Unique phones, but unique because of their own features or because of design and branding? I'll admit that I'm no expert on Android, so others will have to decide what shade of grey we're dealing with there. More to the point, that's "why Windows", is that it seems fairly clear that Nokia felt that Microsoft was willing to give them a special access while Google wasn't. Later in the article Elop is quoted saying basically that Google acted like they had already won. I can imagine that being a hard issue to negotiate around.
Why not Android: [Elop] tried to negotiate a deal with Google to run Android, but Google refused to give the world's biggest phonemaker any advantages over its smaller partners, meaning Nokia's corps of 11,600 engineers would have next to no ability to add their own innovations to Google's software. "It just didn't feel right," Elop says to the crowd. "We'd be just another company distributing Android. That's not Nokia! We need to fight!"
Why Windows Phone: Elop says his software deal with Microsoft was misconstrued as a Hail Mary to the receiver with the worst hands in the business. Microsoft had just 4 percent of the overall market prior to the Nokia deal. What Nokia didn't gain in market share, however, it hopes to gain in flexibility. The contract grants Nokia the right to stuff almost any innovation it can muster into its Windows Phones
I find it totally credible that a fairly small group, like 147 TNCs, own a huge portion of the global economy. However, I'd have two with using the word "control" in this context.
The major issue is that at this scale no one person or a team as a functional understanding of their own organization, let alone the whole system that the organization is embedded in. They may own it, and are able to extract profits from it and influence it to a modest decree, but they don't control it, in the usual sense of the word. The point here being that the system is a real market, not some form of shady back-room corporate conspiracy. (And I'm not arguing that there aren't any corporate conspiracies around, in fact I'm sure there are, but I'm just as sure that they don't work - not on the scale of tens of percentages of global economy like this article is looking at.)
The second issue, a more minor one for sure, is that a TNC is often a public company, which means that very many people actually own a part of the global economy through that public company.
It's probably more than just a rumour, at least that's the impression I got from the Finnish media, which tends to be fairly well informed. Meaning that the OS exist and there are products planned, but of course no guarantees that a product will ship.
As to how the Meltemi-stuff make any sense:
At the level that Nokia makes decisions, the smartphone segment of mobile business isn't about hardware anymore, it's applications and services, or probably more to the point, it's about attracting developers. Nokia ditched their own OSes because they knew that by themselves they could not attract enough developers to build a fourth "ecosystem" (iOS, Android and WP being the there current ones). Nokia said that they chose between Android and WP, and, while we can speculate why they chose WP, one of the stated reasons was the fully-fledged and mature tool-chain that WP has.
Meltemi itself may be about many things: hedging their bets, getting something out of the Linux experience they have, or maybe they just feel that the segment suits a Linux-based OS. The next generation of sub-$100 phones will be much more powerful then previous ones and it would be misleading to think them as having very low specs, but it will still be a distinct segment, separate from the smartphone segment, especially it will not be driven by third-party applications and services. That means that Nokia can still, by themselves, make a competitive phone to that segemnt without having to build an ecosystem.
In summary, Nokia ditched Linux (MeeGo) on smartphones because they had to, and they are using Linux (Meltemi) on feature phones because they can.
While the credit rating thing is unprecedented and sort of iconic moment, the real test of the credit-worthiness of the USA will take place in the bond market.
That is possibly what the Zenimax's lawyers are thinking, but even if that would be true it would still be missing the big picture. Let me quote from little further down this conversation.
"Bethesda is in my shit list now.
I am putting any company that is letting itself run by lawyers instead of customer-oriented executives into that list. and bethesda just made that list. i am bored lately, and i was toying with the idea of playing an old school rpg franchise i havent played yet. and actually i stood over elder scrolls for some time in gamersgate. now i know which i wont be buying - elder scrolls." (Unity100)
Trademark is about exclusive right/ability to identify with a brand. You don't want to diminish the brand - without a valuable brand your exclusive right becomes meaningless.
Going far people like Notch and public favorites like Mindcraft is a potential PR disaster. You should not do that as a part of a standard, mail-a-letter-to-everybody procedure. Regardless of the merits of their claim, somebody at Zenimax was sleeping on the job.
If a scientist of any field rejects evolution and supports intelligent design then I will consider that scientist either wholly dishonest or a crank and I'll ignore all and any work by that scientist.
It's just a very simple and effective heuristic that weeds out many dishonest people and cranks without significant number of false positives. It is possible, like I assume you are suggesting, that some morsel of valid work might get left out, but that is the much more acceptable outcome. I can't even read everything that I know to be important, so I will not spend my time on works of liars and cranks.
Mark-t, rejecting evolution does and should discredit a scientist. Their work should be not used in the public arena and they should not have any effect on policies. This is not ad hominem attack nor is it faulty logic ("not a valid argument"). This about calling out bad faith actors: among scientists, only dishonest or crank scientists reject evolution.
I've been on Spotify Premium for couple of year now, I think, maybe year and a half. That means I have so far spent about 250 songs worth (from a la carte download music shop) on the service that grants ability to browse music: I have listened to many thousands of different songs, many of which I would have hard time gaining access without the service. I would be very bummed if Spotify would shut down for any reason, but I consider the service well worth the cost.
The summary does make a valid point though, Spotify may indeed find itself in a fairly difficult negotiation with copyright holders for access to music. It might be a good idea for Spotify to be extremely public about its licensing contracts and related negotiations: this would make it harder for copyright holders to act as a de facto cartel. It would also assure the consumer that loss of the service is not likely. Another thing possible worth trying would be a loyalty reward system for paying customers that would allow customers to claim (or purchase at a discount) the songs they most often listen to.
Basically, Nokia didn't think they could create a strong "ecosystem" for MeeGo. To compete with Apple/iOS and Google/Android they would have needed to do almost *everything* those companies do, and that didn't seem feasible - and they were probably right. Nokia's window of opportunity was 2005-2007 and they missed it. Today, their options were Android and WP7. Most people think they should have gone with Android, but as I understand it, Nokia felt that Microsoft needed them more than Google, and so Nokia would retain more of it's independence with WP7 than it would with Android.
If we must project onto aliens from our own psyches and earthly experiences, then to be safe we should project from the very worst of these.
What else except our own psyches and earthly experiences could be possibly have?
Anyways, if the goal is to be as safe as possible, then there really is no need to project or in any way to think about what aliens might be like. Hiding is the safest option. However, if we're going to think about how advanced aliens might behave towards us, then we need to think about evolution of cognition. The evidence we have strongly suggests that rapid technological progress requires a society and a culture, which in turn rely on several "cuddly" cognitive abilities/tendencies like empathy, reciprocity, deferral of rewards and many more. You also have think about functional cognitive requirements of technology in an evolutionary context: many relatively autonomous and smart individuals, like us, or a hive-mind made of many stupid individuals, sort of like ants, or single huge and hyper-smart individual, like nothing we've seen so far? Think about the communication overhead that a true hive-mind or a central intelligence would have compared to decentralized intelligence and anthropomorphic way of doing things starts look like a good bet.
Projecting is bad, but we're not limited to just projecting. We don't understand our own cognition fully, but we do understand some of it and we do understand large parts of evolution. Those do give us an insight into functional aspects of aliens. (And no insight into what it is like to be an alien.:-))
I'm I reading this wrong? That's the limit that the ISP can reliably provide, right? Or are those numbers lower than ISP's max because many clients have low-end broadband connection (2M xDSL or something). My ISP can supply sustainably about 5 times that much. I'm on the other side of the Atlantic, but USA can't be that far behind?
Cognitive skills are at premium, absolutely, and the premium is going to grow. We're living a Knowledge Society, folks, that's what it means. However, and this in extremely important and most people get this wrong, "smarts" doesn't cut it. While we truly are a Knowledge Society, we are even more a Network Society. Communication skills allow for exchange and will beat smarts every time. Cognitive skills are still at premium, it's just that communication is the most important part of that.
I can see how moving water might make it more complex approval process, as that probably requires permissions from different regulators, but hopefully that wasn't the reason the project was denied permissions. I mean, if you're building infrastructure, doesn't it make sense to build as much of it as you can on the same area of land?
I tend to agree that it's different this time, but not necessarily for the same reasons Zakaria is pointing to. (Didn't read the Time article, just what the parent was quoting.)
Labour is less mobile than capital and technology, but that's not the problem. Labour's basic problem is that it's value is decreasing globally. You can't found a business on labour any more, because you can't produce stuff that people want for long. Our economy has become so productive and skill-based that labour can't keep up. Any skill that labour has will become redundant in a decade or so. This is a big problem, and as society and economy we really don't have any tools to cope with this.
Another development that disadvantages labour is that people, especially young people, tend to value things that are post-scarcity. They don't want big house that they can fill with designer furniture, they want an address with a broadband connection that they can fill with music, comedy and games.
Developing world labour has a competitive advantage right now, but that won't last for more than decade or two. They will caught in the same bind.
I think we need seriously start to think how to bring about sustainable labour.
I agree with you on the nature/nurture issue itself, but I think you wrong about this being a settled issue in the societies at large. The quiet is due to people not caring.
Computers evolve at an increasing rate. At somebody, not that far into the future if you compare it to the age of the universe, you will have computers to run a simulated universe that contains autonomous agents to whom the universe appears real. A few years later you can run two simulations on parallel on one machine. A couple decades after that you can run about a million such simulations at once. A few years more after that it's a few million believable, internally consistent universes running in parallel on a single computer. So given Moore's law you will eventually end up with a single physical universe and hugely many simulated universes.
Question: isn't it much more likely that we exist in one of the simulated universes instead of the original one?
I think Apple wants to lock down Mac just like iOS. My "not *exactly* like" tried to be in reference to the fact that Mac/OSX and iOS are in many ways different and exist in different contexts and locking them down has to happen with different methods.
The extend that Apple will lock down Mac depends largely on what they can get away with. In that context I'm trying hinder them and you are helping them.
I don't see Steve Jobs as a super-villain, nor is Apple evil a priori. Jobs, and by extension Apple, is brilliant, but also dangerously myopic and egoistic. He is obsessed, to a pathological degree, with his own products. That makes him blind to other views and the needs of the society at large. He really, really would make us his slaves because it would make it easier for him to make his products better.
The great thing about open civil society and democracy is that it can easily contain an individual like Jobs without too much damage to either side, unlike soviet-style single organization state. In a soviet-style state Jobs would either have to rise to the top or be destroyed by the state. In a democracy Jobs can have his fiefdom (Apple) and be a highly productive member of the society.
Ok, I started to go off-topic. Anyways, No conspiracy, just a real danger of unintended consequences. Apple won't take over the world, but only because when they start trying the rest of us push back.
Duh, I wish you had continued being rude, that was the good part of your earlier post. You say "the idea that Apple is going to, or even just wants to, lock down the Mac like iOS is stupid, stupid, stupid. I can't stress that enough." It's not abrasive, it's wrong.
I'm tempted to say that I already made my case and you haven't, beyond stating that the whole notion is absurd. However, that could go on and on, so maybe I try to add a bit.
I don't think Apple is trying to lock down the Mac *exactly* like iOS. The technical and competitive contexts are different, so are user expectations. Those affect what methods of control are effective and what kind of control can realistically be achieved. Apple uses what methods work, but the goal is the same: to build an Apple monoculture, controlled by Apple.
Nor is Apple trying to control the world or me or anyone in an Illuminati sense, they are just trying to make as good consumer products as they can and to do that they feel they need to control all aspects that even remotely affect the product and it's user experience. Problem for me is that I don't want a consumer product designed by Steve Jobs for an idealized version of himself, I want a general purpose computing device.
(I don't really want a general purpose computing device, but rich, social, data-centric, sustainable, open, multi-polar analysis engine and personal learning landscape just don't have the same zing.:-))
I read that ages ago; I remember being most impressed by them making glass. It just seemed useful and fitting, while some other stuff felt superfluous.
Apple is a consumer product company, and Jobs is obsessed with user experience. When openness or usefulness come into conflict with user experience Apple will always go with user experience as defined by Jobs. Does Jobs want to control me? Not in very possible theoretical way, but he very much wants control my interactions with the product. Ostensibly the reason is to affect how I feel about using the product for the better, "make my user experience better", but it does also force me conform with Job's hipster-cool world view. Nothing wrong being a honest hipster, but I'm not one, and a wannabe hipster might actually the lamest thing in existence.
Apple would give up the third party markets in a heartbeat if it able to do so and stay competitive. They can't and they know it. The App Store is many things, many of them very beneficial for everybody, but it is also a way for Apple to control the third party market. Not absolutely but much more strongly than they were able to do previously. They will use it do enforce Job's idea's of that Mac user experience should be. That's what Job cares about. The App Store also gives a Apple a large slice out of the third party market. They will absolutely make the App Store mandatory in the future if they can get away with it.
And there will plenty of fuck-wads around to defend Apple's every move.
There are people who oppose geoengineering, some of them have good arguments, some of them are worthless pieces of garbage that need to die before they spread their diseases any further.
People with good arguments say things like "we need to think about this a lot more", "a environmental benefit for one nation state may be an act of war for another" and "please, please, for the love of all that's good in the world, don't try anything that's irreversible". You can deal with people like that, study the issues together, strike bargains - and the part about no irreversible large scale prototyping just plain makes sense.
People who need to be removed from serious conversation with a hazmat suit and a chainsaw say things like "it's unnatural", "we need to leave this to God" or, my favourite, "you shouldn't goeengineer because it might work and that would prevent the collapse of western consumer capitalism". That's the people who think we deserve to suffer for knowing too much, asking too many questions or having too much stuff. They think there's something inherently wrong about wealth and technological progress, something that removes us from nature, destroys out humanity or makes us impure. They cannot be reasoned with as the source of these views is usually their own sexual maladjustment. Working with people like that is always about minimizing the damage they cause. I suggest using dynamite - rectally.
(I've been watching a lot of George Carlin lately, in case you were wondering.)
My favorite in the Errol Flynn one too, but the tale can succesfully be told in other ways too; for proof see "Robin and Marian" by Richard Lester and writer James Goldman. Sean Connery and Andrey Hepburn in the name roles. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0075147/
Slashdot Mirror
Unique phones, but unique because of their own features or because of design and branding? I'll admit that I'm no expert on Android, so others will have to decide what shade of grey we're dealing with there. More to the point, that's "why Windows", is that it seems fairly clear that Nokia felt that Microsoft was willing to give them a special access while Google wasn't. Later in the article Elop is quoted saying basically that Google acted like they had already won. I can imagine that being a hard issue to negotiate around.
This has been covered widely in the business media, best article probably being from Bloomberg
http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/11_24/b4232056703101.htm
Why not Android:
[Elop] tried to negotiate a deal with Google to run Android, but Google refused to give the world's biggest phonemaker any advantages over its smaller partners, meaning Nokia's corps of 11,600 engineers would have next to no ability to add their own innovations to Google's software. "It just didn't feel right," Elop says to the crowd. "We'd be just another company distributing Android. That's not Nokia! We need to fight!"
Why Windows Phone:
Elop says his software deal with Microsoft was misconstrued as a Hail Mary to the receiver with the worst hands in the business. Microsoft had just 4 percent of the overall market prior to the Nokia deal. What Nokia didn't gain in market share, however, it hopes to gain in flexibility. The contract grants Nokia the right to stuff almost any innovation it can muster into its Windows Phones
tl;dnr
but
I find it totally credible that a fairly small group, like 147 TNCs, own a huge portion of the global economy. However, I'd have two with using the word "control" in this context.
The major issue is that at this scale no one person or a team as a functional understanding of their own organization, let alone the whole system that the organization is embedded in. They may own it, and are able to extract profits from it and influence it to a modest decree, but they don't control it, in the usual sense of the word. The point here being that the system is a real market, not some form of shady back-room corporate conspiracy. (And I'm not arguing that there aren't any corporate conspiracies around, in fact I'm sure there are, but I'm just as sure that they don't work - not on the scale of tens of percentages of global economy like this article is looking at.)
The second issue, a more minor one for sure, is that a TNC is often a public company, which means that very many people actually own a part of the global economy through that public company.
It's probably more than just a rumour, at least that's the impression I got from the Finnish media, which tends to be fairly well informed. Meaning that the OS exist and there are products planned, but of course no guarantees that a product will ship.
As to how the Meltemi-stuff make any sense:
At the level that Nokia makes decisions, the smartphone segment of mobile business isn't about hardware anymore, it's applications and services, or probably more to the point, it's about attracting developers. Nokia ditched their own OSes because they knew that by themselves they could not attract enough developers to build a fourth "ecosystem" (iOS, Android and WP being the there current ones). Nokia said that they chose between Android and WP, and, while we can speculate why they chose WP, one of the stated reasons was the fully-fledged and mature tool-chain that WP has.
Meltemi itself may be about many things: hedging their bets, getting something out of the Linux experience they have, or maybe they just feel that the segment suits a Linux-based OS. The next generation of sub-$100 phones will be much more powerful then previous ones and it would be misleading to think them as having very low specs, but it will still be a distinct segment, separate from the smartphone segment, especially it will not be driven by third-party applications and services. That means that Nokia can still, by themselves, make a competitive phone to that segemnt without having to build an ecosystem.
In summary, Nokia ditched Linux (MeeGo) on smartphones because they had to, and they are using Linux (Meltemi) on feature phones because they can.
While the credit rating thing is unprecedented and sort of iconic moment, the real test of the credit-worthiness of the USA will take place in the bond market.
That is possibly what the Zenimax's lawyers are thinking, but even if that would be true it would still be missing the big picture. Let me quote from little further down this conversation.
"Bethesda is in my shit list now.
I am putting any company that is letting itself run by lawyers instead of customer-oriented executives into that list. and bethesda just made that list. i am bored lately, and i was toying with the idea of playing an old school rpg franchise i havent played yet. and actually i stood over elder scrolls for some time in gamersgate. now i know which i wont be buying - elder scrolls." (Unity100)
Trademark is about exclusive right/ability to identify with a brand. You don't want to diminish the brand - without a valuable brand your exclusive right becomes meaningless.
Going far people like Notch and public favorites like Mindcraft is a potential PR disaster. You should not do that as a part of a standard, mail-a-letter-to-everybody procedure. Regardless of the merits of their claim, somebody at Zenimax was sleeping on the job.
If a scientist of any field rejects evolution and supports intelligent design then I will consider that scientist either wholly dishonest or a crank and I'll ignore all and any work by that scientist.
It's just a very simple and effective heuristic that weeds out many dishonest people and cranks without significant number of false positives. It is possible, like I assume you are suggesting, that some morsel of valid work might get left out, but that is the much more acceptable outcome. I can't even read everything that I know to be important, so I will not spend my time on works of liars and cranks.
Mark-t, rejecting evolution does and should discredit a scientist. Their work should be not used in the public arena and they should not have any effect on policies. This is not ad hominem attack nor is it faulty logic ("not a valid argument"). This about calling out bad faith actors: among scientists, only dishonest or crank scientists reject evolution.
I've been on Spotify Premium for couple of year now, I think, maybe year and a half. That means I have so far spent about 250 songs worth (from a la carte download music shop) on the service that grants ability to browse music: I have listened to many thousands of different songs, many of which I would have hard time gaining access without the service. I would be very bummed if Spotify would shut down for any reason, but I consider the service well worth the cost.
The summary does make a valid point though, Spotify may indeed find itself in a fairly difficult negotiation with copyright holders for access to music. It might be a good idea for Spotify to be extremely public about its licensing contracts and related negotiations: this would make it harder for copyright holders to act as a de facto cartel. It would also assure the consumer that loss of the service is not likely. Another thing possible worth trying would be a loyalty reward system for paying customers that would allow customers to claim (or purchase at a discount) the songs they most often listen to.
Basically, Nokia didn't think they could create a strong "ecosystem" for MeeGo. To compete with Apple/iOS and Google/Android they would have needed to do almost *everything* those companies do, and that didn't seem feasible - and they were probably right. Nokia's window of opportunity was 2005-2007 and they missed it. Today, their options were Android and WP7. Most people think they should have gone with Android, but as I understand it, Nokia felt that Microsoft needed them more than Google, and so Nokia would retain more of it's independence with WP7 than it would with Android.
If we must project onto aliens from our own psyches and earthly experiences, then to be safe we should project from the very worst of these.
What else except our own psyches and earthly experiences could be possibly have?
Anyways, if the goal is to be as safe as possible, then there really is no need to project or in any way to think about what aliens might be like. Hiding is the safest option. However, if we're going to think about how advanced aliens might behave towards us, then we need to think about evolution of cognition. The evidence we have strongly suggests that rapid technological progress requires a society and a culture, which in turn rely on several "cuddly" cognitive abilities/tendencies like empathy, reciprocity, deferral of rewards and many more. You also have think about functional cognitive requirements of technology in an evolutionary context: many relatively autonomous and smart individuals, like us, or a hive-mind made of many stupid individuals, sort of like ants, or single huge and hyper-smart individual, like nothing we've seen so far? Think about the communication overhead that a true hive-mind or a central intelligence would have compared to decentralized intelligence and anthropomorphic way of doing things starts look like a good bet.
Projecting is bad, but we're not limited to just projecting. We don't understand our own cognition fully, but we do understand some of it and we do understand large parts of evolution. Those do give us an insight into functional aspects of aliens. (And no insight into what it is like to be an alien. :-))
I'm I reading this wrong? That's the limit that the ISP can reliably provide, right? Or are those numbers lower than ISP's max because many clients have low-end broadband connection (2M xDSL or something). My ISP can supply sustainably about 5 times that much. I'm on the other side of the Atlantic, but USA can't be that far behind?
Cognitive skills are at premium, absolutely, and the premium is going to grow. We're living a Knowledge Society, folks, that's what it means. However, and this in extremely important and most people get this wrong, "smarts" doesn't cut it. While we truly are a Knowledge Society, we are even more a Network Society. Communication skills allow for exchange and will beat smarts every time. Cognitive skills are still at premium, it's just that communication is the most important part of that.
Very concise and accurate summary. Please mod the parent up.
I can see how moving water might make it more complex approval process, as that probably requires permissions from different regulators, but hopefully that wasn't the reason the project was denied permissions. I mean, if you're building infrastructure, doesn't it make sense to build as much of it as you can on the same area of land?
Anyone seen any reports on what approvals those were and on what grounds were they denied? Two minutes on Google didn't come up with anything useful.
I tend to agree that it's different this time, but not necessarily for the same reasons Zakaria is pointing to. (Didn't read the Time article, just what the parent was quoting.)
Labour is less mobile than capital and technology, but that's not the problem. Labour's basic problem is that it's value is decreasing globally. You can't found a business on labour any more, because you can't produce stuff that people want for long. Our economy has become so productive and skill-based that labour can't keep up. Any skill that labour has will become redundant in a decade or so. This is a big problem, and as society and economy we really don't have any tools to cope with this.
Another development that disadvantages labour is that people, especially young people, tend to value things that are post-scarcity. They don't want big house that they can fill with designer furniture, they want an address with a broadband connection that they can fill with music, comedy and games.
Developing world labour has a competitive advantage right now, but that won't last for more than decade or two. They will caught in the same bind.
I think we need seriously start to think how to bring about sustainable labour.
I agree with you on the nature/nurture issue itself, but I think you wrong about this being a settled issue in the societies at large. The quiet is due to people not caring.
Computers evolve at an increasing rate. At somebody, not that far into the future if you compare it to the age of the universe, you will have computers to run a simulated universe that contains autonomous agents to whom the universe appears real. A few years later you can run two simulations on parallel on one machine. A couple decades after that you can run about a million such simulations at once. A few years more after that it's a few million believable, internally consistent universes running in parallel on a single computer. So given Moore's law you will eventually end up with a single physical universe and hugely many simulated universes.
Question: isn't it much more likely that we exist in one of the simulated universes instead of the original one?
Semantics is fun.
I think Apple wants to lock down Mac just like iOS. My "not *exactly* like" tried to be in reference to the fact that Mac/OSX and iOS are in many ways different and exist in different contexts and locking them down has to happen with different methods.
The extend that Apple will lock down Mac depends largely on what they can get away with. In that context I'm trying hinder them and you are helping them.
I don't see Steve Jobs as a super-villain, nor is Apple evil a priori. Jobs, and by extension Apple, is brilliant, but also dangerously myopic and egoistic. He is obsessed, to a pathological degree, with his own products. That makes him blind to other views and the needs of the society at large. He really, really would make us his slaves because it would make it easier for him to make his products better.
The great thing about open civil society and democracy is that it can easily contain an individual like Jobs without too much damage to either side, unlike soviet-style single organization state. In a soviet-style state Jobs would either have to rise to the top or be destroyed by the state. In a democracy Jobs can have his fiefdom (Apple) and be a highly productive member of the society.
Ok, I started to go off-topic. Anyways, No conspiracy, just a real danger of unintended consequences. Apple won't take over the world, but only because when they start trying the rest of us push back.
Duh, I wish you had continued being rude, that was the good part of your earlier post. You say "the idea that Apple is going to, or even just wants to, lock down the Mac like iOS is stupid, stupid, stupid. I can't stress that enough." It's not abrasive, it's wrong.
I'm tempted to say that I already made my case and you haven't, beyond stating that the whole notion is absurd. However, that could go on and on, so maybe I try to add a bit.
I don't think Apple is trying to lock down the Mac *exactly* like iOS. The technical and competitive contexts are different, so are user expectations. Those affect what methods of control are effective and what kind of control can realistically be achieved. Apple uses what methods work, but the goal is the same: to build an Apple monoculture, controlled by Apple.
Nor is Apple trying to control the world or me or anyone in an Illuminati sense, they are just trying to make as good consumer products as they can and to do that they feel they need to control all aspects that even remotely affect the product and it's user experience. Problem for me is that I don't want a consumer product designed by Steve Jobs for an idealized version of himself, I want a general purpose computing device.
(I don't really want a general purpose computing device, but rich, social, data-centric, sustainable, open, multi-polar analysis engine and personal learning landscape just don't have the same zing. :-))
I read that ages ago; I remember being most impressed by them making glass. It just seemed useful and fitting, while some other stuff felt superfluous.
Really good teen read anyways.
I really like the MacBook Air form factor. I could easily see buying one just for the hardware.
Rude and stupid, nice.
Apple is a consumer product company, and Jobs is obsessed with user experience. When openness or usefulness come into conflict with user experience Apple will always go with user experience as defined by Jobs. Does Jobs want to control me? Not in very possible theoretical way, but he very much wants control my interactions with the product. Ostensibly the reason is to affect how I feel about using the product for the better, "make my user experience better", but it does also force me conform with Job's hipster-cool world view. Nothing wrong being a honest hipster, but I'm not one, and a wannabe hipster might actually the lamest thing in existence.
Apple would give up the third party markets in a heartbeat if it able to do so and stay competitive. They can't and they know it. The App Store is many things, many of them very beneficial for everybody, but it is also a way for Apple to control the third party market. Not absolutely but much more strongly than they were able to do previously. They will use it do enforce Job's idea's of that Mac user experience should be. That's what Job cares about. The App Store also gives a Apple a large slice out of the third party market. They will absolutely make the App Store mandatory in the future if they can get away with it.
And there will plenty of fuck-wads around to defend Apple's every move.
There are people who oppose geoengineering, some of them have good arguments, some of them are worthless pieces of garbage that need to die before they spread their diseases any further.
People with good arguments say things like "we need to think about this a lot more", "a environmental benefit for one nation state may be an act of war for another" and "please, please, for the love of all that's good in the world, don't try anything that's irreversible". You can deal with people like that, study the issues together, strike bargains - and the part about no irreversible large scale prototyping just plain makes sense.
People who need to be removed from serious conversation with a hazmat suit and a chainsaw say things like "it's unnatural", "we need to leave this to God" or, my favourite, "you shouldn't goeengineer because it might work and that would prevent the collapse of western consumer capitalism". That's the people who think we deserve to suffer for knowing too much, asking too many questions or having too much stuff. They think there's something inherently wrong about wealth and technological progress, something that removes us from nature, destroys out humanity or makes us impure. They cannot be reasoned with as the source of these views is usually their own sexual maladjustment. Working with people like that is always about minimizing the damage they cause. I suggest using dynamite - rectally.
(I've been watching a lot of George Carlin lately, in case you were wondering.)
My favorite in the Errol Flynn one too, but the tale can succesfully be told in other ways too; for proof see "Robin and Marian" by Richard Lester and writer James Goldman. Sean Connery and Andrey Hepburn in the name roles. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0075147/