"The touch screen disciminates against us fatties. I meant to hit Republicrat but my fat finger pressed both Republicrat and independent so I want my vote back!
So... what is problem? I'm assuming that there would be some kind of a confirmation screen with a great big "OK" or "Shit, no!" button to mash...
What exactly is the point of computerizing any step in the process, if you end up counting physical ballots?
Simple. You let the computers count the ballots as well. You spot-count a small percentage of them, and if there's a discrepency you hand-count them all. You can also hand count them if there's a contested vote somewhere, or just for grins.
Here is a link to what a Canadian ballot looks like. You mark an X in the circle. We used these yesterday. They work.
Most large USA elections have many, many issues on the ballot. That makes the ballot itself much more complicated.
You have ten times our population in the US, so that's a lot more ballots, but that means you also have ten times the willing volunteers to tabulate these things, no?
Sadly not, but that's unfortunately beside the point here.
...a boat that costs $300,000 to fill the gas tank (look it up).
US$300,000 to fill up the tank? I believe that I will look it up.
Let's assume that you're buying diesel at your local neighborhood Shell station, all road taxes and everything included. Right now, average price in the US, at the pump, is $2.472 per gallon. Diesel is around 7.1 lbs per gallon, so that works out to be $0.348 per lb, or $767.58 per tonne (~2204 lbs).
$300,000 would equate to 3,908 tonnes of diesel fuel at pervalining on road prices. Thats nicely refined diesel, not fuel oil. As a comparison, Cunard's QE2, a ship I can comfortably claim will be bigger and less fuel efficient than your average millionare's play-toy, holds 4,381.4 tonnes, consuming about 1/10 of that for every day of sailing. If you were to price out marine-grade fuel oil rather than diesel, you'd end up with more than a QE2's worth of juice. Even so, you'd have enough to send that liner over 7,000 miles before hitting empty.
Ah, the power of Google. But to your original claim, sir, I must call foul.
Wow. That's almost as long as a laptop with a new battery running at a pretty high speed. Of course, you can also spend $50 or so (probably not a big deal if you've got a 2ghz M laptop) and get a mobile laptop power supply like one of the Targus ones... then it will last (effectively) forever.
Even if your system seems stable, it may still suffer transient faults leading to arbitrary data corruption. In addition, errors in following these instructions (or changes between processor models) may operate the CPU above its nominal parameters, with effects up to and including laptop meltdown.
That is a PITA, yes. However, I've seen a couple of ways on Apples to use the mousepad tap as a left-click, and the single button as a right-click. I may try that if I can't get used to the modifier key.
If a company goes out of business, you only have to wait a few years before you can start sharing an archive of their work
The only thing here is that someone always owns the copyright - either an individual or a corporate entity, that is. When a company goes out of business its assets (and a (c) is an asset) are divided up amongst its creditors and owners (shareholders). There's no telling who ends up with it, but someone does, and they would have the right to renew.
Personally, I'd like to see the fees double every five years as well with no expiration. That way, if there was a pressing economic reason to deny the public copyright, someone like Disney could keep the Mouse to themselves forever. That economic burden would get pretty large though, to compensate the country as a whole for the cultural denial (well, in theory) that the corporation is extending.
Let's look at it this way. Note - I don't want to simplify to the point of being insulting, just trying to help.
Let's pretend that each company is nothing more than a shell - a big ass bank account. This makes it easy to do the math. So Disney, Inc. has one assett - a checking account with $60B. Pixar has one assett, a checking account with $7B. Each company has issued stock to various people, which gives them the right to "control" the company (or, in other words, what it does with its cash).
The value of each company is pretty easy to determine in this case.
If Disney wants to acquire Pixar - for the sake of this grossly simplified sample, adding their $7B to the Disney account - they have to convince the people who currently control Pixar to let them. The easiest way to do this is to pay them cash:
Starting point -------------- 1000 Pixar shareholders with 1mm shares of stock each (stock price: $7) and no cash 1000 Disney shareholders with 1mm shares of stock each (stock price: $60) and no cash Pixar with assets of $7B Disney with assets of $60B
After cash transaction: Pixar bought by Disney for $7B in cash ---------------------- 1000 ex-Pixar shareholders with $7mm cash each and no stock 1000 Disney shareholders with 1mm shares of stock each (stock price: $60) Disney with assets of $60B
So, Disney has Pixar's assets (bank acct), but they had to pay out some cash to get them. Nothing has changed for DIS, which is why deals like this aren't cash-for-cash. So - they don't want to give up their cash - what else can they do?
Disney's board can make an offer to buy out Pixar for Disney stock instead. That way they end up with Pixar's $7B, but don't have to pay out any of their $60B, giving the new company a combined value of $67B. In order to do this, they will (with approval of their current shareholders (really the BOD, but for this example shareholders is fine) issue more stock in exchange for Pixar.
After stock transaction: Pixar bought by Disney for 116,666,666 shares of stock ------------------------
1000 ex-Pixar shareholders with $7mm cash each and no stock 1000 Disney shareholders with 1mm shares of stock each (stock price: $60) Disney with assets of $60B
1000 ex-Pixar shareholders with 116,666 shares of DIS (stock price: $60) 1000 Disney shareholders with 1mm shares of stock each (stock price: $60) Disney with assets of $67B
So each old Disney shareholder controls less of the company, as a percentage. This is important when it comes to voting. However, the company is worth more than it was before, so their individual cash positions are very similar. This would actually be a slightly bad deal for DIS shareholders though since there's more risk that the old Pixar guys, who can now vote on DIS issues, will do something they don't like.
In reality, you almost never see companies bought like this, for their cash. There's always something else, where the value of the new company is (in theory anyway) greater than the values of each company taken separately. That's almost a requirement, because:
a) In either of the first two examples, the Pixar guys probably wouldn't sell. They incur change (risk) and end up with much less control. This is why companies typically sell at a premium of their market valuation.
b) If the DIS shareholders didn't think that they were getting more than they were paying for, they wouldn't buy - they lose an amount of voting control as well due to the stock dilution.
To get back to your question:
If Disney is worth 60 billions before and after the aquisition, and Pixar is worth 7 billions before and does not exist anymore afterwards, where did the 7 billion go?
Into the pockets of the people who used to own shiny Pixar stock, and now don't.
That's the biggest reason I'm finally looking seriously at the laptop. I've wanted one for a while, and my 1.4ghz PentiumM is a bit long in the tooth - getting a substantial Eclipse boost would justify this for me. I've been so tempted to preorder, but I want to get some actual hands-on playtime with it first. Not for any good reason... just for comfort. I'll wait a month to avoid being the giunea pig.
Oh, they were a blast alright. I never wrote anything with wormlike tendencies, but I still remember the first time I figured out (figured out, not copied from an article/program/bbs) how to write self-replicating code. Very gnifty and, while simple to copy, a bit of a PITA to deduce. Then again, I was about 12 at the time... which also means that I never had any of it on a networked machine. Not that it would have mattered - it wouldn't infect other systems, just produce copies of itself upon request, but it was the "hard" part of writing a virus.
Now these kids today just download a virus kit, tie in a root kit, grumble, grumble, bitch, moan, for all the "love of the hack," comments, its pretty much like buying legos and doing nothing but follow the instructions and claiming it as "art."
Yes, but authors were compensated before the days of DRM, which was just a few years ago.
Well, yes and no. Technical DRM with specific rights is relatively recent. Before that though, there was still effective digital rights management achieved through methods like ReallyBigFiles and DialUpInternetAccess that limited distribution in many cases far more than, say, Apple's standard AAC rules do.
Sure can. And the first one to the theater wins. The second through nth one though, probably including yourself, is told that the ticket has already been used. Problem solved. Well, for the theater, and one of your friends.
If you happen to use BofA, they'll even emulate your change jar. You can opt to have them "round up" all CC purchases into your savings account. Better yet, they add something like 5% of those roundings at EOY. If you use a CheckCard and not a credit card, its not a bad deal. I did it hardcore for 3 months, because for the first 3 months they match the savings 100% - I made it a practice to have a lot of $___.01 charges, too.
You've got to work these numbers through other factors of course, like how many of them would be internet-equipped and on particular games, but in mixed company, I think you'd still be bound to notice a behavior among Chinese well before you'd realize how big it was among other groups of people.
Wow. What absurd logic. Can I play too?
Using your (weird) numbers, let's follow the other side of your (weird) logic and draw some conclusions. Feel free to play along at home. 70% of all Americans are nice people. That's about 207 million Americans, not bad. But there are 914 million nice Chinese! More than 3 times the total number of all Americans! Shouldn't it be a lot more obvious that the Chinese are nicer than Americans?
Or do the "asshats" in China just have better internet access?
To misquote, those who do not understand Statistics are bound to reinvent them, poorly.
You have a point with the table situation, however, because the time spent waiting in line plays with the time eating. I don't think there are analagous variables in the elevator case...
Think of it this way. Elevator capacity can be measured in person-feet. By riding the elevator in the wrong direction, you increase the number of person-feet used for the same goal. There's no problem if and only if you never encountered a situation (in your example) where someone wanted to go up and couldn't get on because you, waiting to go down, had taken the last spot. Considering that you're on an upward-bound elevator, again in your example, that's not a totally far-fetched scenario.
Ironically, I wonder if this would be the case if it wasn't for people like you cheating the system? It reminds me of one of my favorite lunch places. As they get close to their seeting capacity, people will start splitting up when they walk in, one person to hold a table and another person to wait in line and order food. This takes a non-existent problem (almost always there are enough tables for people-with-food to eat at) and turns it into a huge problem (now, instead of people-without-food standing in line, there are people-with-food standing waiting for a table). If it wasn't for the "optimization" there would be no problem, or a greatly reduced one.
And if one person blocks the doors on one elevator, everyone gets totally screwed. Other than that...
Even better though, what if you could set it up so that it ran continuously at the same average speed? You'd eliminate a lot of the complexities. Oh, that's right - its called an escalator, and we don't use them because while they move masses of people pretty efficiently, they're very slow when it comes to moving a few people, oh, 50 floors at a time.
I remember having to go through contortions to explain the concept of a "file" and "directory" to my mom. Just how technical *do* you get? "Any file is just a bunch of data" can be a bit confusing...
And yet people bashed the crap out of MSFT when they introduced terms to Windows like "Folder" and "Document" to try to solve this very problem. Not saying that you did, just finding it a little ironic that usability lags so much in general.
I agree with your statement, but not your conclusion. By adding that text box, they are implicitly saying that they will support your use of iLife while using other non-.Mac implementations of the backend services. That's the line they don't want to cross - purely for support reasons. After all, let's say that you're using iSync, and a new update comes out that, for the sake of argument, did something differently (but legitimately) when communicating with the server.
You apply it, and iSync fails to work properly afterwards. How many people (be honest here) would actually first blame their backend solution (which, after all, did not change)? Most would blame the update - after all, that's what changed. Now Apple is stuck with either keeping legacy code around to work with the most popular backends, even if they're broken, just as MSFT had to do with legacy undocumented APIs in Windows... or pissing off a lot of people even if they (Apple) would be technically within their rights to do so. The flexibility to make systemic changes is part of what has made Apple so much more responsive than MSFT, and I don't see them being willing to give that up just to make a relatively few people slightly happier.
As you say, you can already do your own.mac implementation for the most part. But earlier you'd talked about being able to configiure it centrally. I assumed that you meant pointing to a virual ".mac-alike" site, not going through a whole ton of configuration settings. Either way, when they added a service to.mac, or changed the way that some of the communication pathways were set up, you'd be in the same situation. If either your service provider, or you (if you're doing your own services), didn't change the backend to match the new front-end, some things wouldn't work any more. If they officially supported other providers, they'd have to support them (at least through the troubleshooting phase). When you're talking about a $79 software suite, keeping support costs to a minimum is mandatory. That's why they don't want you rolling your own backend. And if you think that they could just say, "If you use this Apple configuration screen to change this setting, your iLife product is no longer supported," well, that's not exactly user friendly now, is it?
And when they rolled out new versions of iLife, all of your faux.mac backend software would cease to work until you updated it. Or rather, if it didn't work, you'd be well within your rights (since its an iLife product) to call Apple tech support... who would now have to deal with another level of possible issue to figure out if they're having a problem with their new version of software, or if its an incompatibility with whichever service (local or hosted) you happen to be using. Under the curremt system, you know its an Apple problem and they can deal with it as such without playing the vendorBlame game.
And you could cobble together versions of iLife that "mostly worked" and were "pretty much" integrated with each other. The whole Apple idea is to make things that actually do work, together, out of the box. For this, you pay around 5% of your purchase price per year, and get a metric shitload of functionality. $8/month isn't exactly a big price to pay for what you get - for most Apple customers that's probably less than 20 minutes salary. Per month. For stuff that just works, is backed up, guaranteed, useful, et ceteara. Sounds like a winning plan to me.
Slashdot Mirror
"The touch screen disciminates against us fatties. I meant to hit Republicrat but my fat finger pressed both Republicrat and independent so I want my vote back!
So... what is problem? I'm assuming that there would be some kind of a confirmation screen with a great big "OK" or "Shit, no!" button to mash...
What exactly is the point of computerizing any step in the process, if you end up counting physical ballots?
Simple. You let the computers count the ballots as well. You spot-count a small percentage of them, and if there's a discrepency you hand-count them all. You can also hand count them if there's a contested vote somewhere, or just for grins.
Here is a link to what a Canadian ballot looks like. You mark an X in the circle. We used these yesterday. They work.
Most large USA elections have many, many issues on the ballot. That makes the ballot itself much more complicated.
You have ten times our population in the US, so that's a lot more ballots, but that means you also have ten times the willing volunteers to tabulate these things, no?
Sadly not, but that's unfortunately beside the point here.
...a boat that costs $300,000 to fill the gas tank (look it up).
US$300,000 to fill up the tank? I believe that I will look it up.
Let's assume that you're buying diesel at your local neighborhood Shell station, all road taxes and everything included. Right now, average price in the US, at the pump, is $2.472 per gallon. Diesel is around 7.1 lbs per gallon, so that works out to be $0.348 per lb, or $767.58 per tonne (~2204 lbs).
$300,000 would equate to 3,908 tonnes of diesel fuel at pervalining on road prices. Thats nicely refined diesel, not fuel oil. As a comparison, Cunard's QE2, a ship I can comfortably claim will be bigger and less fuel efficient than your average millionare's play-toy, holds 4,381.4 tonnes, consuming about 1/10 of that for every day of sailing. If you were to price out marine-grade fuel oil rather than diesel, you'd end up with more than a QE2's worth of juice. Even so, you'd have enough to send that liner over 7,000 miles before hitting empty.
Ah, the power of Google. But to your original claim, sir, I must call foul.
h4x0r yes.
hacker no.
And that makes all the difference.
Wow. That's almost as long as a laptop with a new battery running at a pretty high speed. Of course, you can also spend $50 or so (probably not a big deal if you've got a 2ghz M laptop) and get a mobile laptop power supply like one of the Targus ones... then it will last (effectively) forever.
Even if your system seems stable, it may still suffer transient faults leading to arbitrary data corruption. In addition, errors in following these instructions (or changes between processor models) may operate the CPU above its nominal parameters, with effects up to and including laptop meltdown.
Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play?
That is a PITA, yes. However, I've seen a couple of ways on Apples to use the mousepad tap as a left-click, and the single button as a right-click. I may try that if I can't get used to the modifier key.
If a company goes out of business, you only have to wait a few years before you can start sharing an archive of their work
The only thing here is that someone always owns the copyright - either an individual or a corporate entity, that is. When a company goes out of business its assets (and a (c) is an asset) are divided up amongst its creditors and owners (shareholders). There's no telling who ends up with it, but someone does, and they would have the right to renew.
Personally, I'd like to see the fees double every five years as well with no expiration. That way, if there was a pressing economic reason to deny the public copyright, someone like Disney could keep the Mouse to themselves forever. That economic burden would get pretty large though, to compensate the country as a whole for the cultural denial (well, in theory) that the corporation is extending.
Let's look at it this way. Note - I don't want to simplify to the point of being insulting, just trying to help.
Let's pretend that each company is nothing more than a shell - a big ass bank account. This makes it easy to do the math. So Disney, Inc. has one assett - a checking account with $60B. Pixar has one assett, a checking account with $7B. Each company has issued stock to various people, which gives them the right to "control" the company (or, in other words, what it does with its cash).
The value of each company is pretty easy to determine in this case.
If Disney wants to acquire Pixar - for the sake of this grossly simplified sample, adding their $7B to the Disney account - they have to convince the people who currently control Pixar to let them. The easiest way to do this is to pay them cash:
Starting point
--------------
1000 Pixar shareholders with 1mm shares of stock each (stock price: $7) and no cash
1000 Disney shareholders with 1mm shares of stock each (stock price: $60) and no cash
Pixar with assets of $7B
Disney with assets of $60B
After cash transaction: Pixar bought by Disney for $7B in cash
----------------------
1000 ex-Pixar shareholders with $7mm cash each and no stock
1000 Disney shareholders with 1mm shares of stock each (stock price: $60)
Disney with assets of $60B
So, Disney has Pixar's assets (bank acct), but they had to pay out some cash to get them. Nothing has changed for DIS, which is why deals like this aren't cash-for-cash. So - they don't want to give up their cash - what else can they do?
Disney's board can make an offer to buy out Pixar for Disney stock instead. That way they end up with Pixar's $7B, but don't have to pay out any of their $60B, giving the new company a combined value of $67B. In order to do this, they will (with approval of their current shareholders (really the BOD, but for this example shareholders is fine) issue more stock in exchange for Pixar.
After stock transaction: Pixar bought by Disney for 116,666,666 shares of stock
------------------------
1000 ex-Pixar shareholders with $7mm cash each and no stock
1000 Disney shareholders with 1mm shares of stock each (stock price: $60)
Disney with assets of $60B
1000 ex-Pixar shareholders with 116,666 shares of DIS (stock price: $60)
1000 Disney shareholders with 1mm shares of stock each (stock price: $60)
Disney with assets of $67B
So each old Disney shareholder controls less of the company, as a percentage. This is important when it comes to voting. However, the company is worth more than it was before, so their individual cash positions are very similar. This would actually be a slightly bad deal for DIS shareholders though since there's more risk that the old Pixar guys, who can now vote on DIS issues, will do something they don't like.
In reality, you almost never see companies bought like this, for their cash. There's always something else, where the value of the new company is (in theory anyway) greater than the values of each company taken separately. That's almost a requirement, because:
a) In either of the first two examples, the Pixar guys probably wouldn't sell. They incur change (risk) and end up with much less control. This is why companies typically sell at a premium of their market valuation.
b) If the DIS shareholders didn't think that they were getting more than they were paying for, they wouldn't buy - they lose an amount of voting control as well due to the stock dilution.
To get back to your question:
If Disney is worth 60 billions before and after the aquisition, and Pixar is worth 7 billions before and does not exist anymore afterwards, where did the 7 billion go?
Into the pockets of the people who used to own shiny Pixar stock, and now don't.
Make sense?
Yeah, that's the same reason that everybody drives Hyundais and BMW is on the edge of bankruptcy.
Its not about the cost of raw materials.
That's the biggest reason I'm finally looking seriously at the laptop. I've wanted one for a while, and my 1.4ghz PentiumM is a bit long in the tooth - getting a substantial Eclipse boost would justify this for me. I've been so tempted to preorder, but I want to get some actual hands-on playtime with it first. Not for any good reason... just for comfort. I'll wait a month to avoid being the giunea pig.
Oh, they were a blast alright. I never wrote anything with wormlike tendencies, but I still remember the first time I figured out (figured out, not copied from an article/program/bbs) how to write self-replicating code. Very gnifty and, while simple to copy, a bit of a PITA to deduce. Then again, I was about 12 at the time... which also means that I never had any of it on a networked machine. Not that it would have mattered - it wouldn't infect other systems, just produce copies of itself upon request, but it was the "hard" part of writing a virus.
Now these kids today just download a virus kit, tie in a root kit, grumble, grumble, bitch, moan, for all the "love of the hack," comments, its pretty much like buying legos and doing nothing but follow the instructions and claiming it as "art."
Sigh. I'm gettin' old.
Yes, but authors were compensated before the days of DRM, which was just a few years ago.
Well, yes and no. Technical DRM with specific rights is relatively recent. Before that though, there was still effective digital rights management achieved through methods like ReallyBigFiles and DialUpInternetAccess that limited distribution in many cases far more than, say, Apple's standard AAC rules do.
Sure can. And the first one to the theater wins. The second through nth one though, probably including yourself, is told that the ticket has already been used. Problem solved. Well, for the theater, and one of your friends.
Funny how BRK (Buffett's company) started buying the crap out of it 5-6 years ago, isn't it?
If you happen to use BofA, they'll even emulate your change jar. You can opt to have them "round up" all CC purchases into your savings account. Better yet, they add something like 5% of those roundings at EOY. If you use a CheckCard and not a credit card, its not a bad deal. I did it hardcore for 3 months, because for the first 3 months they match the savings 100% - I made it a practice to have a lot of $___.01 charges, too.
You've got to work these numbers through other factors of course, like how many of them would be internet-equipped and on particular games, but in mixed company, I think you'd still be bound to notice a behavior among Chinese well before you'd realize how big it was among other groups of people.
Wow. What absurd logic. Can I play too?
Using your (weird) numbers, let's follow the other side of your (weird) logic and draw some conclusions. Feel free to play along at home. 70% of all Americans are nice people. That's about 207 million Americans, not bad. But there are 914 million nice Chinese! More than 3 times the total number of all Americans! Shouldn't it be a lot more obvious that the Chinese are nicer than Americans?
Or do the "asshats" in China just have better internet access?
To misquote, those who do not understand Statistics are bound to reinvent them, poorly.
You have a point with the table situation, however, because the time spent waiting in line plays with the time eating. I don't think there are analagous variables in the elevator case...
Think of it this way. Elevator capacity can be measured in person-feet. By riding the elevator in the wrong direction, you increase the number of person-feet used for the same goal. There's no problem if and only if you never encountered a situation (in your example) where someone wanted to go up and couldn't get on because you, waiting to go down, had taken the last spot. Considering that you're on an upward-bound elevator, again in your example, that's not a totally far-fetched scenario.
Ironically, I wonder if this would be the case if it wasn't for people like you cheating the system? It reminds me of one of my favorite lunch places. As they get close to their seeting capacity, people will start splitting up when they walk in, one person to hold a table and another person to wait in line and order food. This takes a non-existent problem (almost always there are enough tables for people-with-food to eat at) and turns it into a huge problem (now, instead of people-without-food standing in line, there are people-with-food standing waiting for a table). If it wasn't for the "optimization" there would be no problem, or a greatly reduced one.
And if one person blocks the doors on one elevator, everyone gets totally screwed. Other than that...
Even better though, what if you could set it up so that it ran continuously at the same average speed? You'd eliminate a lot of the complexities. Oh, that's right - its called an escalator, and we don't use them because while they move masses of people pretty efficiently, they're very slow when it comes to moving a few people, oh, 50 floors at a time.
I remember having to go through contortions to explain the concept of a "file" and "directory" to my mom. Just how technical *do* you get? "Any file is just a bunch of data" can be a bit confusing...
And yet people bashed the crap out of MSFT when they introduced terms to Windows like "Folder" and "Document" to try to solve this very problem. Not saying that you did, just finding it a little ironic that usability lags so much in general.
I agree with your statement, but not your conclusion. By adding that text box, they are implicitly saying that they will support your use of iLife while using other non-.Mac implementations of the backend services. That's the line they don't want to cross - purely for support reasons. After all, let's say that you're using iSync, and a new update comes out that, for the sake of argument, did something differently (but legitimately) when communicating with the server.
... or pissing off a lot of people even if they (Apple) would be technically within their rights to do so. The flexibility to make systemic changes is part of what has made Apple so much more responsive than MSFT, and I don't see them being willing to give that up just to make a relatively few people slightly happier.
You apply it, and iSync fails to work properly afterwards. How many people (be honest here) would actually first blame their backend solution (which, after all, did not change)? Most would blame the update - after all, that's what changed. Now Apple is stuck with either keeping legacy code around to work with the most popular backends, even if they're broken, just as MSFT had to do with legacy undocumented APIs in Windows
But maybe that's just me.
As you say, you can already do your own .mac implementation for the most part. But earlier you'd talked about being able to configiure it centrally. I assumed that you meant pointing to a virual ".mac-alike" site, not going through a whole ton of configuration settings. Either way, when they added a service to .mac, or changed the way that some of the communication pathways were set up, you'd be in the same situation. If either your service provider, or you (if you're doing your own services), didn't change the backend to match the new front-end, some things wouldn't work any more. If they officially supported other providers, they'd have to support them (at least through the troubleshooting phase). When you're talking about a $79 software suite, keeping support costs to a minimum is mandatory. That's why they don't want you rolling your own backend. And if you think that they could just say, "If you use this Apple configuration screen to change this setting, your iLife product is no longer supported," well, that's not exactly user friendly now, is it?
And when they rolled out new versions of iLife, all of your faux.mac backend software would cease to work until you updated it. Or rather, if it didn't work, you'd be well within your rights (since its an iLife product) to call Apple tech support ... who would now have to deal with another level of possible issue to figure out if they're having a problem with their new version of software, or if its an incompatibility with whichever service (local or hosted) you happen to be using. Under the curremt system, you know its an Apple problem and they can deal with it as such without playing the vendorBlame game.
And you could cobble together versions of iLife that "mostly worked" and were "pretty much" integrated with each other. The whole Apple idea is to make things that actually do work, together, out of the box. For this, you pay around 5% of your purchase price per year, and get a metric shitload of functionality. $8/month isn't exactly a big price to pay for what you get - for most Apple customers that's probably less than 20 minutes salary. Per month. For stuff that just works, is backed up, guaranteed, useful, et ceteara. Sounds like a winning plan to me.