Probably because the differentiation between "macro-evolution" ("speciation") and "micro-evolution" is an ID foil. *ALL* evolution is microevolution. There's nowhere in evolutionary theory that says a frog must give birth to a mouse for evolution to occur. Micro-evolutionary changes are sufficient to explain speciation over a long enough time frame.
One of the recurring problems in these kinds of discussion is the definition of speciation. If you nail down an ID'er with evidence of speciation, they change the definition ("Oh, well, it's still a bacterium, isn't it?" ) and start talking about an amorphous concept called "kinds". Then you show the feathered dinosaur fossils, and they yell "hoax" (in spite of the fact that there have been many more species of feathered dinos than archeopteryx discovered), and when that doesn't pan out, they say it's not really a transitional species, it's a distinct, god-created animal that is now extinct. This is clearly the avoidance behavior we all sometimes engage in, designed to protect a comfortable delusion.
You can't 'win' this kind of argument. The BEST we can hope for is that it will fall 'out of fashion' over time.
Actually the newest bootcamp has all necessary drivers to install vista on the macbook pro; it's stable and fast. I'm not a Vista hater - I think it's gotten a bad rap (at least from my experience running it on my mbp) but it's not OSX, and I always end up removing it; I use XP in parallels for those windows programs required by my employer; it's also fast and stable on the MBP.
Vista also runs fine on this little Dell D620. *shrug* Again, no OSX, and I spend nearly all of my time there, but this doesn't suck.
Nearly as I can tell you can't beat apple hardware dollar for dollar in the PC world. I mean, you can buy a piece of crap Dell for less, but for a realistic comparison you've got to stack 'em against Sony or similar. And the Mac Pros? There aren't any Xeon systems out there for less money. That "costs more" bull is so 2004.
I think he meant 'human powered flight' in the sense of "flight powered by a human being" (think the bicycle driven ultralights) instead of "powered flight with human passenger"... guessing, though.
Either in this patent or another one filed this week, they included a full-surface touch screen; I don't think we have to worry about Apple releasing an iPod with a click-wheel 'alpha' keyboard for regular usage.
LOL... No, not at all. You register with the iTunes store and authorize the device. No credit card is stored, and it's fairly simple to log on to iTunes and de-authorize one of your devices.
I'm thinking this feature would be pretty cool to have; think of a song or album you're dying to have and download it from iTunes store without breaking out the laptop - or maybe even without having the laptop with me! Sweet.
I've had iRivers, Creatives, Sansas, Sonys - no Cowan, so I'll have to give it a wash on that one. But all in all, I've had eight different manufacturer's digital audio player, and frankly, my iPod sounds the best by far. Side-by-side plug/unplug cycles convinced me and many others who happened to be around for a test. (Started at a party where a friend said his MDplayer smoked the iPod for audio quality... even he agreed that he was wrong after a direct plug-unplug audio test). None of them has had the functionality of my iPod, nor the sound quality. I don't care about 'hip' - in fact, it was that fact - that the iPod was 'hip' - that kept me from buying one until last year.
I'm reasonably sure that's incorrect. The Powerbook I have has two open SODIMM slots and zero soldered system memory; the Macbooks a few people have around here are the same. It makes absolutely no sense to make the MBP crippled in a way that the MBs and PBs are/were not.
"The advent of Dug Song's 'webmitm' in late 2000 demonstrated the feasibility of mounting an MITM attack on the protocol, but a properly configured client SSL implementation would warn the user about problems with the server certificate."
So a good SSL client will alarm, because you cannot own the correct CA certificate for the site in question, if the target site does already.
But there is some truth to your assertion, if you are of the Windows Ilk:
"One faulty SSL client implementation, Microsoft's Internet Explorer, allows for transparent SSL MITM attacks when the attacker has any CA-signed certificate."
Sweet! ANOTHER reason I can't wait to run Boot Camp and install Windows.
It's not a VPN if it's not encrypted, it's just a tunnel. The Private is the important thing. A VPN is a system for creating secure private networks over 'unfriendly' or 'unsecured' networks.
I love it! So what you're telling me is that in the not-too-distant future, a Windows virus could encode itself in the very silicone of the processor? Sweet!
There's no industry in the world with zero defects; the only ones that have any legal requirement for low defect rates are 'life-saving equipment', AFAIK. If you expect to enforce your 'zero defect' regime on manufacturers other than Apple, as well, you can expect prices of all consumer goods to skyrocket overnight. As someone later in the thread pointed out, the discovered items thus far represent a very respectable 'defect rate' for manufacturing of virtually *anything*.
A very good point, but it's important to note that it would add another *station* to the assembly line, with the additional requirement of management of that station. So the actuality is probably somewhere between 800+ days and 10 seconds...
"And there's no point blaming the Chinese contractor, I'm sure they were just following the Apple procedure, sloppy as it is."
What do you base this assertion on? How do you know how 'sloppy' the Apple procedure is?
Many are lambasting Apple because they didn't test every vendor-supplied microdrive for *windows* viruses/virii. They sold 7.7 million ipods, as I understand it. If we grant 'em 10 seconds to hook the drive up and test it - even automated; remember, these drives aren't exactly fast - that's 891 additional days added to that manufacturing model.
I'm not sure I believe that Apple should necessarily be responsible for a chinese manufacturer's choice of operating system for their production line.
In fact, in response to the many assertions that Windows is the pre-eminent choice in production line systems... I find it difficult to believe; in my direct experience with seven major production systems and indirect with ten or twelve, only two used Windows, and of them had as their purpose was directly testing production of Windows based computers. A pharmaceutical company I'm familiar with uses HP clusters; a local utility recently switched from SCO to Linux ( I love saying that! ); A PCB assembly machine I dealt with had embedded a BSD variant. A plastics manufacturer I'm familiar with uses Linux and DOS (!) because the hardware manufacturer doesn't want to fix something that's "not broken". I've never even *heard* of Windows being used in production systems anywhere but plants that produce Windows computers.
Bullshit radar is pegged by the 'for the sake of the children' phrase right out of the gate. I'm not sure what governments think they will be doing in attempting to regulate the internet. Of course, the lifetime of the Internet is already measured and cut, waiting to be woven into the tapestry of the paranoid. The various governments of the world won't be able to tolerate the freedom the Internet brings. They'll stop it if we let them.
It sounds to me like he's expecting the current fashion (which is changing as we speak) which details skinny women and men as the ideal of beauty to persist over the next 10k years. Go back to the 60s and you find Marylin Monroe - hips, boobs, not skinny. Then further back, in the 20's, the boyish look is in. It's cyclical. To expect it to be definitive in the development of the species is just... silly.
Mate selection is a factor in natural selection. Animal husbandry can show significant changes with a single pairing that produces a new strain from what would essentially be 'hybrid vigor'. Selecting for certain traits can make more significant changes. Just a few generations of dogs chosen for a given trait can produce what is essentially a 'new breed'. C'mon, guys, we're not talking speciation at this stage.
But on the other hand, one must consider the 'social success' of the athlete. Post career, they have a fairly low 'success rate', and most professional athletes have shorter-than-normal life expectency.
The wealthy tend to get educated, tend to be healthier - if only through dint of better on demand health care. We can look to our aristocracy in this oligarchy we call the "United States Of America" and see the overlords of the future.
I attended one MENSA meeting, and one MENSA function. Your assessment of the general member is absolutely on target. It was a room filled with incredibly insecure people who stood around patting each other on the back and telling one another how smart they were.
But I think it is a non-sequitur to decide that because the members who remain in MENSA are insecure, therefor IQ must mean nothing. You're seeing people who need others to validate their perception of their own intellect, not people with high IQs who are effective and in their element.
Most people identify high IQ with 'nerds'; this is, IMO, an error, and a significant one. Not that there aren't stereotypical 'nerds' with high IQs. But research has demonstrated that many people with the turn of mind that makes math and programming 'just come to them' exhibit many of the autistic spectrum symptoms that can lead to extreme social ineptitude - in other words, their social ineptitude is *not* a symptom of intellect. There are people with high IQs in all fields, and outside of the math geeks, social integration seems to be much higher.
Mmmm.... But obviously, *someone* who thinks they're the smartest one around has to be right, eh? Do you think it's reasonable to accept the opinions of those around you? As in, when everybody else around you thinks you're the smartest person around, is it safe to accept that view in that context?
I tend to agree that everyone pretty much believes they're the smartest person in the room at any given time, barring obvious demonstration to the contrary combimed with a certain confidence that allows one to say, "Wow, that dude is a lot smarter than I am!" ( even if we suffix it with "in regard to this topic", that can be a tough admission! )
A recent (last year or so) Scientific American Mind was dedicated to the theme of IQ and its relevance. They pointed out that many of the current popular perceptions of IQ are incorrect. As in, it's the singly highest predictor of 'success', for instance. Admittedly it's a marker, and there's no 1-to-1 correspondence, but hell, how many things have that high a level of correspondence? As IQ goes up, within a given field, incomes tend to go up as well. Of course, there's the conundrum that as IQ goes up, education level tends to rise as well, so it's another 'chicken/egg' delimma.
In the end, the overwhelming view I took away from that issue was that people with high IQs really do tend to be 'smarter' (in that general, abstract sense of 'intellect' that we can't really quantify) than people with lower IQs.
But that's not a popular viewpoint in our society; we're supposed to believe that a genetic advantage in intellect doesn't offer one any advantage, and if it does, dammit, you should be ashamed of it. But it's perfectly ok to admit that a physical advantage entitles one to success in pro sports or as a model or actor/actress. I can say "I'm seven feet tall and athletic; you've got little chance of competing with me in Basketball!" and people will just nod. But let me say, "I'm extremely adept at technological tasks; you've got a snowball's chance in hell of competing with me in this arena." and everyone will be all over me like stink on you-know-what, calling me arrogant and pointing out how wrong I am. People fear those who are smarter than they are. I think it has a lot to do with the reason we've spent the last 60 years or so making movies that have steadily presented those of high intellect in a somehow deficient light, either socially inept ( revenge of the nerds and similar ) or evil ( most villians are smarter than the 'hero', but he wins anyway, because he's the *good guy*, and being average is BETTER ).
"Science Fearing Luddites"... I find that phrase interesting (in the GP); When I go to Whole Foods or other stores that sell organic, non-GM foods, I find doctors, lawyers, engineers, and my peers from the Information Industries. I know organic and non-gm foods cost considerably more than their 'conventional' counterparts.
The assertions of safety and testing in this thread generally betray a lack of consideration of the issues. Tests are only relevant when you're testing for the right kind of problem; if the timeline of the test is shorter than the problem incubation, your tests will demonstrate safety even if the eventual result is 100% fatality.
Not to mention that a general move toward GM and hybrid causes a reduction in biodiversity; for the same reason I avoid a monoculture in my work, I think we should avoid them in our much more critical food chain.
One more time with feeling... I'm always amused when people start invoking the 'free market' in regard to "Intellectual Properties". Intellectual properties are the *opposite* of the "free market". It's a Fiat Monopoly granted by the government, not a 'natural state of affairs'.
And from what I see in the bars around here, there's not *enough* competition for bar band gigs, because they're hiring people who SUCK ASS to play every other set. The few local bands that really are good get booked solid. People will pay to watch a good band or artist perform, and, oddly enough, that's where the vast majority of recording artists make their money: on tour. They get paid for performing! Imagine that!
I've still never heard a reasonable argument that supported the idea that a musician's work in recording a song was more valuable than a heart surgeon's work in replacing a valve. The guy with the bypass doesn't pay his doctor every time his heart beats forever. The doctor gets paid *once* for his work. Then he goes on to work some more to get paid some more.
I'm not advocating the elimination of IP altogether; I'm just generally of the opinion that making laws to protect an industry from technological advance is always a bad idea - expensive and futile. In the end, no matter what happens with IP in our world, someone will figure out how to make money on movies, on music, on art, and that's the way the industry will go. In the past, artists needed rich patrons; currently, the same is often true. *shrug*.
I don't think most people - even Apple 'supporters' - think Apple is a pie-in-the-sky hippie love-and-peace damn-the-bottom-line not-for-profit adventure setting out to make the world a better place for bits and bytes. I, personally, think they're a corporation, with all of the nasty shit that implies. However, I think that they stay closer to the 'default' nasty shit being a corporation brings, rather than heterodyning their nastiness into a fine art a la MS. I don't want Apple in the position MS is in now; I want to see Apple at the 40% or so market share, so NO single vendor can drag the whole freaking computer world around by its ear. In the end, such competition will be good for all of *us*, even though it might negatively impact Bill's personal fortune, and make Jobs one of the top 100 richest dudes in the world. Let's face it, there are worse people it could - and has - happened to, eh?
In short, I just think they're the lesser of two evils *right now*.
Let's face it, folks. The RIAA has an agenda, and it's fairly transparent. They want, eventually, for you to pay some amount every time you access media. That's the only way they can assure their revenue stream into the digital age. Well, that and producing new talent, but they'r enot exactly great at taht, are they?
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Probably because the differentiation between "macro-evolution" ("speciation") and "micro-evolution" is an ID foil. *ALL* evolution is microevolution. There's nowhere in evolutionary theory that says a frog must give birth to a mouse for evolution to occur. Micro-evolutionary changes are sufficient to explain speciation over a long enough time frame.
One of the recurring problems in these kinds of discussion is the definition of speciation. If you nail down an ID'er with evidence of speciation, they change the definition ("Oh, well, it's still a bacterium, isn't it?" ) and start talking about an amorphous concept called "kinds". Then you show the feathered dinosaur fossils, and they yell "hoax" (in spite of the fact that there have been many more species of feathered dinos than archeopteryx discovered), and when that doesn't pan out, they say it's not really a transitional species, it's a distinct, god-created animal that is now extinct. This is clearly the avoidance behavior we all sometimes engage in, designed to protect a comfortable delusion.
You can't 'win' this kind of argument. The BEST we can hope for is that it will fall 'out of fashion' over time.
Actually the newest bootcamp has all necessary drivers to install vista on the macbook pro; it's stable and fast. I'm not a Vista hater - I think it's gotten a bad rap (at least from my experience running it on my mbp) but it's not OSX, and I always end up removing it; I use XP in parallels for those windows programs required by my employer; it's also fast and stable on the MBP.
Vista also runs fine on this little Dell D620. *shrug* Again, no OSX, and I spend nearly all of my time there, but this doesn't suck.
"Extra Money"?
Nearly as I can tell you can't beat apple hardware dollar for dollar in the PC world. I mean, you can buy a piece of crap Dell for less, but for a realistic comparison you've got to stack 'em against Sony or similar. And the Mac Pros? There aren't any Xeon systems out there for less money. That "costs more" bull is so 2004.
I think he meant 'human powered flight' in the sense of "flight powered by a human being" (think the bicycle driven ultralights) instead of "powered flight with human passenger"... guessing, though.
Either in this patent or another one filed this week, they included a full-surface touch screen; I don't think we have to worry about Apple releasing an iPod with a click-wheel 'alpha' keyboard for regular usage.
LOL... No, not at all. You register with the iTunes store and authorize the device. No credit card is stored, and it's fairly simple to log on to iTunes and de-authorize one of your devices.
I'm thinking this feature would be pretty cool to have; think of a song or album you're dying to have and download it from iTunes store without breaking out the laptop - or maybe even without having the laptop with me! Sweet.
I've had iRivers, Creatives, Sansas, Sonys - no Cowan, so I'll have to give it a wash on that one. But all in all, I've had eight different manufacturer's digital audio player, and frankly, my iPod sounds the best by far. Side-by-side plug/unplug cycles convinced me and many others who happened to be around for a test. (Started at a party where a friend said his MDplayer smoked the iPod for audio quality... even he agreed that he was wrong after a direct plug-unplug audio test). None of them has had the functionality of my iPod, nor the sound quality. I don't care about 'hip' - in fact, it was that fact - that the iPod was 'hip' - that kept me from buying one until last year.
I'm reasonably sure that's incorrect. The Powerbook I have has two open SODIMM slots and zero soldered system memory; the Macbooks a few people have around here are the same. It makes absolutely no sense to make the MBP crippled in a way that the MBs and PBs are/were not.
Man-in-the-middle is not that trivial, my friend.
From SANS WhitePaper:
"The advent of Dug Song's 'webmitm' in late 2000 demonstrated the feasibility of mounting an MITM attack on the protocol, but a properly configured client SSL implementation would warn the user about problems with the server certificate."
So a good SSL client will alarm, because you cannot own the correct CA certificate for the site in question, if the target site does already.
But there is some truth to your assertion, if you are of the Windows Ilk:
"One faulty SSL client implementation, Microsoft's Internet Explorer, allows for transparent SSL MITM attacks when the attacker has any CA-signed certificate."
Sweet! ANOTHER reason I can't wait to run Boot Camp and install Windows.
It's not a VPN if it's not encrypted, it's just a tunnel. The Private is the important thing. A VPN is a system for creating secure private networks over 'unfriendly' or 'unsecured' networks.
I love it! So what you're telling me is that in the not-too-distant future, a Windows virus could encode itself in the very silicone of the processor? Sweet!
There's no industry in the world with zero defects; the only ones that have any legal requirement for low defect rates are 'life-saving equipment', AFAIK. If you expect to enforce your 'zero defect' regime on manufacturers other than Apple, as well, you can expect prices of all consumer goods to skyrocket overnight. As someone later in the thread pointed out, the discovered items thus far represent a very respectable 'defect rate' for manufacturing of virtually *anything*.
A very good point, but it's important to note that it would add another *station* to the assembly line, with the additional requirement of management of that station. So the actuality is probably somewhere between 800+ days and 10 seconds...
"And there's no point blaming the Chinese contractor, I'm sure they were just following the Apple procedure, sloppy as it is."
What do you base this assertion on? How do you know how 'sloppy' the Apple procedure is?
Many are lambasting Apple because they didn't test every vendor-supplied microdrive for *windows* viruses/virii. They sold 7.7 million ipods, as I understand it. If we grant 'em 10 seconds to hook the drive up and test it - even automated; remember, these drives aren't exactly fast - that's 891 additional days added to that manufacturing model.
I'm not sure I believe that Apple should necessarily be responsible for a chinese manufacturer's choice of operating system for their production line.
In fact, in response to the many assertions that Windows is the pre-eminent choice in production line systems... I find it difficult to believe; in my direct experience with seven major production systems and indirect with ten or twelve, only two used Windows, and of them had as their purpose was directly testing production of Windows based computers. A pharmaceutical company I'm familiar with uses HP clusters; a local utility recently switched from SCO to Linux ( I love saying that! ); A PCB assembly machine I dealt with had embedded a BSD variant. A plastics manufacturer I'm familiar with uses Linux and DOS (!) because the hardware manufacturer doesn't want to fix something that's "not broken". I've never even *heard* of Windows being used in production systems anywhere but plants that produce Windows computers.
From overbearing governmental moneygrubbers.
Bullshit radar is pegged by the 'for the sake of the children' phrase right out of the gate. I'm not sure what governments think they will be doing in attempting to regulate the internet. Of course, the lifetime of the Internet is already measured and cut, waiting to be woven into the tapestry of the paranoid. The various governments of the world won't be able to tolerate the freedom the Internet brings. They'll stop it if we let them.
It sounds to me like he's expecting the current fashion (which is changing as we speak) which details skinny women and men as the ideal of beauty to persist over the next 10k years. Go back to the 60s and you find Marylin Monroe - hips, boobs, not skinny. Then further back, in the 20's, the boyish look is in. It's cyclical. To expect it to be definitive in the development of the species is just... silly.
Mate selection is a factor in natural selection. Animal husbandry can show significant changes with a single pairing that produces a new strain from what would essentially be 'hybrid vigor'. Selecting for certain traits can make more significant changes. Just a few generations of dogs chosen for a given trait can produce what is essentially a 'new breed'. C'mon, guys, we're not talking speciation at this stage.
But on the other hand, one must consider the 'social success' of the athlete. Post career, they have a fairly low 'success rate', and most professional athletes have shorter-than-normal life expectency.
The wealthy tend to get educated, tend to be healthier - if only through dint of better on demand health care. We can look to our aristocracy in this oligarchy we call the "United States Of America" and see the overlords of the future.
I attended one MENSA meeting, and one MENSA function. Your assessment of the general member is absolutely on target. It was a room filled with incredibly insecure people who stood around patting each other on the back and telling one another how smart they were.
But I think it is a non-sequitur to decide that because the members who remain in MENSA are insecure, therefor IQ must mean nothing. You're seeing people who need others to validate their perception of their own intellect, not people with high IQs who are effective and in their element.
Most people identify high IQ with 'nerds'; this is, IMO, an error, and a significant one. Not that there aren't stereotypical 'nerds' with high IQs. But research has demonstrated that many people with the turn of mind that makes math and programming 'just come to them' exhibit many of the autistic spectrum symptoms that can lead to extreme social ineptitude - in other words, their social ineptitude is *not* a symptom of intellect. There are people with high IQs in all fields, and outside of the math geeks, social integration seems to be much higher.
Mmmm.... But obviously, *someone* who thinks they're the smartest one around has to be right, eh? Do you think it's reasonable to accept the opinions of those around you? As in, when everybody else around you thinks you're the smartest person around, is it safe to accept that view in that context?
I tend to agree that everyone pretty much believes they're the smartest person in the room at any given time, barring obvious demonstration to the contrary combimed with a certain confidence that allows one to say, "Wow, that dude is a lot smarter than I am!" ( even if we suffix it with "in regard to this topic", that can be a tough admission! )
A recent (last year or so) Scientific American Mind was dedicated to the theme of IQ and its relevance. They pointed out that many of the current popular perceptions of IQ are incorrect. As in, it's the singly highest predictor of 'success', for instance. Admittedly it's a marker, and there's no 1-to-1 correspondence, but hell, how many things have that high a level of correspondence? As IQ goes up, within a given field, incomes tend to go up as well. Of course, there's the conundrum that as IQ goes up, education level tends to rise as well, so it's another 'chicken/egg' delimma.
In the end, the overwhelming view I took away from that issue was that people with high IQs really do tend to be 'smarter' (in that general, abstract sense of 'intellect' that we can't really quantify) than people with lower IQs.
But that's not a popular viewpoint in our society; we're supposed to believe that a genetic advantage in intellect doesn't offer one any advantage, and if it does, dammit, you should be ashamed of it. But it's perfectly ok to admit that a physical advantage entitles one to success in pro sports or as a model or actor/actress. I can say "I'm seven feet tall and athletic; you've got little chance of competing with me in Basketball!" and people will just nod. But let me say, "I'm extremely adept at technological tasks; you've got a snowball's chance in hell of competing with me in this arena." and everyone will be all over me like stink on you-know-what, calling me arrogant and pointing out how wrong I am. People fear those who are smarter than they are. I think it has a lot to do with the reason we've spent the last 60 years or so making movies that have steadily presented those of high intellect in a somehow deficient light, either socially inept ( revenge of the nerds and similar ) or evil ( most villians are smarter than the 'hero', but he wins anyway, because he's the *good guy*, and being average is BETTER ).
In exactly the same way a bad rash is relevant.
"Science Fearing Luddites"... I find that phrase interesting (in the GP); When I go to Whole Foods or other stores that sell organic, non-GM foods, I find doctors, lawyers, engineers, and my peers from the Information Industries. I know organic and non-gm foods cost considerably more than their 'conventional' counterparts.
The assertions of safety and testing in this thread generally betray a lack of consideration of the issues. Tests are only relevant when you're testing for the right kind of problem; if the timeline of the test is shorter than the problem incubation, your tests will demonstrate safety even if the eventual result is 100% fatality.
Not to mention that a general move toward GM and hybrid causes a reduction in biodiversity; for the same reason I avoid a monoculture in my work, I think we should avoid them in our much more critical food chain.
One more time with feeling... I'm always amused when people start invoking the 'free market' in regard to "Intellectual Properties". Intellectual properties are the *opposite* of the "free market". It's a Fiat Monopoly granted by the government, not a 'natural state of affairs'.
And from what I see in the bars around here, there's not *enough* competition for bar band gigs, because they're hiring people who SUCK ASS to play every other set. The few local bands that really are good get booked solid. People will pay to watch a good band or artist perform, and, oddly enough, that's where the vast majority of recording artists make their money: on tour. They get paid for performing! Imagine that!
I've still never heard a reasonable argument that supported the idea that a musician's work in recording a song was more valuable than a heart surgeon's work in replacing a valve. The guy with the bypass doesn't pay his doctor every time his heart beats forever. The doctor gets paid *once* for his work. Then he goes on to work some more to get paid some more.
I'm not advocating the elimination of IP altogether; I'm just generally of the opinion that making laws to protect an industry from technological advance is always a bad idea - expensive and futile. In the end, no matter what happens with IP in our world, someone will figure out how to make money on movies, on music, on art, and that's the way the industry will go. In the past, artists needed rich patrons; currently, the same is often true. *shrug*.
I don't think most people - even Apple 'supporters' - think Apple is a pie-in-the-sky hippie love-and-peace damn-the-bottom-line not-for-profit adventure setting out to make the world a better place for bits and bytes. I, personally, think they're a corporation, with all of the nasty shit that implies. However, I think that they stay closer to the 'default' nasty shit being a corporation brings, rather than heterodyning their nastiness into a fine art a la MS. I don't want Apple in the position MS is in now; I want to see Apple at the 40% or so market share, so NO single vendor can drag the whole freaking computer world around by its ear. In the end, such competition will be good for all of *us*, even though it might negatively impact Bill's personal fortune, and make Jobs one of the top 100 richest dudes in the world. Let's face it, there are worse people it could - and has - happened to, eh?
In short, I just think they're the lesser of two evils *right now*.
Obscure reference from 1995 or 1996. "HDDIDE001AAWW"
"You want me to hit *what*?"
Let's face it, folks. The RIAA has an agenda, and it's fairly transparent. They want, eventually, for you to pay some amount every time you access media. That's the only way they can assure their revenue stream into the digital age. Well, that and producing new talent, but they'r enot exactly great at taht, are they?