Let the town pass an ordinance that requires explanation of the facts and recommendation of content from less onerous publishers in every place MPAA affiliated content is sold or performed. Imagine a local movie theater showing foreign and indy films and recommending one when someone asks for a ticket to Transformers.
Eventually, nobody will care about this because all communications will be encrypted end-to-end and wiretaps will be useless. Attempts to outlaw that would result in only criminals having encryption and honest people falling victim to wiretaps by criminals and foreign governments. Besides there are many ways to make encryption not look like encryption.
This is quite all right for law enforcement, as many new ways to breach people's privacy are emerging at the same time - RFIDs, GPS phones, new hackable devices, street cameras, voice-tracking lasers shinned on one's window and so on. On the whole, it will be easier than ever to do lawful or unlawful. curvallaince. They just need to stop cribbing about having to abandon some old technologies and adopting new ones.
Current movie marketing excludes most of the market and most notably adults who actually have the money to pay for all the movies they want. There are multiple reasons why anyone with children will seldom go to movie theater. Even if you find a G rated movie that everyone wants to see and is willing to sit through quietly, you will be out $50 for 2 adult tickets, 2 child tickets and everyone who must have popcorn and coke. This will never be competitive with other sources of entertainment that one can get for $50. These leaves teenagers and college students who have neither money nor fully developed ethics to avoid Pirate Bay or sitting in the theater for the whole day after buying one ticket.
On the other hand, DVDs, iTunes rentals and On-Demand movies are only released half a year later, when there are no billboards, magazine reviews or any other buzz about the title. How can anyone expect to sell a product without advertisement?
Where MPAA goes wrong is in assuming that their product is essential and some special law changes or 2 grand for new TVs in the house would be considered so that they agree to sell their stuff. But movies are not something like health insurance where we can negotiate terms like banning exclusion of pre-existing conditions in exchange for requiring everyone financially capable to buy a policy. If they don't want to market and sell their stuff under existing terms and on the equipment that most potential customers have, there are thousands of other products and services crying for our attention. Skip 4 theater movies and book a weekend getaway on Travelocity - sounds good to me.
Even they were that important, they should expect a legal requirement in exchange for a legal waiver. Like mandating that any title showing in theaters is simultaneously available on any local on-demand service for a set maximum price.
Nope, there is a huge difference from insurance companies. As a result of more sober, seatbelt wearing drivers going at 70mph on 55mph highway instead of at 100mph on 80mph highway (let's be realistic here), you are less likely to die or get crippled even if you pay as much as ever for insurance.
On the other hand, if MPAA gets it's way, you are out two grand for a new TV AND you will not be able to archive content which you think is culturally important and share it with your children.
Sure, as long as the machine simulating the universe is more complex than the universe itself and includes an underlying deterministic model behind quantum uncertainty.
Did this God of yours also suggest that the father has at least a moral right to be involved in the decision? (doctor and the God don't get a legal right either, so I guess I'll deal).
Polynomial time approximate, probabilistic or special case solutions to NP problems are wide spread. The problem is that real human being in economics can not be easily described by an equation - and when they can be, they quickly change their behavior based on that knowledge. What both computer scientists and economists need to learn is stop being geeks addicted to a single theory and start dealing with people.
If Oracle is not interested, other people/companies will carry on the development. In general Sun customers should be applauding the foresight of the company to make pretty much every peace of their hardware and software Open Source and compare their situation to that of Peoplesoft or Siebel customers. Even if everything Sun is killed off tomorrow, it would still be possible to manufacture Sparc-based servers running Solaris and with applications developed using Java and Netbeans.
There is always the possibility of a life with happiness, dignity, and without constant suffering, thus abortion is always a horrible thing.
How do you know that? There are plenty of disorders that result in death within a couple of months or mental retardation so severe that no communication is possible. Did you go and ask them if they are happy or suffering. Do you feel you are more qualified to make the decision than well-informed parents?
Legality of abortion has nothing to do with the fetus being able to feel pain or hear words. From ultrasounds I think everyone can clearly see many behaviors we associate with being alive or being human. The question is weather anyone is willing to take responsibility for life, health and future of both the mother or the baby. Do we keep a mentally disturbed teenager in chains until she gives birth so that she can not possibly jump of the bridge or otherwise harm herself or the baby? Will anyone make sure that a severally mentally disabled child doesn't spend decades being abused and neglected in an institution after his/her parents pass away? Is government more qualified than prospective parents to decide what constitutes a quality of life worth winning.
Thus, although I believe that abortion (where there is otherwise a possibility of a life with happiness, dignity and without constant suffering) is a horrible thing, I also do not believe that a legal ban is any more humane. We need many solutions that will require others in the society to make sacrifices at least by paying taxes. For example, families with Down's child will often have their marriage and future of other children screwed if they don't have some part time place to drop off the child once in a while and get a break. Even with multitude of options, a few parents may still decide on abortion and they should be allowed to.
I find it hard to believe that you fail to comprehend such a simple point, but then again the whole movie industry is in the same boat. How can I be expected to go and buy/rent movies when they haven't been advertised on highway billboards, reviewed in magazines or talked about in the office for over half a year? I am not the one suffering - I just don't get the urge to go and spend money without product awareness and the built up popular buzz. I simply find other ways to spend money on products and services that someone actually bothered to bring to my attention. However I find it incredible that marketing departments in multibillion dollar companies just assume that profits are plummeting because their whole customer base is thieves without ruling out far more likely explanations.
Same for Dora DVDs. Any competent marketing specialists familiar with toddlers and parents can point out that these will be used for quick half an hour diversions rather than watched continuously from beginning to end. Hence 15 minutes of ads and the need for a manual step after that ruins the product's value. Sure, I can strip off CSS from my DVD and not get caught. But if I already decide that I have to break the law, I might as well strip CSS of my friends DVD, not get caught AND save fifteen bucks. Sounds like a great business plan for the studio.
As for your $100 Walmart PC, please feel free to loan it to me for a week. I will return it and even try to find some of the keys that have been pried off the keyboard and thrown into a bowl of soup because they are "ABCs".
A babysitter is certainly part of the solution, however expense, the amount of advanced planning needed, privacy and safety make it more suitable for special occasions than the cases where you would want a Dora DVD. Nobody calls a sitter to cook dinner and spending romantic time with your spouse is much more fun when it's relatively spontaneous and doesn't involve a teenager or an old lady sitting in your house.
I guess you are either too young to realize or too old to remember that being a decent parent means staying profitably employed, cooking meals, cleaning the house and keeping one's marriage viable. None of these activities, and especially not the last one, are compatible with an undistracted 2-year-old.
Yes you can suggest that I stop eating meals, cleaning the house or spending time with my wife or attending after hours conference calls with offshore coworkers. However I am more likely to listen to - and financially support - someone who gives me realistic options for when diversions are necessary. Increasingly, it's looking like "suggestion" from entertainment industry are about as helpful as yours is.
Well, commercial tools that bypass CSS can not be legally sold in US. Which effectively means GPL downloads from Europe. I do use Handbrake and play the results on Apple TV. However, the goal of having reliable, inexpensive, hassle free access to content from all rooms in the house that have a TV is surprisingly illusive. DVD players are dirt cheap, H-264 players are not. So ideally the tool would strip CSS and transfer MPEG-2 video to a new disk without re-compressing it. I am sure that I can eventually find a Mac tool for that, but even then this would involve quite a few hassles - like keeping my laptop dedicated to the task for many hours, buying relatively expensive dual layer media, swapping disks to convert a dozen and so on.
So I ask again why are the idiots so resistant to making money for cartoons which are already free on TV?
The do. Comcast has a large number of on-demand movies for your home TV. How many of those have you watched? The production houses often release DVDs of their movies for you to watch on your home TV. How many of those have you payed for and watched? I suspect your statement about paying and watching is less than accurate.
Those movies are at least 6 month and often 6 year old and represent only a small selection of what is originally released in theaters. I can not watch the movie when people are actually talking about and there is rarely a motivation to proactively scan iTunes store or Comcast On-Demand months later on an off chance that it is available for rent at that exact time.
Whenever I hear someone say something like this, I say "WTF?" I buy DVDs and I'm never troubled by ads or menus. The first stop for a DVD after the store is my computer, where the content is ripped and stored digitally. I once made the mistake of trying to watch a recent DVD on my $29 DVD player, and yes, ads and menus. Ick.
Each DVD sets you back $15. If it's a TV series, you have to pay for all 5 episodes even when you already watched 3. Now that you ripped the DVD, just how do you make it accessible in every room of the house? Wireless-enabled H264 players are not cheap and management software is messy (even in case of iTunes and Apple TV you have to remember to leave the computer and iTunes running). Even after all that, suppose I started Dora in the nursery to eat my dinner in peace. Now if I want to heat up some more food in microwave, Apple TV is going to promptly lose its wireless connection and I have to go back upstairs to deal with blood-curling screams. On the other hand if I go with original DVD, I need to wait in the room for 15 minutes listening to protests about "Doda" not playing and then be physically there to select "Play all" from the menu before going to do my stuff.
I suppose there are some ways to eventually hack around all this without spending hundreds of dollars just to be able to play cartoons which are free on broadcast TV. But at this point I am leaning towards just encouraging some other entertainment which is not so fragile and expensive. I just can't imagine that the idiots are so resistant to making money.
Like I am going to spend $200+ on a Blu Ray player for my 2 year old daughter's $240 TV with a built in DVD player, much less for each room where we might need an hour of diversion. Even then, who is to say that they will release "Dora the Explorer" on Blu Ray, for a reasonable price, and without ads for PG13 movies?
I just wish they made a few DVDs with 6 episodes each that automatically start and play in infinite loop as soon as inserted. I already have episodes from iTunes, but these would require an $220 Apple TV in every room and the damn thing loses network connection and thus triggers tamper tantrums every time microwave is started. Bottom line, someone hates making money and makes the simplest thing overwhelmingly complicated, annoying and expensive. The cartoons already play free on Nickelodeon. Just sell watermarked videos for $2/each and get done with it.
I haven't seen a modern display recently that *doesn't* support HDCP
I would argue that a definition of modern display is something that doesn't need to be physically tied down with wires to a cable box or dedicated for the purpose of only watching TV and not displaying any other information. Like a laptop that I can take to an outdoor patio to watch my favorite show. Or a portable player that my kid can use on a back sit of the car. Or a nice 30 inch dual link DVI LCD. If I plopped down $2K for Apple cinema display or $500 for a a projector or both, why should I have to spend thousands more when either is perfectly adequate as my house TV?
Oh, consumers are willing to change all right. We are willing to stop consuming - legally or otherwise - expensive music and movies ridden with restrictions that do not work for our lifestyles. I saw like 2 movies in the theater in the two years after our first child was born and, now that the "prove that we still can" feeling is out of the way, were are not going again for at least another 3 years. Had they offered the movies on our home TV, we would have payed and watched. But we are not going to buy a new, enhanced DRM TV just to have a privilege of paying more money for the movies. Similarly, I bought a few DVDs for my daughter, but they show 15 minutes worth of unskippable, not age appropriate ads and then get stuck on the menu rather than automatically playing the content. I think I will just teach her to play with other toys or watch free cartoons from broadcast TV rather then going through the hassle of trying to burn a fixed copy with complicated tools or buying expensive hardware to stream H264. I can buy some nice bikes and dolls for the same money.
If producers are similarly ready to stop producing and go out of business, we are truly more a like and different. I can save my money for family trips to Hawaii and they can ask me "do you want fries with that". It's funny how people who are losing sales fail to consider the simplest explanation rather than assuming that the majority of society is composed of malicious criminals.
So the average Joe shouldn't be able to benefit from 64 bit architecture (like a video editing tool that makes good use of unlimited virtual memory) if he has the right CPU? Or should he give up easy compatibility with 32 bit code (like flash plugin) in order to make the switch?
I love the fact that Snow Leopard lets you fully utilize your hardware without giving up any of your software - not even old PowerPC binaries.
With Apple's tiny market share, it is more to their interest to consolidate the user base to the latest version of the OS so that application developers have the maximum number of customers to target with new technologies. Hence Snow Leopard is $29 and doesn't bother to check if you have Leopard before installing.
However, if they just let the installer run on an older, slower machine, they become responsible for all advertised features of the OS working in an acceptable manner. You may be happy with results of XPostFacto/LeopardAssist, but it may be impossible to play a movie full screen or to open more than 5 dashboard widgets. Worse, you may buy an expensive app designed for Leopard and find that it does not work since it's developer targeted the expected lowest common denominator hardware.
Apple could have provided some expert option to bypass the checks and show a compatibility warning during every boot instead. But their philosophy is that if things install they should work completely and work well rather than sporadically crashing/hanging/requiring hacks. They didn't not however use DRM to keep people from creating 3rd party hacks, so enjoy your XPostFacto and LeopardAssist.
If cost is a measure of environmental impact, we would save the planet by eating exclusively in McDonald.
Furthermore, these are early adopter costs. 10 years later the battery of a new Prius will be mostly made from a battery of an old Prius rather than mining for raw components.
Finally, you are assuming that the energy prices will not go up over 4 years.
In case of Patriot system, it has always been known to be effective only for a fraction of incoming missiles. So you would presumably run to the bunker in either case.
Slashdot Mirror
Let the town pass an ordinance that requires explanation of the facts and recommendation of content from less onerous publishers in every place MPAA affiliated content is sold or performed. Imagine a local movie theater showing foreign and indy films and recommending one when someone asks for a ticket to Transformers.
Eventually, nobody will care about this because all communications will be encrypted end-to-end and wiretaps will be useless. Attempts to outlaw that would result in only criminals having encryption and honest people falling victim to wiretaps by criminals and foreign governments. Besides there are many ways to make encryption not look like encryption.
This is quite all right for law enforcement, as many new ways to breach people's privacy are emerging at the same time - RFIDs, GPS phones, new hackable devices, street cameras, voice-tracking lasers shinned on one's window and so on. On the whole, it will be easier than ever to do lawful or unlawful. curvallaince. They just need to stop cribbing about having to abandon some old technologies and adopting new ones.
Current movie marketing excludes most of the market and most notably adults who actually have the money to pay for all the movies they want. There are multiple reasons why anyone with children will seldom go to movie theater. Even if you find a G rated movie that everyone wants to see and is willing to sit through quietly, you will be out $50 for 2 adult tickets, 2 child tickets and everyone who must have popcorn and coke. This will never be competitive with other sources of entertainment that one can get for $50. These leaves teenagers and college students who have neither money nor fully developed ethics to avoid Pirate Bay or sitting in the theater for the whole day after buying one ticket.
On the other hand, DVDs, iTunes rentals and On-Demand movies are only released half a year later, when there are no billboards, magazine reviews or any other buzz about the title. How can anyone expect to sell a product without advertisement?
Where MPAA goes wrong is in assuming that their product is essential and some special law changes or 2 grand for new TVs in the house would be considered so that they agree to sell their stuff. But movies are not something like health insurance where we can negotiate terms like banning exclusion of pre-existing conditions in exchange for requiring everyone financially capable to buy a policy. If they don't want to market and sell their stuff under existing terms and on the equipment that most potential customers have, there are thousands of other products and services crying for our attention. Skip 4 theater movies and book a weekend getaway on Travelocity - sounds good to me.
Even they were that important, they should expect a legal requirement in exchange for a legal waiver. Like mandating that any title showing in theaters is simultaneously available on any local on-demand service for a set maximum price.
Nope, there is a huge difference from insurance companies. As a result of more sober, seatbelt wearing drivers going at 70mph on 55mph highway instead of at 100mph on 80mph highway (let's be realistic here), you are less likely to die or get crippled even if you pay as much as ever for insurance.
On the other hand, if MPAA gets it's way, you are out two grand for a new TV AND you will not be able to archive content which you think is culturally important and share it with your children.
Sure, as long as the machine simulating the universe is more complex than the universe itself and includes an underlying deterministic model behind quantum uncertainty.
Did this God of yours also suggest that the father has at least a moral right to be involved in the decision? (doctor and the God don't get a legal right either, so I guess I'll deal).
It would be even more effective to block known IP blocks of his businesses from any inbound or outbound access to Google services for a month.
Polynomial time approximate, probabilistic or special case solutions to NP problems are wide spread. The problem is that real human being in economics can not be easily described by an equation - and when they can be, they quickly change their behavior based on that knowledge. What both computer scientists and economists need to learn is stop being geeks addicted to a single theory and start dealing with people.
If Oracle is not interested, other people/companies will carry on the development. In general Sun customers should be applauding the foresight of the company to make pretty much every peace of their hardware and software Open Source and compare their situation to that of Peoplesoft or Siebel customers. Even if everything Sun is killed off tomorrow, it would still be possible to manufacture Sparc-based servers running Solaris and with applications developed using Java and Netbeans.
There is always the possibility of a life with happiness, dignity, and without constant suffering, thus abortion is always a horrible thing.
How do you know that? There are plenty of disorders that result in death within a couple of months or mental retardation so severe that no communication is possible. Did you go and ask them if they are happy or suffering. Do you feel you are more qualified to make the decision than well-informed parents?
Legality of abortion has nothing to do with the fetus being able to feel pain or hear words. From ultrasounds I think everyone can clearly see many behaviors we associate with being alive or being human. The question is weather anyone is willing to take responsibility for life, health and future of both the mother or the baby. Do we keep a mentally disturbed teenager in chains until she gives birth so that she can not possibly jump of the bridge or otherwise harm herself or the baby? Will anyone make sure that a severally mentally disabled child doesn't spend decades being abused and neglected in an institution after his/her parents pass away? Is government more qualified than prospective parents to decide what constitutes a quality of life worth winning.
Thus, although I believe that abortion (where there is otherwise a possibility of a life with happiness, dignity and without constant suffering) is a horrible thing, I also do not believe that a legal ban is any more humane. We need many solutions that will require others in the society to make sacrifices at least by paying taxes. For example, families with Down's child will often have their marriage and future of other children screwed if they don't have some part time place to drop off the child once in a while and get a break. Even with multitude of options, a few parents may still decide on abortion and they should be allowed to.
I find it hard to believe that you fail to comprehend such a simple point, but then again the whole movie industry is in the same boat. How can I be expected to go and buy/rent movies when they haven't been advertised on highway billboards, reviewed in magazines or talked about in the office for over half a year? I am not the one suffering - I just don't get the urge to go and spend money without product awareness and the built up popular buzz. I simply find other ways to spend money on products and services that someone actually bothered to bring to my attention. However I find it incredible that marketing departments in multibillion dollar companies just assume that profits are plummeting because their whole customer base is thieves without ruling out far more likely explanations.
Same for Dora DVDs. Any competent marketing specialists familiar with toddlers and parents can point out that these will be used for quick half an hour diversions rather than watched continuously from beginning to end. Hence 15 minutes of ads and the need for a manual step after that ruins the product's value. Sure, I can strip off CSS from my DVD and not get caught. But if I already decide that I have to break the law, I might as well strip CSS of my friends DVD, not get caught AND save fifteen bucks. Sounds like a great business plan for the studio.
As for your $100 Walmart PC, please feel free to loan it to me for a week. I will return it and even try to find some of the keys that have been pried off the keyboard and thrown into a bowl of soup because they are "ABCs".
A babysitter is certainly part of the solution, however expense, the amount of advanced planning needed, privacy and safety make it more suitable for special occasions than the cases where you would want a Dora DVD. Nobody calls a sitter to cook dinner and spending romantic time with your spouse is much more fun when it's relatively spontaneous and doesn't involve a teenager or an old lady sitting in your house.
I guess you are either too young to realize or too old to remember that being a decent parent means staying profitably employed, cooking meals, cleaning the house and keeping one's marriage viable. None of these activities, and especially not the last one, are compatible with an undistracted 2-year-old.
Now go get off my lawn.
Yes you can suggest that I stop eating meals, cleaning the house or spending time with my wife or attending after hours conference calls with offshore coworkers. However I am more likely to listen to - and financially support - someone who gives me realistic options for when diversions are necessary. Increasingly, it's looking like "suggestion" from entertainment industry are about as helpful as yours is.
Well, commercial tools that bypass CSS can not be legally sold in US. Which effectively means GPL downloads from Europe. I do use Handbrake and play the results on Apple TV. However, the goal of having reliable, inexpensive, hassle free access to content from all rooms in the house that have a TV is surprisingly illusive. DVD players are dirt cheap, H-264 players are not. So ideally the tool would strip CSS and transfer MPEG-2 video to a new disk without re-compressing it. I am sure that I can eventually find a Mac tool for that, but even then this would involve quite a few hassles - like keeping my laptop dedicated to the task for many hours, buying relatively expensive dual layer media, swapping disks to convert a dozen and so on.
So I ask again why are the idiots so resistant to making money for cartoons which are already free on TV?
The do. Comcast has a large number of on-demand movies for your home TV. How many of those have you watched? The production houses often release DVDs of their movies for you to watch on your home TV. How many of those have you payed for and watched? I suspect your statement about paying and watching is less than accurate.
Those movies are at least 6 month and often 6 year old and represent only a small selection of what is originally released in theaters. I can not watch the movie when people are actually talking about and there is rarely a motivation to proactively scan iTunes store or Comcast On-Demand months later on an off chance that it is available for rent at that exact time.
Whenever I hear someone say something like this, I say "WTF?" I buy DVDs and I'm never troubled by ads or menus. The first stop for a DVD after the store is my computer, where the content is ripped and stored digitally. I once made the mistake of trying to watch a recent DVD on my $29 DVD player, and yes, ads and menus. Ick.
Each DVD sets you back $15. If it's a TV series, you have to pay for all 5 episodes even when you already watched 3. Now that you ripped the DVD, just how do you make it accessible in every room of the house? Wireless-enabled H264 players are not cheap and management software is messy (even in case of iTunes and Apple TV you have to remember to leave the computer and iTunes running). Even after all that, suppose I started Dora in the nursery to eat my dinner in peace. Now if I want to heat up some more food in microwave, Apple TV is going to promptly lose its wireless connection and I have to go back upstairs to deal with blood-curling screams. On the other hand if I go with original DVD, I need to wait in the room for 15 minutes listening to protests about "Doda" not playing and then be physically there to select "Play all" from the menu before going to do my stuff.
I suppose there are some ways to eventually hack around all this without spending hundreds of dollars just to be able to play cartoons which are free on broadcast TV. But at this point I am leaning towards just encouraging some other entertainment which is not so fragile and expensive. I just can't imagine that the idiots are so resistant to making money.
Like I am going to spend $200+ on a Blu Ray player for my 2 year old daughter's $240 TV with a built in DVD player, much less for each room where we might need an hour of diversion. Even then, who is to say that they will release "Dora the Explorer" on Blu Ray, for a reasonable price, and without ads for PG13 movies?
I just wish they made a few DVDs with 6 episodes each that automatically start and play in infinite loop as soon as inserted. I already have episodes from iTunes, but these would require an $220 Apple TV in every room and the damn thing loses network connection and thus triggers tamper tantrums every time microwave is started. Bottom line, someone hates making money and makes the simplest thing overwhelmingly complicated, annoying and expensive. The cartoons already play free on Nickelodeon. Just sell watermarked videos for $2/each and get done with it.
I haven't seen a modern display recently that *doesn't* support HDCP
I would argue that a definition of modern display is something that doesn't need to be physically tied down with wires to a cable box or dedicated for the purpose of only watching TV and not displaying any other information. Like a laptop that I can take to an outdoor patio to watch my favorite show. Or a portable player that my kid can use on a back sit of the car. Or a nice 30 inch dual link DVI LCD. If I plopped down $2K for Apple cinema display or $500 for a a projector or both, why should I have to spend thousands more when either is perfectly adequate as my house TV?
Oh, consumers are willing to change all right. We are willing to stop consuming - legally or otherwise - expensive music and movies ridden with restrictions that do not work for our lifestyles. I saw like 2 movies in the theater in the two years after our first child was born and, now that the "prove that we still can" feeling is out of the way, were are not going again for at least another 3 years. Had they offered the movies on our home TV, we would have payed and watched. But we are not going to buy a new, enhanced DRM TV just to have a privilege of paying more money for the movies. Similarly, I bought a few DVDs for my daughter, but they show 15 minutes worth of unskippable, not age appropriate ads and then get stuck on the menu rather than automatically playing the content. I think I will just teach her to play with other toys or watch free cartoons from broadcast TV rather then going through the hassle of trying to burn a fixed copy with complicated tools or buying expensive hardware to stream H264. I can buy some nice bikes and dolls for the same money.
If producers are similarly ready to stop producing and go out of business, we are truly more a like and different. I can save my money for family trips to Hawaii and they can ask me "do you want fries with that". It's funny how people who are losing sales fail to consider the simplest explanation rather than assuming that the majority of society is composed of malicious criminals.
So the average Joe shouldn't be able to benefit from 64 bit architecture (like a video editing tool that makes good use of unlimited virtual memory) if he has the right CPU? Or should he give up easy compatibility with 32 bit code (like flash plugin) in order to make the switch?
I love the fact that Snow Leopard lets you fully utilize your hardware without giving up any of your software - not even old PowerPC binaries.
With Apple's tiny market share, it is more to their interest to consolidate the user base to the latest version of the OS so that application developers have the maximum number of customers to target with new technologies. Hence Snow Leopard is $29 and doesn't bother to check if you have Leopard before installing.
However, if they just let the installer run on an older, slower machine, they become responsible for all advertised features of the OS working in an acceptable manner. You may be happy with results of XPostFacto/LeopardAssist, but it may be impossible to play a movie full screen or to open more than 5 dashboard widgets. Worse, you may buy an expensive app designed for Leopard and find that it does not work since it's developer targeted the expected lowest common denominator hardware.
Apple could have provided some expert option to bypass the checks and show a compatibility warning during every boot instead. But their philosophy is that if things install they should work completely and work well rather than sporadically crashing/hanging/requiring hacks. They didn't not however use DRM to keep people from creating 3rd party hacks, so enjoy your XPostFacto and LeopardAssist.
If cost is a measure of environmental impact, we would save the planet by eating exclusively in McDonald.
Furthermore, these are early adopter costs. 10 years later the battery of a new Prius will be mostly made from a battery of an old Prius rather than mining for raw components.
Finally, you are assuming that the energy prices will not go up over 4 years.
You don't think the government can splurge somewhat more than $200 for a key targeting component of a missile defense system?
In case of Patriot system, it has always been known to be effective only for a fraction of incoming missiles. So you would presumably run to the bunker in either case.