I must admit I'm puzzled. I have a bunch of Japanese-language UTF-8 files on my machine. I just catted one in the terminal window and there it was. I then tried 'ls' and it didn't show the filenames correctly. But if I do an 'echo *' in a directory it gives me the right names.
So is it just ls that's the problem? I'm not sure, but that's what I'd suspect...
> The 7.6, which was PPC only, and hence a major update, because all the FAT code was stripped out.
Two things:
First, you're wrong. 7.6 stopped support for 68000 and 68020 machines, and on non-32-bit-clean 68030 machines such as the Mac IIcx (alas), but worked fine on many 68030 and all 68040 machines.
Second, even after they went PPC-only, they still shipped a load of 680x0 code because of processor emulation issues. And that was much later... 8.5, maybe? I don't recall for certain.
> Microsoft bends over backwards to help developers that do not occupy a space that Microsoft wants.
Don't be silly. Microsoft frequently helps them. And then when they start getting a decent product out Microsoft buys them. (And frequently ruins it.) The grand hard fucking comes if the company doesn't sell out to them.
It's been a while, but Apple did announce that they'd ported QuickTime to, let's see, I think it was SGI/Irix (?), Solaris, and someone else's OS. It never saw the light of day because 'priorities shifted' and, as I recall, two of the three UNIX backers backed out. Damned if I can remember why. (This was in the mid-1990s.)
One might assume that that port is still floating around in there somewhere. (It's not like big companies ever delete anything.) One might assume, therefore, that it isn't the big initial cost that is the problem, it is the continuing costs of support and code updates for a program that depends on tight (driver-level) access to the kernel, and that could only be shipped as a binary. Or perhaps you can blame it on something else.
> I suspect Apple doesn't want to give *nix users a reason to not switch to Apple. They are > forced to support QT on windows because if they don't, it won't stay relevent.
I can speak to this personally.
Two problems with Linux: code and support.
First off, Apple (for obvious reasons -- you may not agree with them, but they are obvious) most certainly doesn't want to ship QuickTime as a set of source files and let Jack Jones compile it on his machine. Thus, they'd have to ship binary versions for all the major Linuxes. And on MacOS X and Windows QuickTime isn't a normal application: it interacts with the kernel in peculiar ways, most notibly in the area of thread priority (pseudo-realtime-ness). On Linux, at least a few years ago, there was really a choice between having that kind of integration or putting up a product that skipped and jerked and didn't really work. (Processors being faster now, it might be okay, I have no idea.) If they wanted to do this on Linux, they'd have to ship an update with every kernel, or make people compile some 'driver' portion of QuickTime each time they updated their kernel. Yes, THAT would really speed adoption of desktop Linux.
Second: the entire QuickTime team, to varying degrees, works with two OSes already: Windows and MacOS X. For a while it was three: Windows, MacOS X/Carbon, and MacOS 9/Classic. There are people who know more about Windows and there are people who know less about Windows but everyone has a Windows machine on their desks and everyone tests their software on Windows. They tried, many years ago, to have a Windows 'team' to port QuickTime, but QuickTime is a very... ah... 'comprehensive' item, what with it basically being an entire programming API, plus applications. So everyone who makes a change in the codebase has to test it on both Mac and Windows before they check it in. Now, that's a hassle right now. Imagine everyone having a Linux box on their desk too, and having to test it there? And maybe having to hire another QA team to test on, say, six flavors of Linux? (And which six?)
Don't underestimate the difficulty of this. QuickTime isn't just some app that you can download and compile anywhere, nor is it something that is being withheld from you for marketing reasons. If someone else were to underwrite the development and testing of QuickTime, I'll bet Apple would be delighted to do it. However, if it's not going to increase their revenues AT ALL (those Linux people, they aren't known for being big spenders on crippleware, and most of the ones I know would never consider paying for a Mac when they can get Linux for free) and it's going to increase their costs by (whatever) a million per year, it's kind of a no-brainer as far as I (and apparently they) are concerned.
> Plus, I believe several companies license QT from Apple for use on > embedded systems running Linux, so porting it is not cost prohibitive.
I hadn'd heard, but I could believe this... but do you see how your first statement doesn't at all lead to your second? Embedded system: one version of Linux, one kernel, no testing costs (the client picks most of them up), *AND* the development is underwritten by someone else.
iTMS tries to figure out where you are located. If you are connected to the internet via a computer in the United States, and it is fairly certain of this, it doesn't require a credit card to make an account.
If it is not sure, it requires a credit card to verify that your address is in the US.
It's a licensing issue: since they can't sell to people overseas, they can't give songs away to them either.
Now, having heard this, some people overseas might get ideas about bypassing such protections. They may well work, and they are Not My Problem.
Geez, guys. With 30 seconds of thought, any of you could have figured this out. Why are there so many 'but *I* needed a credit card!' 'but *I* didn't!' posts all over the place?
> (1) I spend 99c downloading a song > (2) I then encode it into non-DRM MP3 via PlayFair > (3) I download it to my non-Apple HW player.
> Just one of the fair use things (space-shifting) that Apple doesn't want people to do.
Well, if they didn't want to, then they sure could have gone about it more efficiently. Because even without PlayFair, all you have to do is burn a CD and then reimport the tunes as MP3s. And that gives you the exact same quality as you get using PlayFair, because you're exporting to an uncompressed format and then doing the recompression, which is exactly what happens when you go from AAC to MP3.
The damn story isn't even about DRM. Why do I even bother?
> I think Apple decided to provide what they wanted regardless of what "everyone" else wants.
Uh... no, see, companies that do that, there's a word for them. It's... uh... delicious? No, no... derogatory? Noo... Defunct! Yeah, that's right.
It's fine that you don't want what they are providing, but don't mistake the righteous indignation boiling in the pit of your stomach for universal. It seems, if anything, that the previous poster was closer to the mark than you were... I've met a lot more people who haven't ever heard of iTMS than I have people who refuse to use it on principle.
> (although at some point i anticipate apple doing the whole "unless you upgrade your OS for 130 bucks you can't get the > latest versions of this software" like they did with safari.
You do know WHY they did this with Safari, don't you?
In 10.3 they built all of the web access routines into the OS, called it WebKit (?), and opened it up to all comers. So now instead of trying to code your own http requests using sockets and such you can just toss the OS one line of 'get me this page from this machine' and it'll return it in a buffer. They would have had to maintain two VERY VERY different versions of Safari in order to make 1.2 work on 10.2. Serious engineering effort. Not worth it. Don't assume that this was done just to insult you.
And yes, I'm quite aware of the irony... for Apple, the browser now really IS mostly part of the Operating System. Oh, cruel fate...
> What is more relevant is the fact that you can NOW listen to your music on 5 computers AT THE SAME TIME
Just make sure you start them all at exactly the same second or it sounds really, really weird. Well, sometimes kind of cool, but definitely weird.
You can get pretty much the same effect by opening the song five times in Quicktime, changing the settings so that the backgrounded players play audio, and then hitting play on each of them in turn.
It's cool once, but I don't know that I'd want to make a habit of it.
> Don't be surprised when Apple suddenly becomes one of the biggest supporters of "trusted" computing, and introduces a > palladium technology of their own. And all the Mac zealots who were busy telling us before why Apple DRM was good, while > Microsoft DRM was bad, will come back to tell us why Mac Palladium is good.
Glad to know you're privy to exactly what Apple will do at any given time, in response to any given stimulus. But, of course, that's what people who have a serious dislike of something do... they automatically assume the worst. If they're right, they are vindicated, and their dislike becomes more intense. If they are wrong, they simply ignore the inaccuracy until the are next right.
Of course, having said this, I wouldn't be at all suprised if there is a Palladium-like technology in Apple's future. Because, frankly, I expect Congress to pass a requirement that all computers have a widget like this in them, and I expect ISPs to start keeping people who don't have them from connecting, and so forth. It would piss me off no end, of course, but I'm hardly going to blame Apple for that kind of development. If all the ISPs in the country won't let Macs connect, and half the web pages are encrypted so they can't be read by Macs, 'it's DRM-free!' would be a pretty hollow consolation.
When I worked there, what I heard from Apple people was, 'You can't stop people from copying things without turning the computer into a CD player, and that's the last thing we want to do. The best you can do is slow them down a little.' That seems to be the prevailing wisdom there. If it changes, it will be because Apple is left no other alternative.
And people like you will act self-righteous, because you were 'right'.
Yeah, that's right! Just like public key encryption has gone the way of the winds because everyone could reverse-engineer and crack it, and so it became useless.
> All this study shows is that people are still utterly clueless about technology, what > the terminology is and what will be possible six months from now. Period.
It's refreshing to hear someone who is so completely free of any self-doubt that he just plain knows that anyone who might disagree with him is clueless or a terrorist (or Apple shill, in this case). Or, well, it would be if I didn't hear it every day from the current US administration. As it is, it's actually kind of repetitive and sad.
If I were in the market for a player, I'd seriously consider the Mini. By your definition, I am 'utterly clueless about technology.' By mine, you have a serious deficit in the 'thinking like other people' category, and, worse, don't even know it.
Oh, and your car analogy needs work. We're saying that people don't mind filling up their car once in a while, and you're saying that they should only ever have to fill it up once or it's not useful.
And, by the way, if I had a choice between two otherwise identical cars, one that got, say, 55 MPG and had a one gallon tank and one that got 15 MPG and had a 30 gallon tank, even if we assume I can't keep a five gallon jerry can in the trunk, I might still go for the former. Much cheaper to drive, and the last time I drove more than 40 miles without stopping anyway was... well, four months ago, I guess. And even then, one stop for gas and I would've been fine.
I simply don't have the same requirements you do, nor do I have the same mindset. If you refuse to allow me to differ, then I hope you don't mind me laughing at you.
So, you have 999 songs that you've collected over the last ten years. You buy a 1000 song iPod.
In ten years, you will have 1998 songs. Of those, if you are lucky (like me), there will only be about 200 that you think suck.
So, then, once every month you have to plug in and switch from the first 900 in your collection to the second 900 in your collection. You can, of course, just do this by automating it, plugging the iPod in, and then reading slashdot while it all just automagically happens in the background.
I'm not sure what kind of convenience you're looking for here. Maybe the iPod should, when you push a button, read your mind and figure out what the perfect piece of music would be for you, then steal it via satellite networking and start playing it within the next tenth of a second?
Or maybe you just need a product that lets you whine. I can give you a special on broken computers, shattered CDs, and cell phones with a broken '4' key, if you'd like.
> laying back 320kbps MP3s on your iPod WILL use up the battery almost twice as fast
Depends very heavily on how the caching is done, how much of the load is actually the hard drive, and a number of other factors.
One could more accurately say that playing back 320 kbps MP3s will not use your battery any more than twice as fast, nor probably any less than ten percent faster.
Until I have empirical data I'm keeping an open mind.
And I save money by living a mile and a quarter from work, and walking to and from. My never actually using my car means more money left over for the absolute *RAPE* that San Francisco rents have become.
But, well, we're terribly house and garden at #7b.
The Apple market share in schools is still quite high, especially in California. However, it's pretty clear to me that after this settlement, it's going to go down. Schools can't afford to turn down free things.
Your school may be primarily Windows-based, but the two that my friend has worked in in the past two years were between 75% and 100% Mac-based, and the one I volunteered my services for last year was 100% Mac. They don't have a full-time IT guy, just me and one other occasional volunteer, but given that they'll probably soon have a few Windows machines, I expect them to be getting one shortly.
The 'invisible hand' is the metaphor used to talk about the market needing no regulation what so ever because it corrects itself whenever something bad happens.
Fining a company has little or nothing to do with this, because according to the theory of the 'inivisible hand' you should never do that: you're keeping the market from correcting itself.
Of course, the 'invisible hand' theory doesn't work at all in the short term (the short term being 'long enough for lots and lots of people to starve to death'), and has never shown many signs of working in the long term very well either. But that doesn't stop it from being the major tenent of faith among the American neo-conservative movement, and among libertarians as well. As with all tenents of faith, having someone try to disprove it only serves to strengthen their faith.
Slashdot Mirror
I must admit I'm puzzled. I have a bunch of Japanese-language UTF-8 files on my machine. I just catted one in the terminal window and there it was. I then tried 'ls' and it didn't show the filenames correctly. But if I do an 'echo *' in a directory it gives me the right names.
So is it just ls that's the problem? I'm not sure, but that's what I'd suspect...
-fred
> The 7.6, which was PPC only, and hence a major update, because all the FAT code was stripped out.
Two things:
First, you're wrong. 7.6 stopped support for 68000 and 68020 machines, and on non-32-bit-clean 68030 machines such as the Mac IIcx (alas), but worked fine on many 68030 and all 68040 machines.
Second, even after they went PPC-only, they still shipped a load of 680x0 code because of processor emulation issues. And that was much later... 8.5, maybe? I don't recall for certain.
-fred
Sell it to me!
I used MacOS X on a 400 mHz G4 laptop and an (cpu-upgraded) 400 mHz beige G3 machine until not so long ago. Didn't feel particularly slow.
If you're going to chuck your 900 mHz iBook, chuck it in my direction!
-fred
...prolly wanna cracker.
-fred
> Microsoft bends over backwards to help developers that do not occupy a space that Microsoft wants.
Don't be silly. Microsoft frequently helps them. And then when they start getting a decent product out Microsoft buys them. (And frequently ruins it.) The grand hard fucking comes if the company doesn't sell out to them.
-fred
And I compile my own.
:-)
Perhaps you mean 'lazy UNIX folk' or 'people who don't know how to compile their own programs but still think of themselves as UNIX folk'?
-fred
It's been a while, but Apple did announce that they'd ported QuickTime to, let's see, I think it was SGI/Irix (?), Solaris, and someone else's OS. It never saw the light of day because 'priorities shifted' and, as I recall, two of the three UNIX backers backed out. Damned if I can remember why. (This was in the mid-1990s.)
One might assume that that port is still floating around in there somewhere. (It's not like big companies ever delete anything.) One might assume, therefore, that it isn't the big initial cost that is the problem, it is the continuing costs of support and code updates for a program that depends on tight (driver-level) access to the kernel, and that could only be shipped as a binary. Or perhaps you can blame it on something else.
-fred
> I suspect Apple doesn't want to give *nix users a reason to not switch to Apple. They are
... ah... 'comprehensive' item, what with it basically being an entire programming API, plus applications. So everyone who makes a change in the codebase has to test it on both Mac and Windows before they check it in. Now, that's a hassle right now. Imagine everyone having a Linux box on their desk too, and having to test it there? And maybe having to hire another QA team to test on, say, six flavors of Linux? (And which six?)
> forced to support QT on windows because if they don't, it won't stay relevent.
I can speak to this personally.
Two problems with Linux: code and support.
First off, Apple (for obvious reasons -- you may not agree with them, but they are obvious) most certainly doesn't want to ship QuickTime as a set of source files and let Jack Jones compile it on his machine. Thus, they'd have to ship binary versions for all the major Linuxes. And on MacOS X and Windows QuickTime isn't a normal application: it interacts with the kernel in peculiar ways, most notibly in the area of thread priority (pseudo-realtime-ness). On Linux, at least a few years ago, there was really a choice between having that kind of integration or putting up a product that skipped and jerked and didn't really work. (Processors being faster now, it might be okay, I have no idea.) If they wanted to do this on Linux, they'd have to ship an update with every kernel, or make people compile some 'driver' portion of QuickTime each time they updated their kernel. Yes, THAT would really speed adoption of desktop Linux.
Second: the entire QuickTime team, to varying degrees, works with two OSes already: Windows and MacOS X. For a while it was three: Windows, MacOS X/Carbon, and MacOS 9/Classic. There are people who know more about Windows and there are people who know less about Windows but everyone has a Windows machine on their desks and everyone tests their software on Windows. They tried, many years ago, to have a Windows 'team' to port QuickTime, but QuickTime is a very
Don't underestimate the difficulty of this. QuickTime isn't just some app that you can download and compile anywhere, nor is it something that is being withheld from you for marketing reasons. If someone else were to underwrite the development and testing of QuickTime, I'll bet Apple would be delighted to do it. However, if it's not going to increase their revenues AT ALL (those Linux people, they aren't known for being big spenders on crippleware, and most of the ones I know would never consider paying for a Mac when they can get Linux for free) and it's going to increase their costs by (whatever) a million per year, it's kind of a no-brainer as far as I (and apparently they) are concerned.
> Plus, I believe several companies license QT from Apple for use on
> embedded systems running Linux, so porting it is not cost prohibitive.
I hadn'd heard, but I could believe this... but do you see how your first statement doesn't at all lead to your second? Embedded system: one version of Linux, one kernel, no testing costs (the client picks most of them up), *AND* the development is underwritten by someone else.
-fred
...just so y'all will shut up.
iTMS tries to figure out where you are located. If you are connected to the internet via a computer in the United States, and it is fairly certain of this, it doesn't require a credit card to make an account.
If it is not sure, it requires a credit card to verify that your address is in the US.
It's a licensing issue: since they can't sell to people overseas, they can't give songs away to them either.
Now, having heard this, some people overseas might get ideas about bypassing such protections. They may well work, and they are Not My Problem.
Geez, guys. With 30 seconds of thought, any of you could have figured this out. Why are there so many 'but *I* needed a credit card!' 'but *I* didn't!' posts all over the place?
-fred
> (1) I spend 99c downloading a song
> (2) I then encode it into non-DRM MP3 via PlayFair
> (3) I download it to my non-Apple HW player.
> Just one of the fair use things (space-shifting) that Apple doesn't want people to do.
Well, if they didn't want to, then they sure could have gone about it more efficiently. Because even without PlayFair, all you have to do is burn a CD and then reimport the tunes as MP3s. And that gives you the exact same quality as you get using PlayFair, because you're exporting to an uncompressed format and then doing the recompression, which is exactly what happens when you go from AAC to MP3.
The damn story isn't even about DRM. Why do I even bother?
-fred
> I think Apple decided to provide what they wanted regardless of what "everyone" else wants.
Uh... no, see, companies that do that, there's a word for them. It's... uh... delicious? No, no... derogatory? Noo... Defunct! Yeah, that's right.
It's fine that you don't want what they are providing, but don't mistake the righteous indignation boiling in the pit of your stomach for universal. It seems, if anything, that the previous poster was closer to the mark than you were... I've met a lot more people who haven't ever heard of iTMS than I have people who refuse to use it on principle.
-fred
> All people want to do is play their songs on non-Apple players...
It's nice that you know what everyone wants.
Of course, if this is the impression you've gotten, perhaps you've been hanging out at slashdot for a little too long.
-fred
Too bad you published the correction. You had me thinking you were quite witty. The connivence of the tape form factor indeed!
-fred
Yeah! And if they do, is it God-given? Or man-given? Or dog-given?
Personally, I have the self-given right to throw rocks off of my fifth-floor balcony.
-fred
> (although at some point i anticipate apple doing the whole "unless you upgrade your OS for 130 bucks you can't get the
> latest versions of this software" like they did with safari.
You do know WHY they did this with Safari, don't you?
In 10.3 they built all of the web access routines into the OS, called it WebKit (?), and opened it up to all comers. So now instead of trying to code your own http requests using sockets and such you can just toss the OS one line of 'get me this page from this machine' and it'll return it in a buffer. They would have had to maintain two VERY VERY different versions of Safari in order to make 1.2 work on 10.2. Serious engineering effort. Not worth it. Don't assume that this was done just to insult you.
And yes, I'm quite aware of the irony... for Apple, the browser now really IS mostly part of the Operating System. Oh, cruel fate...
-fred
> What is more relevant is the fact that you can NOW listen to your music on 5 computers AT THE SAME TIME
Just make sure you start them all at exactly the same second or it sounds really, really weird. Well, sometimes kind of cool, but definitely weird.
You can get pretty much the same effect by opening the song five times in Quicktime, changing the settings so that the backgrounded players play audio, and then hitting play on each of them in turn.
It's cool once, but I don't know that I'd want to make a habit of it.
Er, what were we talking about again?
-fred
> Don't be surprised when Apple suddenly becomes one of the biggest supporters of "trusted" computing, and introduces a
> palladium technology of their own. And all the Mac zealots who were busy telling us before why Apple DRM was good, while
> Microsoft DRM was bad, will come back to tell us why Mac Palladium is good.
Glad to know you're privy to exactly what Apple will do at any given time, in response to any given stimulus. But, of course, that's what people who have a serious dislike of something do... they automatically assume the worst. If they're right, they are vindicated, and their dislike becomes more intense. If they are wrong, they simply ignore the inaccuracy until the are next right.
Of course, having said this, I wouldn't be at all suprised if there is a Palladium-like technology in Apple's future. Because, frankly, I expect Congress to pass a requirement that all computers have a widget like this in them, and I expect ISPs to start keeping people who don't have them from connecting, and so forth. It would piss me off no end, of course, but I'm hardly going to blame Apple for that kind of development. If all the ISPs in the country won't let Macs connect, and half the web pages are encrypted so they can't be read by Macs, 'it's DRM-free!' would be a pretty hollow consolation.
When I worked there, what I heard from Apple people was, 'You can't stop people from copying things without turning the computer into a CD player, and that's the last thing we want to do. The best you can do is slow them down a little.' That seems to be the prevailing wisdom there. If it changes, it will be because Apple is left no other alternative.
And people like you will act self-righteous, because you were 'right'.
-fred
Yeah, that's right! Just like public key encryption has gone the way of the winds because everyone could reverse-engineer and crack it, and so it became useless.
-fred
> All this study shows is that people are still utterly clueless about technology, what
> the terminology is and what will be possible six months from now. Period.
It's refreshing to hear someone who is so completely free of any self-doubt that he just plain knows that anyone who might disagree with him is clueless or a terrorist (or Apple shill, in this case). Or, well, it would be if I didn't hear it every day from the current US administration. As it is, it's actually kind of repetitive and sad.
If I were in the market for a player, I'd seriously consider the Mini. By your definition, I am 'utterly clueless about technology.' By mine, you have a serious deficit in the 'thinking like other people' category, and, worse, don't even know it.
Oh, and your car analogy needs work. We're saying that people don't mind filling up their car once in a while, and you're saying that they should only ever have to fill it up once or it's not useful.
And, by the way, if I had a choice between two otherwise identical cars, one that got, say, 55 MPG and had a one gallon tank and one that got 15 MPG and had a 30 gallon tank, even if we assume I can't keep a five gallon jerry can in the trunk, I might still go for the former. Much cheaper to drive, and the last time I drove more than 40 miles without stopping anyway was... well, four months ago, I guess. And even then, one stop for gas and I would've been fine.
I simply don't have the same requirements you do, nor do I have the same mindset. If you refuse to allow me to differ, then I hope you don't mind me laughing at you.
-fred
Ah... hah.
So, you have 999 songs that you've collected over the last ten years. You buy a 1000 song iPod.
In ten years, you will have 1998 songs. Of those, if you are lucky (like me), there will only be about 200 that you think suck.
So, then, once every month you have to plug in and switch from the first 900 in your collection to the second 900 in your collection. You can, of course, just do this by automating it, plugging the iPod in, and then reading slashdot while it all just automagically happens in the background.
I'm not sure what kind of convenience you're looking for here. Maybe the iPod should, when you push a button, read your mind and figure out what the perfect piece of music would be for you, then steal it via satellite networking and start playing it within the next tenth of a second?
Or maybe you just need a product that lets you whine. I can give you a special on broken computers, shattered CDs, and cell phones with a broken '4' key, if you'd like.
-fred
You didn't read his comment very well, did you?
Go back and read it again, and then try replying again.
-fred
> laying back 320kbps MP3s on your iPod WILL use up the battery almost twice as fast
Depends very heavily on how the caching is done, how much of the load is actually the hard drive, and a number of other factors.
One could more accurately say that playing back 320 kbps MP3s will not use your battery any more than twice as fast, nor probably any less than ten percent faster.
Until I have empirical data I'm keeping an open mind.
-fred
And I save money by living a mile and a quarter from work, and walking to and from. My never actually using my car means more money left over for the absolute *RAPE* that San Francisco rents have become.
But, well, we're terribly house and garden at #7b.
-fred
The Apple market share in schools is still quite high, especially in California. However, it's pretty clear to me that after this settlement, it's going to go down. Schools can't afford to turn down free things.
Your school may be primarily Windows-based, but the two that my friend has worked in in the past two years were between 75% and 100% Mac-based, and the one I volunteered my services for last year was 100% Mac. They don't have a full-time IT guy, just me and one other occasional volunteer, but given that they'll probably soon have a few Windows machines, I expect them to be getting one shortly.
-fred
You're mixing your metaphors.
The 'invisible hand' is the metaphor used to talk about the market needing no regulation what so ever because it corrects itself whenever something bad happens.
Fining a company has little or nothing to do with this, because according to the theory of the 'inivisible hand' you should never do that: you're keeping the market from correcting itself.
Of course, the 'invisible hand' theory doesn't work at all in the short term (the short term being 'long enough for lots and lots of people to starve to death'), and has never shown many signs of working in the long term very well either. But that doesn't stop it from being the major tenent of faith among the American neo-conservative movement, and among libertarians as well. As with all tenents of faith, having someone try to disprove it only serves to strengthen their faith.
-fred