This is exactly what I'm looking for: the ability to dual boot into Windows so I can play PC games.
If indeed Apple doesn't lock Windows out of the hardware, then I'll be able to get rid of my Windows box. About the last reason for keeping it has been to play its incomparable library of games.
No, it's not going to be fun for the Mac game porting industry, such as it was. But in this case, that's a Dodo in the path of evolution. Better that future Apple hardware allow us an easy path into the world's biggest library of games. Games drive a lot of PC hardware sales; this new Apple-Intel platform could, if done right, appeal to the huge PC gaming market.
There's another point to consider, too: used PPC Macs are going to take a hit in resale value now.
Nobody is going to want to pay top dollar for old architecture, and that will mean deals on used G4 and G5 hardware.
That isn't helpful if one wants the latest and greatest, or if you're the owner now of rapidly obsoleting hardware--but for deal-seekers it will be just dandy.
"But I have to find it difficult recommending a product that's clearly unfinished, and clearly not without bugs. None of the bugs that I encountered were show stoppers, but I'm not one to support pre-release products that are being shipped as final. So if you're expecting a perfect user experience with Tiger, you'll be close but not quite there. I'm hoping the 10.4.1 update fixes all of my issues, but for now don't expect a flawless $129 experience. "
...
"Looking at today, it's an important day for Apple, a day to celebrate a very impressive OS launch - but I get the feeling that no one at Apple is celebrating quite yet, it seems like there's still quite a bit of work left."
I'm doubtful Tiger out-of-the-box will run as well as Panther on my 700 mhz iBook.
Mossberg seems to imply as much in his complaints about slowdowns, adding:
"Apple acknowledges it will need to tweak Tiger to eliminate the delays, and it promises to address the problem within a few months. It might be wise for users with older, slower Mac models to wait until then to upgrade to Tiger."
Spotlight would help me enormously, but I'm not willing to run key tasks slower in exchange for it (and especially not for "a few months"). Anyone else going to run Tiger on a G3 system?
As with Steve Jobs, so with George W. Bush: no cult of personality can tolerate books that are merely "largely" positive. There's the gospel, and then there's apostasy. Either you adore, or you'd better get out of Dodge.
No, Apple doesn't have to sell the book. But pulling the entire line is childish. And counter-productive. By going nuclear, Jobs has helped to give the title some buzz--the silver lining in every act of censorship.:-)
1)
Q: Who was that beowulf cluster I saw you with last night?
A: That was no beowulf cluster. That was my wi-fi.
2)
Man walks into a bar, orders a beowulf cluster. Bartender says, "Straight up or on racks?" Man says, "On the racks, please."
3)
Imagine a thread filled with the same one-liner beowulf cluster jokes. Now imagine a beowulf cluster of these things!
4)
I've just gone through a messy divorce. My wife caught me in the middle of an orgy. In my own defense, I was only screwing one iMac. But the damn thing was in a beowulf cluster!
Existing solely to sell ads and flatter advertisers, a vanity publication like PC Mag has every reason to find dual core systems appropriate to the task of carrying the load for Microsoft's security failures.
What's telling is that these failures aren't even treated as a source of embarrassment any more: they're a growth industry! $4,000 for a Dell dual core in an age of $400 computers... The crazy aunt in the attic has been promoted to a striptease attraction, and PC Mag is selling tickets. Try not to barf.;-)
I'm not a huge fan of Reznor's work but I admire him giving users control over his music. That's the paradigm shift here: a notorious studio wiz inviting budding wizards into his tower.
In the age of the remix and the mash-up, no work of music is ever finished. Think of it. If Reznor's daring move became popular, we'd never have to put up with Britney Spears again: you'd just overlay some loops, remove the cliched beat, bend that nasty little corporate whine of a voice into something interesting, and voila, Nine Inch Britney.;-)
Forget the thumb. Those UIs look like nightmares. Their sense of organization reminds me of the visual clutter popular in U.S. cable TV news broadcasts--the widest-possible-net theory of information design.
Maybe this interface is right for someone (corporate drones, perhaps, whose work lives are drowned in minutaie). But when devices or broadcasts make you shuffle through a maelstrom of information to learn or get something done, you're submitting to someone else's taste for disorder.
The lack of compelling/really useful widgets was a problem.
Oh, for the lurva Pete!
I don't happen to care much for Konfabulator, but there are nearly 1,000 widgets for it. They cover every single thing Apple is scraping together for Dashboard. And you can be sure nearly everything to be "invented" for Dashboard later will already have been Konfabulated.
It just was not very useful. Dashboard looks to be more so.
Er, yeah. They both work the same way and do the same thing.
Do you have ANY idea how old the songs get on your mp3 player if you keep hearing stuff over and over again like a radio station?
No, frankly.
Listening to "stuff over and over again" is exactly the point for some of us. There is music made of many layers, subtleties, textures and allusions that you can spend a lifetime hearing "over and over again." Hold on to your hat, Sonny Jim: I listen to some music repeatedly in the same day! My tastes are the antithesis of yours: how could you not want to listen to Charles Mingus or Miles Davis over and over and over again?:-)
But sure: mp3 players aren't aimed at music lovers. They're aimed at music consumers. if one's taste is for disposable corporate product, you'll need a bigger trough from which to scoop the next load.
Even someone who is an audiophile will often still have a hard time telling the difference (between 128k and higher) through the shit headphones that often come with MP3 players.:)
Heh, true enough. Yet better earphones are easily affordable. For under $20, you can greatly improve upon the comfort and marginally improve upon the audio quality of the iPod's buds, those notorious Certs on a cord.
Anyone seeking a low-cost alternative should check out the Panasonic RP-HJE50 in-ear phones. Good for jazz and acoustic listening because they do a better job of producing clear mids and highs than the iPod buds; less so for rock or hiphop, as they're admittedly far from great on bass. Their exterior is made of soft rubber--so comfortable you can't tell they're in your ear.
I was disappointed by the poor performance of MS Word and Pages when I tested a Mini in our Apple store. Neither app could keep up with my typing--this on a G4! Even my aging G3 iBook, no speed machine, doesn't hiccup while rendering simple text.
Mind, I've maxed out RAM on my iBook. Apparently the standard Mini is wanting at 256mb.
People who give of their time and talents to Wikipedia earn my respect, and I am a former encyclopedia author.
But people who give of their time to Microsoft are performing charity for billionaires. Clever devils, Redmond: they understand one of the core appeals of the Wiki and open source movements is community, a value so debased in our right wing society that its resurrection in these projects is something of a bright hope.
There are two problems with the Encarta scheme. One, Microsoft is exploiting unpaid work for its own gain. And two, more critically, Microsoft's notorious censorship (cf. the pruning of disagreeable words from its Office dictionaries), dishonesty in public policy (cf. attempts to control open source) and irresponsibly-used economic might (cf. antitrust behavior in the US and EU) cast a long shadow over its ability to objectively shepherd any body of knowledge.
Even grandstanding idiots like Lamar Smith can blunder into the correct position. Interoperability may not please Apple, and yes, Microsoft is horribly proprietary, too. But those are both red herrings. Interoperability is an easily demonstrated good for us as consumers, and proprietary DRM is bad. That must guide our positions, even if a sacred cow gets gored--or should I say cored?;-).
Not surprisingly Apple is in a precarious position. Is it any wonder, Jobs having bedded down with one of our most corrupt industries? The labels have one goal--restoring their traditional market hegemony--and since Jobs has refused to raise prices they will, at the earliest opportunity, screw him. Only iPod's dominance is keeping this shaky alliance going. The moment that crumbles...
Bless Mr. Stern, but what an irony! In all the years of blowing my paper route money back in the 70s, his would have been the last company I'd have expected to still be standing. Gottlieb had the precision tables, Bally and Williams the style and speed. The Data East-Sega-Stern corner--machines unimaginatively designed that felt clunky--was easy to ignore. Go figure. But here we are, on the very last ball, and I wish Stern all the luck in the world.
Sorry to learn, though, that all his machines now are tie-ins to movies and TV shows. Half the beauty of pinball in its heyday was its aesthetic, which ranged voraciously across Americana as each table assembled a kind of comic book on glass and wood: you got legends and history and fantasy, blue collar pasttimes, pool and racing and cards, techno festishism, social trends, anatomically impossible chicks, and just plain weird and self-referential stuff about pinball. The backglass and table designs were a unique form not without their masterpieces (look up the artist Jerry Kelly--the form's Picasso--on the delightful Internet Pinball Machine Database).
It really is a shame when the prevailing "geek" attitude towards agencies like the FBI is mistrust and fear, not confidence and respect.
Others are mentioning COINTELPRO, or Hoover's reign of terror, or Waco, and on and on. No need for me to cover that territory, which any well-informed citizen knows. There's always Wikipedia if you need to bone up on the cheap.
No, I wish to call attention to your language. Therein lies your problem: your language shortcuts thought. Do you realize you write less like a citizen than a subject?
Agencies like the FBI, you write.
Government agencies, law enforcement agencies, you mean. Please stop and think about that.
"Agencies like the FBI"--which would include, of course, the CIA, the NSA, the DEA, the BATF, for starters--are nothing more than arms of power. It is that power to which we must turn, thoughtfully, and ask our questions. We cannot say de facto that an enforcement agency is worthy of "confidence and respect," as you would have it, unless we first examine whose laws and whose agenda these agencies are enforcing.
To take but one high-profile example: the war on drugs. This irrational prohibition has stocked our prisons with the poor, but failed demonstrably by creating more crime in illegal drugs; yet it is blindly enforced by those before whom you would have us genuflect. What choice have they, after all? Yet, fortunately, we have a choice: we can think, they cannot. We can withhold automatic "confidence and respect," as we should, since a brutal and destructive prohibition depends on patsies and collaborators.
The founders of our nation viewed overweening power with deep suspicion, and they anticipated the glamor of irrational obedience--the impulses of mob-like majorities, of good little yes-men. Examine their writings, and behold their constitutional framework: it is in sum a work of almost beautiful paranoia, conceived by men who looked on history as realists. They designed the nation to survive not terrorists or criminals but the surrender of thought by its own inhabitants.
Re:A MiniMac is cheap if you live in the USA
on
Return of the Mac
·
· Score: 1
Do you know how much a MiniMac cost abroad? Far more than just 1.5 times a PC, because there are import taxes and conversion rates to be dealt with. (...) All this means that, no, the MiniMac won't take over the world, when it actually costs (e.g., Brazil) almost the triple of a simple PC.
Heard of our collapsing currency? Just fly here and get your Dubya Discount. Great prices on car companies and treasury debt, too, if you're interested.
The controversial bill (PDF)will require ISPs to block access to websites deemed "harmful to minors" on request. This blacklist will be drawn up by the state's Attorney General.
The law empowers the AG to determine what is "harmful to minors." That is the first problem: our federal constitution forbids laws that abridge speech as this one does by turning the state AG into a gatekeeper of literary, artistic, sexual, or other content. Community standards? Fine, prosecute; but you can't legislate with such a broad brush.
Far from the niceties of an opt-out solution, this noxious law requires ISPs either to block sites themselves or give customers filtering software. Either solution will result in normal, nonpornographic content being blocked, too. That will creates costs and headaches for creators and consumers.
Now, it's one thing for parents who use imperfect filtering software to say, "I don't care if my kid doesn't get to see some good web sites as long as all the bad ones are blocked." But the state has no such luxury, being nobody's parent; indeed, our Bill of Rights is there to slap down the state when it overreaches, and it is overreaching here. The slap will be forthcoming in court and it will be applied severely.
I guess I don't see how this applies to My rights online other than the rating system.
Even if you can't appreciate what's at stake, you'll understand soon enough if you're a Utah resident and your state persists in this folly. Lawsuits against this kind of mischievous puritanism end up being very costly for taxpayers. That should be incentive enough to rein in the state's Taliban.
Where the "screw and subvert legitimate businesses and content owners at all costs" attitude is considered "Insightful".
Count your lucky stars they haven't encoded your Viagra with DRM yet, baby.
Drugs, baseball, and American "morality"
on
Juiced
·
· Score: 1
All this fretting over home-run hitters having drug-built muscles is interesting--as a sideshow. It matters most to two overlapping constituencies: baseball purists and bloodstream purists.
Both are triumphalist control freaks, products of American Puritanism. The former are hobbyists who regularly demand exceptional treatment for their game. Baseball must be exempt from antitrust laws because--well, just because. No other nation is invited to compete, and yet their championship is the "world" series. And when it comes time to build stadiums for this sport of millionaires? Here, in Minnesota, as elsewhere, the public is routinely badgered and bullied into lavishing welfare on some of the richest members of society, purely for the reason that it will enrich other affluent members of society (bar, restaurant and parking lot owners) while creating peonage jobs for the young and the underemployed. To our credit, my city has consistently told these special interests to piss off.
Baseball purists have a special gripe against steroids, which they believe are spoiling the record books. (On NPR's Talk of the Nation the other day, you could hear one steroid foe cry that he longs for a future in which he can tell his son that home run records are "real.") Like those who promote and profit from our expensive, wasteful, violent, and crime-producing drug prohibition, they draw a line in the sand between what they imagine to be authenticity and its opposite--purity and its bane. It's a species of silliness, as hypocritical in a sport that uses high-tech bats and shortened outfields as in a society pickled in alcohol.
Much of America is either drunk in the evening or zoning on the SSRIs that by day allow them to survive their cubicle or Wal-Mart-defined existence. We are a druggie nation, sloshed, soothed, uplifted, downturned, turned on, freaked out, fucked up. And that's just those doing the legal drugs. If we were a free society--like the one that you hear a lot about whenever we invade another--then we would not pretend that it matters whether baseball players pop steroids or your next door neighbor smokes pot. But the Puritan ideal drives us onward in the sweatshop of our godliness. Jesus wants your urine to be clean, you know, and He'll greet you outside the Pearly Gates with a little cup, just like His emissary on earth, your Human Resources Piss Taster. So be ready.
Besides the obvious angle that steroids makes a sluggish game more exciting, there's a good public policy case for their use in baseball. Performance-enhancers, according to free market logic, should improve the market value of players. More homers, more dough. And judging from salaries, it seems to work. Great: give them to each and everyone on the team, and the poor pill freaks may finally be able to afford to build their own stadiums.
1) Jobs doesn't care whether the phone succeeds (for various reasons ranging from the soured Moto relationship to his Apple-centric concerns to his plan to introduce a similar product)
2) Jobs is used to selling to a built-in audience clamoring for new product
3) Jobs knows something about the future of iTMS that Moto and we don't (e.g., it won't survive the labels' greed)
Why should free speech trump the rights of an individual or a company to use a contract to keep information private?
Because expression is the foundation of a free society. It is more important to keep the society free than to foster commercial interests. The wealth of the owners is not synonymous with, and frequently is inimical to, the good of the many.
Thanks for sneering at us little people again, Forbesy-Worbesy! Your contempt is always so gratifying. Next time one of our communities is wrecked by a Wal-Mart or we see our jobs outsourced to a sweatshop, we'll remember you and your flat-taxing ilk kindly!
Now, if we can do anything more for-- What? You say we can? And all it will cost is our social security system?
Slashdot Mirror
If indeed Apple doesn't lock Windows out of the hardware, then I'll be able to get rid of my Windows box. About the last reason for keeping it has been to play its incomparable library of games.
No, it's not going to be fun for the Mac game porting industry, such as it was. But in this case, that's a Dodo in the path of evolution. Better that future Apple hardware allow us an easy path into the world's biggest library of games. Games drive a lot of PC hardware sales; this new Apple-Intel platform could, if done right, appeal to the huge PC gaming market.
There's another point to consider, too: used PPC Macs are going to take a hit in resale value now.
Nobody is going to want to pay top dollar for old architecture, and that will mean deals on used G4 and G5 hardware.
That isn't helpful if one wants the latest and greatest, or if you're the owner now of rapidly obsoleting hardware--but for deal-seekers it will be just dandy.
Anand, the PC guru who has been extremely positive toward Apple products since becoming a dual-user, beta-tested Tiger throughout its development.
This week his lengthy review praises features, but finds the release version to be buggy and rushed. Performance is also a mixed bag. http://anandtech.com/mac/showdoc.aspx?i=2404&p=1
Two quotes:
Mossberg seems to imply as much in his complaints about slowdowns, adding:
Spotlight would help me enormously, but I'm not willing to run key tasks slower in exchange for it (and especially not for "a few months"). Anyone else going to run Tiger on a G3 system?
No, Apple doesn't have to sell the book. But pulling the entire line is childish. And counter-productive. By going nuclear, Jobs has helped to give the title some buzz--the silver lining in every act of censorship. :-)
Q: Who was that beowulf cluster I saw you with last night?
A: That was no beowulf cluster. That was my wi-fi.
2)
Man walks into a bar, orders a beowulf cluster. Bartender says, "Straight up or on racks?" Man says, "On the racks, please."
3)
Imagine a thread filled with the same one-liner beowulf cluster jokes. Now imagine a beowulf cluster of these things!
4)
I've just gone through a messy divorce. My wife caught me in the middle of an orgy. In my own defense, I was only screwing one iMac. But the damn thing was in a beowulf cluster!
What's telling is that these failures aren't even treated as a source of embarrassment any more: they're a growth industry! $4,000 for a Dell dual core in an age of $400 computers... The crazy aunt in the attic has been promoted to a striptease attraction, and PC Mag is selling tickets. Try not to barf. ;-)
I'm not a huge fan of Reznor's work but I admire him giving users control over his music. That's the paradigm shift here: a notorious studio wiz inviting budding wizards into his tower.
In the age of the remix and the mash-up, no work of music is ever finished. Think of it. If Reznor's daring move became popular, we'd never have to put up with Britney Spears again: you'd just overlay some loops, remove the cliched beat, bend that nasty little corporate whine of a voice into something interesting, and voila, Nine Inch Britney. ;-)
Maybe this interface is right for someone (corporate drones, perhaps, whose work lives are drowned in minutaie). But when devices or broadcasts make you shuffle through a maelstrom of information to learn or get something done, you're submitting to someone else's taste for disorder.
Oh, for the lurva Pete!
I don't happen to care much for Konfabulator, but there are nearly 1,000 widgets for it. They cover every single thing Apple is scraping together for Dashboard. And you can be sure nearly everything to be "invented" for Dashboard later will already have been Konfabulated.
It just was not very useful. Dashboard looks to be more so.
Er, yeah. They both work the same way and do the same thing.
And it is free, so
It's $129, Sonny Jim.
No, frankly.
Listening to "stuff over and over again" is exactly the point for some of us. There is music made of many layers, subtleties, textures and allusions that you can spend a lifetime hearing "over and over again." Hold on to your hat, Sonny Jim: I listen to some music repeatedly in the same day! My tastes are the antithesis of yours: how could you not want to listen to Charles Mingus or Miles Davis over and over and over again? :-)
But sure: mp3 players aren't aimed at music lovers. They're aimed at music consumers. if one's taste is for disposable corporate product, you'll need a bigger trough from which to scoop the next load.
Heh, true enough. Yet better earphones are easily affordable. For under $20, you can greatly improve upon the comfort and marginally improve upon the audio quality of the iPod's buds, those notorious Certs on a cord.
Anyone seeking a low-cost alternative should check out the Panasonic RP-HJE50 in-ear phones. Good for jazz and acoustic listening because they do a better job of producing clear mids and highs than the iPod buds; less so for rock or hiphop, as they're admittedly far from great on bass. Their exterior is made of soft rubber--so comfortable you can't tell they're in your ear.
Mind, I've maxed out RAM on my iBook. Apparently the standard Mini is wanting at 256mb.
But people who give of their time to Microsoft are performing charity for billionaires. Clever devils, Redmond: they understand one of the core appeals of the Wiki and open source movements is community, a value so debased in our right wing society that its resurrection in these projects is something of a bright hope.
There are two problems with the Encarta scheme. One, Microsoft is exploiting unpaid work for its own gain. And two, more critically, Microsoft's notorious censorship (cf. the pruning of disagreeable words from its Office dictionaries), dishonesty in public policy (cf. attempts to control open source) and irresponsibly-used economic might (cf. antitrust behavior in the US and EU) cast a long shadow over its ability to objectively shepherd any body of knowledge.
Moral: don't do free work for bullies.
Not surprisingly Apple is in a precarious position. Is it any wonder, Jobs having bedded down with one of our most corrupt industries? The labels have one goal--restoring their traditional market hegemony--and since Jobs has refused to raise prices they will, at the earliest opportunity, screw him. Only iPod's dominance is keeping this shaky alliance going. The moment that crumbles...
Sorry to learn, though, that all his machines now are tie-ins to movies and TV shows. Half the beauty of pinball in its heyday was its aesthetic, which ranged voraciously across Americana as each table assembled a kind of comic book on glass and wood: you got legends and history and fantasy, blue collar pasttimes, pool and racing and cards, techno festishism, social trends, anatomically impossible chicks, and just plain weird and self-referential stuff about pinball. The backglass and table designs were a unique form not without their masterpieces (look up the artist Jerry Kelly--the form's Picasso--on the delightful Internet Pinball Machine Database).
Others are mentioning COINTELPRO, or Hoover's reign of terror, or Waco, and on and on. No need for me to cover that territory, which any well-informed citizen knows. There's always Wikipedia if you need to bone up on the cheap.
No, I wish to call attention to your language. Therein lies your problem: your language shortcuts thought. Do you realize you write less like a citizen than a subject?
Agencies like the FBI, you write.
Government agencies, law enforcement agencies, you mean. Please stop and think about that.
"Agencies like the FBI"--which would include, of course, the CIA, the NSA, the DEA, the BATF, for starters--are nothing more than arms of power. It is that power to which we must turn, thoughtfully, and ask our questions. We cannot say de facto that an enforcement agency is worthy of "confidence and respect," as you would have it, unless we first examine whose laws and whose agenda these agencies are enforcing.
To take but one high-profile example: the war on drugs. This irrational prohibition has stocked our prisons with the poor, but failed demonstrably by creating more crime in illegal drugs; yet it is blindly enforced by those before whom you would have us genuflect. What choice have they, after all? Yet, fortunately, we have a choice: we can think, they cannot. We can withhold automatic "confidence and respect," as we should, since a brutal and destructive prohibition depends on patsies and collaborators.
The founders of our nation viewed overweening power with deep suspicion, and they anticipated the glamor of irrational obedience--the impulses of mob-like majorities, of good little yes-men. Examine their writings, and behold their constitutional framework: it is in sum a work of almost beautiful paranoia, conceived by men who looked on history as realists. They designed the nation to survive not terrorists or criminals but the surrender of thought by its own inhabitants.
Heard of our collapsing currency? Just fly here and get your Dubya Discount. Great prices on car companies and treasury debt, too, if you're interested.
Geez. That is ruthless in ways they don't even practice in Gitmo.
Not really.
From TFA:
The controversial bill (PDF)will require ISPs to block access to websites deemed "harmful to minors" on request. This blacklist will be drawn up by the state's Attorney General.
The law empowers the AG to determine what is "harmful to minors." That is the first problem: our federal constitution forbids laws that abridge speech as this one does by turning the state AG into a gatekeeper of literary, artistic, sexual, or other content. Community standards? Fine, prosecute; but you can't legislate with such a broad brush.
Far from the niceties of an opt-out solution, this noxious law requires ISPs either to block sites themselves or give customers filtering software. Either solution will result in normal, nonpornographic content being blocked, too. That will creates costs and headaches for creators and consumers.
Now, it's one thing for parents who use imperfect filtering software to say, "I don't care if my kid doesn't get to see some good web sites as long as all the bad ones are blocked." But the state has no such luxury, being nobody's parent; indeed, our Bill of Rights is there to slap down the state when it overreaches, and it is overreaching here. The slap will be forthcoming in court and it will be applied severely.
I guess I don't see how this applies to My rights online other than the rating system.
Even if you can't appreciate what's at stake, you'll understand soon enough if you're a Utah resident and your state persists in this folly. Lawsuits against this kind of mischievous puritanism end up being very costly for taxpayers. That should be incentive enough to rein in the state's Taliban.
Where the "screw and subvert legitimate businesses and content owners at all costs" attitude is considered "Insightful".
Count your lucky stars they haven't encoded your Viagra with DRM yet, baby.
Both are triumphalist control freaks, products of American Puritanism. The former are hobbyists who regularly demand exceptional treatment for their game. Baseball must be exempt from antitrust laws because--well, just because. No other nation is invited to compete, and yet their championship is the "world" series. And when it comes time to build stadiums for this sport of millionaires? Here, in Minnesota, as elsewhere, the public is routinely badgered and bullied into lavishing welfare on some of the richest members of society, purely for the reason that it will enrich other affluent members of society (bar, restaurant and parking lot owners) while creating peonage jobs for the young and the underemployed. To our credit, my city has consistently told these special interests to piss off.
Baseball purists have a special gripe against steroids, which they believe are spoiling the record books. (On NPR's Talk of the Nation the other day, you could hear one steroid foe cry that he longs for a future in which he can tell his son that home run records are "real.") Like those who promote and profit from our expensive, wasteful, violent, and crime-producing drug prohibition, they draw a line in the sand between what they imagine to be authenticity and its opposite--purity and its bane. It's a species of silliness, as hypocritical in a sport that uses high-tech bats and shortened outfields as in a society pickled in alcohol.
Much of America is either drunk in the evening or zoning on the SSRIs that by day allow them to survive their cubicle or Wal-Mart-defined existence. We are a druggie nation, sloshed, soothed, uplifted, downturned, turned on, freaked out, fucked up. And that's just those doing the legal drugs. If we were a free society--like the one that you hear a lot about whenever we invade another--then we would not pretend that it matters whether baseball players pop steroids or your next door neighbor smokes pot. But the Puritan ideal drives us onward in the sweatshop of our godliness. Jesus wants your urine to be clean, you know, and He'll greet you outside the Pearly Gates with a little cup, just like His emissary on earth, your Human Resources Piss Taster. So be ready.
Besides the obvious angle that steroids makes a sluggish game more exciting, there's a good public policy case for their use in baseball. Performance-enhancers, according to free market logic, should improve the market value of players. More homers, more dough. And judging from salaries, it seems to work. Great: give them to each and everyone on the team, and the poor pill freaks may finally be able to afford to build their own stadiums.
2) Jobs is used to selling to a built-in audience clamoring for new product
3) Jobs knows something about the future of iTMS that Moto and we don't (e.g., it won't survive the labels' greed)
Because expression is the foundation of a free society. It is more important to keep the society free than to foster commercial interests. The wealth of the owners is not synonymous with, and frequently is inimical to, the good of the many.
Now, if we can do anything more for-- What? You say we can? And all it will cost is our social security system?