How would the community have benefited from Apple's use of the code?
The same way that the rest of us have - with the addition of another viable Windows competitor with serious commercial backing, marketing, retail presence, et cetera.
If the BSD code had been GPL'ed, Open Darwin could be a true community project. Apple wouldn't be able to withhold code at any time, it would have to release interesting kernel drivers, and they couldn't take peoples' changes and close them back up later.
Actually, if the BSD code had been GLPd, Apple wouldn't have used it as a starting point.
It's why I have to pay more for car isurance just because I don't always pay my Visa bll on time. Apparently, my low credit score equates to me being a 'less safe' driver.
Yeah, I agree. Wouldn't it be much better if they could actually tie your insurance premiums to something a lot more concrete about your driving habits rather than having to guess by looking at your FICA score?
Well when we ran you through the system we found that every Friday you stop at the bar around the corner from your house and spend 3 hours there. Statistics show that you have an 85% change of getting a DUI. We also found that you are spending 2 hours every evening teaching your 15 year old son to drive, So we added the student driver rate. There is also the fact that in all you're driving, 95% of the time you are with in 20 miles of your house. Statisticly you are more likely to have an accident with in 20 miles of your home. This has forced us to move you into the high risk bracket.
And what's wrong with this?
Think about it for a minute. Right now, most people with relatively clean driving records pay a certain amount for insurance, an amount that doesn't quite cover the expected cost of insurance payouts for the year (true - look up "float" if you're skeptical - premiums are not how insurance companies make money). They do their best to make it so that your overall lifetime payments are close to your overall lifetime payouts, but this allows you to average the cost, rather than having a big surprise in any particular year.
Currently, more reckless people are being subsidized by more careful people. I agree that this is the status quo. There may be some very real reasons why this is beneficial for society. However, I don't see that its intrinsically that valuable an idea to promote. Insurance is generally intended to average out your personal costs over your insured-life. Not the country's.
So... if someone is allowing their underage kid to drive, which would normally cause their premiums to rise, but is not reporting it, on average the rest of us are picking up the tab. Please explain how this is a good thing?
Note: This assumes that market forces would not support moving everyone into the high-risk bracket, as you suggest; this is born out by the current and historical competitive behaviors of most insurance companies.
but I do have a problem with it being used for minor violations such as a very recently expired license plate
Why? Right now, enforcement of laws is lax and random. This actually helps the police, since there's a very strong probability that anyone is doing something illegal, and may therefore be questioned. Which may or may not be a bad thing, depending on your point of view. If (theoretically) we made all laws real and enforcable, maybe we'd actually get some of the bad ones off the books. I mean, if every time anyone went 32mph down a big fast no-access street that was marked as 30 for some stupid reason they were ticketed, there's a much higher likelyhood that the limit would be fixed. Much better than unequal enforcement, where a cop could pick "anyone" based on who-knows-what-criteria (resembelence to ex-boyfriend even) and ticket them, ignoring hundreds of other violators.
And as for "recently expired," dude, your plate is either expired or it isn't. WTF is with the grace period? Or to put it another way, let's give everyone a 30 day grace period. And then, to make it easy for police to know when its "really" expired, let's put the month at the end of the grace period on the sticker. Er, except that now people would be clamoring for another grace period. Why not just replace your plates before they expire?
The Power Tap hub weighs maybe an ounce (at the most two ounces) more than a standard hub... and since it's got a wireless link straight to the display computer, there's no extra drag or other downside to using it. Not much penalty for getting a fairly definitive indication of your riding performance throughout the day.
For you and I, perhaps. Considering the razor-thin margins that the Tour regularly hinges around, "not much" penalty can be pretty extreme. A few seconds here, a few there, pretty soon you're talking real jerseys.
How are you measuring your performance? Total query bandwidth database SELECTS are inherently bound by the speed of a single processor. More agressive multi-processor design often increases throughput, but for sheer performance a 2-way machine with faster chips beats a 64-node beowolf cluster of slightly slower ones 99.9% of the time. Databases are also often secondarily (or even primarily) disk bound. If you replaced 3 machines with 1, I'm betting that you moved from a network-based disk system to a locally attached one, right?
Probbably not, since you're not actually making a copy of the book. But that's not what we're talking about here. It would most definately be illegal to buy a book, scan or type the entire contents of the book into a computer, edit out what you didn't like, and re-sell your newly printed copy of the book. If you want to make an analogy you have to include every critical aspect.
What about books for the blind and dyslexic? Wouldn't that be "format shifting" (in effect), if you included the original book along with the new copy?
As I've said above, your analogy breaks down because they aren't altering the original physical DVD, they're making a copy of it.
Right, but isn't this akin to hiring someone to personally make a backup copy for you? I mean, you give them the original, they give you back your original and your backup copy. That would be fair use, I know, since its just making a backup. In this case they're not making a very accurate backup, but at the end of the day you're still buying as much product, they're still doing almost the same work...
Technically reselling even one copy of a work you've modified is violating copyright law, though you'd never get sued for it because it's not worth the money to pay the lawyers. It doesn't matter if you bought a copy or not, you can't sell derivative works without permission of the copyright holder.
This is where I don't follow you. So you're saying that it would be illegal to buy a book, cross out some of the words, and then sell the book? I believe that we can agree that selling a 2nd hand book is not illegal, and that crossing out words in your own copy is not illegal... but reselling it is, since you've created a new derivitive work?
Removing content from a movie isn't creating a new work. There certainly are gray areas, but this case is in no way in a gray area. If you can't see that there's really no point in arguing any further.
Er, yeah, that was my point too. My understanding of derivitive work would be creating a new item to sell based on the book (or whatever) but specifically not containing the book itself. Which gives you the ability to sell your new work without the copyrighted work needing to be repurchased, which I agree would be Wrong (and illegal).
You shouldn't be able to profit off someone elses work unless the copyright owner agrees to it.
Sure, sure. And yet, I can buy a physical object such as a book from someone, cut out some pages and turn it into a book safe, and then resell that. Its technically a heavily edited book at that point. But -- and this happened with the original DVDs too -- every time I sell a copy of the booksafe, I have to buy another copy of the book. Thus the copyright owner gets their cut, each and every time.
What's happening here is nothing at all like a collage. It's quite obvious it's a derivative work, and distributing it therefore violates copyright law.
I did say that I was taking it to an absurd level. But let's get back to my other points.
Where do you draw the line between modifying an existing item, and creating a new one? Sure, if it was a physical item, its easy. But if what you're really buying is a license to privately view the movie along with a copy of the conten, and that license is purchased, and the accompanying content is modified, and then they're both resold... is that really derivitave, or is it just a modification of the originally purchased thing (whatever it is you actually purchase when you buy a movie)?
Why are there so many people that make this out to be a limit on what you can edit and view yourself in the privacy of your own home? These companies were DISTRIBUTING this content.
Yes, but they weren't MASS distributing the content. Each DVD was, effectively, purchased->modified->resold. At least, the content was. Each sale of the edited DVD had a corresponding purchase of the original DVD by the editor. So how is this any different than taking anything else, changing it, and reselling it?
Money is beside the point... a copyright holder has every right to choose how a work is distributed.
Have you ever seen an artist make a collage? You know, cut up portions of photographs, text, whatever and incorporate them into a new creation (assuming that they purchased them in the first place, that is)? Well, this ruling takes a big step towards forbidding that in the future. Hell, ever purchased a pair of used jeans that weren't exactly in brand-new condition, maybe were missing a piece or two? Nope, that'll be illegal too.
Am I taking this to an absurd conclusion? I hope so, but think about it for a minute. Heck, let's go back to the original comment, as it relates to movie distribution. Let's say that Lucas releases Star Wars again, but this time it will only play on THX-certified stereos. After all, if he's allowed to forbid you from editing it (after purchasing a copy), isn't he also allowed to forbid you from "editing out the sound" that he thinks you'd get from an approved stereo system? Now what if you replace THX with Windows, is that still okay? Same legal issue, methinks.
That's why when you're conducting research for the writing scholarly material, or for any other purpose, it is considered good practice to have a good variety of sources from well-known authorities on the subject. The more diverse these sources are, the better.
Even with that, its important if you care to go back and look at those sources, to make sure that your "10 supporting sources" weren't all getting their information from the same place. My favorite example of this is the popular (endorsed by Shakespeare) theory of the English king Richard III killing his two nephews, even though every account of this is tracable back to the writings of one of his arch-enemies working for his successor, and most hard evidence (including the fact that their silent deaths wouldn't have helped his position in the slighest) points otherwise. One of the most enjoyable accounts of this is a fictionalized (ie: made up dialog surrounding facts with attribution) story by Joesephine Tey: Daughter of Time. Well worth reading if you like that sort of thing.
I thought that the first rule of screenwriting was, "Never talk about screenwriting." Actually, empirical evidence suggests that the first rule of screenwriting is... always talk about screenwriting. To everyone. All the time. Incessently. But that's beside the point (and probably mispelled).
Which also means that the user can never, ever install anything outside of that package management system. Like, oh, almost all commercial software. While that's probably a fair requirement for some low-impact Linux users (and does that include things like web-browser Plugins?), its not realistic as the systems get rolled out into wider use.
If there was a case, it wouldn't hold water. Cause if it did, we could all go to Arco and sue them for forcing you to pay Cash to get the gas prices as advertised on their signs. And of course, all the Mom and Pop stores that don't take Visa...
Oh, any other auction site could stop you from using Google if they wanted to. The reason that eBay (probably) can't do it, legally, is that they also own PayPal. They could force you to pay their fees however they wanted, even requiring PayPal for those, but they can't stop you from allowing your customers to use an officially unrelated product just because they own one of its competitors. That's the rub.
Disclaimer: I use Windows/UNIX/OSX. I like OSX, but even with IE7 on Windows I haven't been infected. So...
Then it's all just a friendly "Please provide your root password" dialog away.
Hmm. I just realized that this is a potential problem -- a major potential problem -- with the OSX and now Vista (and, I believe, some Linux) GUI security paradigms. We're training people to be ready to enter their administrator passwords whenever they're prompted to. And Ma & Pa User won't know when this is a good thing. Especially when badly behaved programs like Adobe's suite raise dialog after dialog during updating. What's to stop EvilSoftCo from creating a program that, during its first-time startup, just creates a dialog box that matches the standard one, and gathers your password?
Hmm. Not great, methinks. Although surely someone must have thought of this already...
This makes the assumption that the masses want "fast and efficient." I think quite the opposite. If the masses wanted fast and efficient, they would turn off the fancy stuff in XP and turn it back to looking like 2000.
You know, I've heard this a lot. And, other than some menu fade delays that I believe are constant with both look-n-feels (and are easily eliminated using MSTweakUI), I don't see any performance difference when using rounded corners over square ones. They take up a tiny amount more real estate, but they also provide for larger more obvious titles. But a dramatic performance hit? That's getting mighty close to FUD, there.
I wasn't arguing evidence, I was discussing the phrase, "[Y]ou are required to respond to someone..." (emphasis mine). Like many things in life, its a choice. And as for talking to passengers, I don't know about you but it scares the crap out of me when someone driving (either in the car I'm riding in, or one I can see) feels the need to turn and look at the person they're talking to all the time. May not happen in controlled studies, but happens all the time in real life... Distractions are bad for driving, of whatever kind.
It's worse than talking to someone in the passenger seat or listening to the radio because you are required to respond to someone who has no idea what situation you're in.
Er, no you're not. Or at least a simple, "Hang on," which is the verbal equiv. of an idle loop. There's nothing that says that you have to give top priority to your phone conversation over your driving habits. If you do have a critical phone call, such as a customer issue, that requires you to give it your top priority, then you pull over. Its not that hard, is it?
At least Google accounts are easy to sign up for and manage. I have a PayPal account. I think it even has some money in it still (a few bucks). I have the hardest time getting any PayPal transactions to work - and I work in enterprise web development, so its not as if I'm a stranger to the system. I couldn't imagine forcing someone to sign up for a PP account, and I agree that a Google account is still too much of a requirement, but at least its a lot more reasonable.
Actually, I think it was more trying to get away with using a totally stupid unit just in case people recognize the number. Saying that you have 100MB bandwidth is like talking about your new performance car that goes 0-60 miles! People would indeed complain at a 60 mile range, just as people complained about a 100MB transfer. 100MB/s, on the other hand, is quite good, and a much more useful statistic.
I'll agree, but define peak as "get to within 6-8% of peak." One thing that systems such as VTEC timing have done is really flatten out the torque curves for a lot of engines.
Having said that, there's something else to consider. Any peak measurements or charts you see are measured at WOT. You also get some very interesting readouts of things when you measure the engine at, say, 20% throttle. Or 40%. Of course, a lot of this becomes moot when you get into CVTs as well... Or rather its key, but no longer your problem.
The engine in the S2000 is hardly a typical engine. Most cars hit their torque peak somewhere around 2000-2500rpm, dropping off somewhat around 4500rpm. If you look at their power curve you'll see that the 2000 hits its first peak at around 3000rpm, then gets a bounce from the hyper-dramatic VTEC cam tuning change and lifts somewhat more later in the powerband. This is highly unusual. Look at almost any other car's curve -- specifically cars with engines that don't have wildly divergent cam profiles that only engage around 6000rpm -- and you wouldn't see this. As for being efficient, its more honest to say that due to its "extreme" design the S2000 engine would be horrible to drive at speeds lower than around 5500rpm, so they change the entire cam profile and effectively give you a different engine for slow driving. The torque peak for the 2000 still comes relatively lower in its usalble powerband.
As an aside, while googling for that graph, I came across a surprisingly well-written commentary on torque and powertrain design. No relation, just passing it along.
Slashdot Mirror
How would the community have benefited from Apple's use of the code?
The same way that the rest of us have - with the addition of another viable Windows competitor with serious commercial backing, marketing, retail presence, et cetera.
If the BSD code had been GPL'ed, Open Darwin could be a true community project. Apple wouldn't be able to withhold code at any time, it would have to release interesting kernel drivers, and they couldn't take peoples' changes and close them back up later.
Actually, if the BSD code had been GLPd, Apple wouldn't have used it as a starting point.
It's why I have to pay more for car isurance just because I don't always pay my Visa bll on time. Apparently, my low credit score equates to me being a 'less safe' driver.
Yeah, I agree. Wouldn't it be much better if they could actually tie your insurance premiums to something a lot more concrete about your driving habits rather than having to guess by looking at your FICA score?
Er, wait a minute...
Well when we ran you through the system we found that every Friday you stop at the bar around the corner from your house and spend 3 hours there. Statistics show that you have an 85% change of getting a DUI. We also found that you are spending 2 hours every evening teaching your 15 year old son to drive, So we added the student driver rate. There is also the fact that in all you're driving, 95% of the time you are with in 20 miles of your house. Statisticly you are more likely to have an accident with in 20 miles of your home. This has forced us to move you into the high risk bracket.
And what's wrong with this?
Think about it for a minute. Right now, most people with relatively clean driving records pay a certain amount for insurance, an amount that doesn't quite cover the expected cost of insurance payouts for the year (true - look up "float" if you're skeptical - premiums are not how insurance companies make money). They do their best to make it so that your overall lifetime payments are close to your overall lifetime payouts, but this allows you to average the cost, rather than having a big surprise in any particular year.
Currently, more reckless people are being subsidized by more careful people. I agree that this is the status quo. There may be some very real reasons why this is beneficial for society. However, I don't see that its intrinsically that valuable an idea to promote. Insurance is generally intended to average out your personal costs over your insured-life. Not the country's.
So... if someone is allowing their underage kid to drive, which would normally cause their premiums to rise, but is not reporting it, on average the rest of us are picking up the tab. Please explain how this is a good thing?
Note: This assumes that market forces would not support moving everyone into the high-risk bracket, as you suggest; this is born out by the current and historical competitive behaviors of most insurance companies.
but I do have a problem with it being used for minor violations such as a very recently expired license plate
Why? Right now, enforcement of laws is lax and random. This actually helps the police, since there's a very strong probability that anyone is doing something illegal, and may therefore be questioned. Which may or may not be a bad thing, depending on your point of view. If (theoretically) we made all laws real and enforcable, maybe we'd actually get some of the bad ones off the books. I mean, if every time anyone went 32mph down a big fast no-access street that was marked as 30 for some stupid reason they were ticketed, there's a much higher likelyhood that the limit would be fixed. Much better than unequal enforcement, where a cop could pick "anyone" based on who-knows-what-criteria (resembelence to ex-boyfriend even) and ticket them, ignoring hundreds of other violators.
And as for "recently expired," dude, your plate is either expired or it isn't. WTF is with the grace period? Or to put it another way, let's give everyone a 30 day grace period. And then, to make it easy for police to know when its "really" expired, let's put the month at the end of the grace period on the sticker. Er, except that now people would be clamoring for another grace period. Why not just replace your plates before they expire?
The Power Tap hub weighs maybe an ounce (at the most two ounces) more than a standard hub... and since it's got a wireless link straight to the display computer, there's no extra drag or other downside to using it. Not much penalty for getting a fairly definitive indication of your riding performance throughout the day.
For you and I, perhaps. Considering the razor-thin margins that the Tour regularly hinges around, "not much" penalty can be pretty extreme. A few seconds here, a few there, pretty soon you're talking real jerseys.
How are you measuring your performance? Total query bandwidth database SELECTS are inherently bound by the speed of a single processor. More agressive multi-processor design often increases throughput, but for sheer performance a 2-way machine with faster chips beats a 64-node beowolf cluster of slightly slower ones 99.9% of the time. Databases are also often secondarily (or even primarily) disk bound. If you replaced 3 machines with 1, I'm betting that you moved from a network-based disk system to a locally attached one, right?
Probbably not, since you're not actually making a copy of the book. But that's not what we're talking about here. It would most definately be illegal to buy a book, scan or type the entire contents of the book into a computer, edit out what you didn't like, and re-sell your newly printed copy of the book. If you want to make an analogy you have to include every critical aspect.
What about books for the blind and dyslexic? Wouldn't that be "format shifting" (in effect), if you included the original book along with the new copy?
As I've said above, your analogy breaks down because they aren't altering the original physical DVD, they're making a copy of it.
Right, but isn't this akin to hiring someone to personally make a backup copy for you? I mean, you give them the original, they give you back your original and your backup copy. That would be fair use, I know, since its just making a backup. In this case they're not making a very accurate backup, but at the end of the day you're still buying as much product, they're still doing almost the same work...
Wow. Way to get double-mod points. Not that I believe you were going for them, but still...
Well, at least you're not a victim... (emphasis added for those who wouldn't otherwise get the joke)
This is where I don't follow you. So you're saying that it would be illegal to buy a book, cross out some of the words, and then sell the book? I believe that we can agree that selling a 2nd hand book is not illegal, and that crossing out words in your own copy is not illegal... but reselling it is, since you've created a new derivitive work?
Er, yeah, that was my point too. My understanding of derivitive work would be creating a new item to sell based on the book (or whatever) but specifically not containing the book itself. Which gives you the ability to sell your new work without the copyrighted work needing to be repurchased, which I agree would be Wrong (and illegal).
Sure, sure. And yet, I can buy a physical object such as a book from someone, cut out some pages and turn it into a book safe, and then resell that. Its technically a heavily edited book at that point. But -- and this happened with the original DVDs too -- every time I sell a copy of the booksafe, I have to buy another copy of the book. Thus the copyright owner gets their cut, each and every time.
What's happening here is nothing at all like a collage. It's quite obvious it's a derivative work, and distributing it therefore violates copyright law.
I did say that I was taking it to an absurd level. But let's get back to my other points.
Where do you draw the line between modifying an existing item, and creating a new one? Sure, if it was a physical item, its easy. But if what you're really buying is a license to privately view the movie along with a copy of the conten, and that license is purchased, and the accompanying content is modified, and then they're both resold... is that really derivitave, or is it just a modification of the originally purchased thing (whatever it is you actually purchase when you buy a movie)?
Why are there so many people that make this out to be a limit on what you can edit and view yourself in the privacy of your own home? These companies were DISTRIBUTING this content.
Yes, but they weren't MASS distributing the content. Each DVD was, effectively, purchased->modified->resold. At least, the content was. Each sale of the edited DVD had a corresponding purchase of the original DVD by the editor. So how is this any different than taking anything else, changing it, and reselling it?
Have you ever seen an artist make a collage? You know, cut up portions of photographs, text, whatever and incorporate them into a new creation (assuming that they purchased them in the first place, that is)? Well, this ruling takes a big step towards forbidding that in the future. Hell, ever purchased a pair of used jeans that weren't exactly in brand-new condition, maybe were missing a piece or two? Nope, that'll be illegal too.
Am I taking this to an absurd conclusion? I hope so, but think about it for a minute. Heck, let's go back to the original comment, as it relates to movie distribution. Let's say that Lucas releases Star Wars again, but this time it will only play on THX-certified stereos. After all, if he's allowed to forbid you from editing it (after purchasing a copy), isn't he also allowed to forbid you from "editing out the sound" that he thinks you'd get from an approved stereo system? Now what if you replace THX with Windows, is that still okay? Same legal issue, methinks.
Beware the slippery slope.
Even with that, its important if you care to go back and look at those sources, to make sure that your "10 supporting sources" weren't all getting their information from the same place. My favorite example of this is the popular (endorsed by Shakespeare) theory of the English king Richard III killing his two nephews, even though every account of this is tracable back to the writings of one of his arch-enemies working for his successor, and most hard evidence (including the fact that their silent deaths wouldn't have helped his position in the slighest) points otherwise. One of the most enjoyable accounts of this is a fictionalized (ie: made up dialog surrounding facts with attribution) story by Joesephine Tey: Daughter of Time. Well worth reading if you like that sort of thing.
I thought that the first rule of screenwriting was, "Never talk about screenwriting." Actually, empirical evidence suggests that the first rule of screenwriting is ... always talk about screenwriting. To everyone. All the time. Incessently. But that's beside the point (and probably mispelled).
Which also means that the user can never, ever install anything outside of that package management system. Like, oh, almost all commercial software. While that's probably a fair requirement for some low-impact Linux users (and does that include things like web-browser Plugins?), its not realistic as the systems get rolled out into wider use.
Oh, any other auction site could stop you from using Google if they wanted to. The reason that eBay (probably) can't do it, legally, is that they also own PayPal. They could force you to pay their fees however they wanted, even requiring PayPal for those, but they can't stop you from allowing your customers to use an officially unrelated product just because they own one of its competitors. That's the rub.
Hmm. I just realized that this is a potential problem -- a major potential problem -- with the OSX and now Vista (and, I believe, some Linux) GUI security paradigms. We're training people to be ready to enter their administrator passwords whenever they're prompted to. And Ma & Pa User won't know when this is a good thing. Especially when badly behaved programs like Adobe's suite raise dialog after dialog during updating. What's to stop EvilSoftCo from creating a program that, during its first-time startup, just creates a dialog box that matches the standard one, and gathers your password?
Hmm. Not great, methinks. Although surely someone must have thought of this already...
You know, I've heard this a lot. And, other than some menu fade delays that I believe are constant with both look-n-feels (and are easily eliminated using MSTweakUI), I don't see any performance difference when using rounded corners over square ones. They take up a tiny amount more real estate, but they also provide for larger more obvious titles. But a dramatic performance hit? That's getting mighty close to FUD, there.
I wasn't arguing evidence, I was discussing the phrase, "[Y]ou are required to respond to someone..." (emphasis mine). Like many things in life, its a choice. And as for talking to passengers, I don't know about you but it scares the crap out of me when someone driving (either in the car I'm riding in, or one I can see) feels the need to turn and look at the person they're talking to all the time. May not happen in controlled studies, but happens all the time in real life... Distractions are bad for driving, of whatever kind.
At least Google accounts are easy to sign up for and manage. I have a PayPal account. I think it even has some money in it still (a few bucks). I have the hardest time getting any PayPal transactions to work - and I work in enterprise web development, so its not as if I'm a stranger to the system. I couldn't imagine forcing someone to sign up for a PP account, and I agree that a Google account is still too much of a requirement, but at least its a lot more reasonable.
Actually, I think it was more trying to get away with using a totally stupid unit just in case people recognize the number. Saying that you have 100MB bandwidth is like talking about your new performance car that goes 0-60 miles! People would indeed complain at a 60 mile range, just as people complained about a 100MB transfer. 100MB/s, on the other hand, is quite good, and a much more useful statistic.
I'll agree, but define peak as "get to within 6-8% of peak." One thing that systems such as VTEC timing have done is really flatten out the torque curves for a lot of engines.
Having said that, there's something else to consider. Any peak measurements or charts you see are measured at WOT. You also get some very interesting readouts of things when you measure the engine at, say, 20% throttle. Or 40%. Of course, a lot of this becomes moot when you get into CVTs as well... Or rather its key, but no longer your problem.
The engine in the S2000 is hardly a typical engine. Most cars hit their torque peak somewhere around 2000-2500rpm, dropping off somewhat around 4500rpm. If you look at their power curve you'll see that the 2000 hits its first peak at around 3000rpm, then gets a bounce from the hyper-dramatic VTEC cam tuning change and lifts somewhat more later in the powerband. This is highly unusual. Look at almost any other car's curve -- specifically cars with engines that don't have wildly divergent cam profiles that only engage around 6000rpm -- and you wouldn't see this. As for being efficient, its more honest to say that due to its "extreme" design the S2000 engine would be horrible to drive at speeds lower than around 5500rpm, so they change the entire cam profile and effectively give you a different engine for slow driving. The torque peak for the 2000 still comes relatively lower in its usalble powerband.
As an aside, while googling for that graph, I came across a surprisingly well-written commentary on torque and powertrain design. No relation, just passing it along.