the surface. If everything was a simple, one-step tax, people would be horrified at the amount they pay.
What needs to be done is the same thing as physical stores -- charge the tax of the locality of the seller rather than where it's being shipped. Then, though, you'd probably get arguments about paying the merchant's local Connecticut sales tax on goods delivered to Ohio from a warehouse in Indiana and how that, too, violates the interstate commerce clause.
What's really silly is that in some way, the state where the customer is, the state where the merchant is, the state where the server is, the state where the warehouse is, the state where the payment is processed, and the state where the bank the payment gets deposited into really want to be able to collect their own tax on the transaction. There's no way that's going to work. That's especially true since many businesses ship one product out of one warehouse and another out of another and different payment methods are often processed by different processing companies.
There are also companies registered as corporations in Nevada or Delaware with nothing more than a registered agent in those states. If I'm in one state, incorporated in another, which one gets my tax dollars for an Internet sale?
You make Ra very angry with your flippant remark. ;-)
His state doesn't deserve it. His state didn't provide the infrastructure used to sell or buy it. His state does collect it, though, and as a voter in his state he's partly (a small part) responsible for that fact.
Apparently you've never driven in Chicago or Atlanta. ;-)
There are some things about cities that are inefficient, and some things that are efficient.
It's more efficient to operate light rail in a city, obviously. You need enough people close enough to the tracks and stations to make it worthwhile.
It's less efficient to drive a car. When I say "20 minutes by car", I might mean 15 or 20 miles in downstate Illinois or 3 to 5 miles in Chicago. I know people who work from 5 or 6 am to 2 or 3 pm instead of 8 to 5 because doing so cuts their commute from 2 hours to 45 minutes.
It's more efficient to run power and communications lines in a city when measured by miles of cable. It's more efficient when measured in labor and regulations per mile of cable to lay it in suburbs and small towns.
A big reason why taxes get distributed from areas of dense populations to areas of sparse population is that it is one country, and there's a network effect. A trip from New York to LA cannot be taken by road and rail without roads and rails being laid across the country. They cannot be interconnected with power on a national grid unless the grid is national in scope. Much of the food consumed in New York City and LA is not grown in New York State and California. The food has to get from farms to plates, and the farms in the South, Midwest, and Plains states have to have a way to ship.
Another reason is that the IRS is ordered by Congress to collect based on the same income scale across the entire country. The cost of living in a large city is higher (so much for overall efficiency) and therefore the incomes are higher. Since the incomes are higher, those people pay more in taxes. With a tiered income tax, they pay even more taxes.
Cities tend to build their own roads. The roads that connect cities are built by states and the Federal government. The roads that connect those roads to each other and that connect states are Federally funded as well. Areas that have roads running through them but which have few people are still a necessary part of the roadway network. That's a big part of Federal spending, and of course a four-lane highway in a state costs more per capita in a state with fewer people.
Your point is, in case you haven't realized it yet, that taxes based on income -- especially tiered brackets based on income -- are inherently unfair when levied equally against people in areas of entirely divergent costs of living.
When the average income in NY state is much higher than the average income in Montana, but only because the cost of living in NY State is equally higher, then the collection of a higher percentage of a New Yorker's income is inherently unfair.
The minimum deductions and itemized deductions mitigate this somewhat, but not to the point it's equal to a flat percentage tax. The minimum deduction actually favors the one with the lower income, even in areas where the lower income offers a better standard of living.
A flat tax would solve many of these issues. However, it would not solve the simple fact that roads and bridges which serve the entire country, especially the highly populated areas, run through lower populated areas. These roads need to be safe and effective in Missouri and Iowa as much as in California and New York. They are more heavily trafficked per the population in Missouri because of interstate trucking, but the goods mostly pass through to people in other states. The whole country helps pay for those roads because the whole country uses them, even if indirectly.
Federal taxes probably shouldn't pay for direct welfare distributions. The states should be required to do something about it that pleases a very small Federal oversight agency. That way, less money that's not paying for things the whole country uses would be paid for by the whole country.
Nice Democrat-controlled Congress you have there in your "Republican-controlled government".
Given sufficient knowledge and time, physical access does indeed mean a complete lack of security. Any phone can be rebooted, JTAG accessed, or have the complete firmware and user memory copied off the hardware.
What's startling here is how quickly and easily the access is, and that it's only access to the actual user interface that's required.
What regulation? Is the ASA suddenly a government body that sets regulations for the definitions of technical terms?
What Apple is being accused of is making a false statement. The statement is not false. Ergo, the claim against them is false.
If the ASA was saying that the lay public sometimes misunderstands technical terminology and issues, and that some people might be confused about statements containing terms they misunderstand then that's true. There's also not much to be done about that other than education, and it's not Apple alone's job to educate the buying public.
Does your mother understand the difference between a megapixel sensor and the supported image sizes a camera will save? Does she understand that a 0 to 100 km/h acceleration test depends on good tires, good suspension, and near perfect driving skill? Does she understand the difference between a coaxial audio cable with RCA-type plugs and coaxial television cables with type-F connectors?
People misunderstand technical topics all the time. That misunderstanding doesn't make a true statement false. If the ASA wants to say that Apple could make their statement more lucid to lay people, then they might have a point. To say the statement was false shows a probable misunderstanding of the issue on their own part.
It doesn't say it can display everything you can get to on the Internet. It just says you can get to everything on the Internet. That's an important distinction.
It's also an important distinction from, say, my cell phone. I can browse the whole Web for an extra $5 a month on top of my data plan, or for just the price of the data plan I can only surf the sites for which my provider runs WAP proxies.
I'd be much more critical of the "all of the Internet" claims if I found out it doesn't support telnet or NNTP rather than not being able to run Flash content out of the box.
Does nobody here recognize that the Internet and the content on the Internet are two different things?
The Internet is a communications medium and content delivery system. Flash and Java are content. The iPhone doesn't restrict people to WAP proxies and a limited number of preselected sites like some cell phones. What you can do with the content once you get it has no bearing on whether or not you have access to the site it's on.
Please learn how the Internet works. Flash and Java are content.They are not Internet hosts, domains, protocols, nor other infrastructure.
To require that "all parts of the Internet" means "all content on the Internet is immediately useful to you" means that Apple would have to teach you to read Russian and Chinese content, that they provide emulators for hundreds of computer models, and that you can run applications written in thousands of toy programming languages that have their own hobby sites.
Flash and Java are not parts of the Internet. They are content served across it. You can download them without the applications in place to use them, even.
From TFS:
"Apple has been running an iPhone ad saying 'all parts of the internet are on the iPhone', but it had to be withdrawn after Britain's Advertising Standards Authority ruled that it gave 'a misleading impression of the internet capabilities of the iPhone' because the iPhone cannot access Flash or Java â" features that are essential to some websites. This raises an interesting issue of where do you draw the line between essential and non-essential features of websites. What should the web look like? Should government authorities be the ones making that decision?"
From TFA:
"You never know which part of the internet you'll need. The do you need sun cream part? The what's the quickest way to the airport part? The what about an ocean view room part? Or the can you really afford this part? Which is why all the parts of the internet are on the iPhone".
Emphasis mine.
Java and Flash are not parts of the Internet. They are specific application languages that appear on some sites, which are generally served by HTTP. HTTP is a part of the Internet. Flash and Java are parts of the sites on the Internet.
Still, though, I do want my Gopher, WAIS, Archie, telnet, NNTP, SIP, OSPF, BGP, IRC, GRE, and L2TP to just work if I'm told the whole Internet is available on the stock version of a system.
It turns out that it's not much different from the iPhone in the US, then.
The developer in the middle, who takes the code the original developer wrote and provides it to the end user, is free to choose not to select GPLed software as the basis of his work.
He can write it himself, or he can choose a BSD/MIT style license.
This means the last developer in the chain has a choice of using GPLed code at the expense of having to provide the source (if the end user even wants it) or to not use GPLed code.
Considering you're giving someone a choice of whether or not to do something and asking for a very small consideration on their part, I do not see how that diminishes their freedom. It's an extra option, not a reduction of options.
If all software was forced to be GPL, that would be a reduction in options and I'd agree it was a reduction in freedom.
Your definition of freedom seems to come down to one of two things. One is that there must be no costs or conditions to any act. The other possibility is that people must not be allowed to negotiate consideration or contracts. Either of these options provides more freedom for one party in the short term, but less for the other. In the long run, either one comes down to a loss of overall freedom, because nobody really is free if they cannot protect the fruits of their own labor.
There is a basis in freedom of me having control over my own work if I want it. Otherwise I'm not free to exercise that control.
The real losers would be Via and AMD. If NVidia made a big entry into the x86/x86-64 space, they would take as much ore more market share from the smaller players as from Intel. NVidia would be poorly served by knocking Via out and especially by knocking AMD out. Even though those companies compete for graphics dollars, they give NVidia somewhere to put its graphics and chipsets other than on Intel-CPU boards.
You're not just looking at media encoding, but also media decoding. That's a pretty common task these days. Hell, media encoding is pretty common, too. YouTube is evidence of that.
The typical hand-held computing device these days is the cell phone. Voice calls, multimedia messaging, video recording using the camera, and mobile video streaming (like VCast) all have to do with encoding and/or decoding streams of data.
Database applications can search through thousands of rows even in something as simple as an address book or to-do list. Indexing helps, but a partial string match search can outstrip a cache quickly. Big databases that don't get used on hand-held devices use even more memory quickly.
I think your analysis of the application types is good. I think you're either overestimating the amount of cache you've got (unlikely) or you're overlooking how people use their systems (more likely).
They should feel free to do that. They should also feel free to sell machines with EFI or with emulated EFI and provide a link to instructions on how to install OS X, IMO. If OS X actually had fully licensed retail packages, they should feel free to resell those, too.
Where they go wrong is selling an upgrade copy as a fully licensed copy.
I agree with their countersuit about tying OS X and the Mac in principle. I don't think you violate the license and then countersue in your own defense, though. I think if they wanted to sue Apple over the tying argument they should have done that part first. After the tying arrangement is broken and Apple actually sets a retail (or less likely, an OEM price), then they could use it with no problems.
Now, I said I agree in principle. In the specific case of the Mac and OS X, I think there are plenty of other OSes out there. I think there are plenty of other OSes one can run on the Mac. You can even run versions of OS X on non-Mac products, although those are also Apple hardware.
Is it really tying, in the sense the law was written to counter, if it's a one-way tie? It's not like they're saying both that you must use OS X only with Apple hardware and use Apple hardware only with OS X. It's for this kind of situation that lawyers and judges study the law and court procedures so deeply. It's going to take much better than a lay discussion about the law to hash this thing out.
Well, it can work -- sort of. You lose CPU cycles to do the compression and decompression. You have to use part of your uncompressed memory to store the compression and decompression routines.
Not everything compresses very tightly. In the case of lots of audio, video, and still graphics formats you're trying to compress an already compressed format, and decompress it twice for working with it (once from the RAM compression, which barely compressed anything anyway, and once in the viewing or editing package) instead of once.
The thing is, if you're already tight on memory, using a good portion of it to double what's left may not gain you much. Something like this should cost a lower percentage of memory then on a 1 megabyte or 4 megabyte system, because the compression and decompression itself shouldn't need to be that much bigger than it was ten or twenty years ago.
The thing is, even if you're getting double the effective RAM, you're still burning all kinds of cycles if you're doing this on the CPU. If you're doing it in the controller, you'd better be able to do it faster than the CPU needs the bits, because memory throughput is already the bottleneck for most applications.
People put more memory into their machines for better performance. The virtual memory swapping to disk/flash is a problem long solved, after all. For this scheme to be worthwhile, several things have to work out: