WebKit is open source and free which is a key reason its a serious challenge to Opera in the embedded space.
Yeah, whereas IE seems to be a good example of how vendor lock-in can overcome superior products, Opera seems to be a case study on how difficult it can be even for a very good product to compete in an area that has become commoditized by open source projects. Safari, Chrome, and Firefox are all very good browsers on the desktop, and Webkit generally seems to be taking over the mobile market, due to being free and having a small footprint.
Opera has to try to offer something more than these open source projects can, given the backing of companies like Apple and Google, I'd imagine that it won't be long before the open source competition catches up.
Well certainly when you look at the service being provided, I'm not sure why either DNS registration or SSL certs are so expensive. They're really just hosting a relatively small database with relatively light usage. There's the facade of security, but it's not as though registrars and CAs actually investigate people to verify identity (at least in most cases).
The only upside to increased prices is it provides some kind of limit to domain squatting and such. If domain registration were free, then every single possible domain would probably be taken by now.
Phone and cable have gotten better in the past 30 years. Landline phone and cable companies are so desperate for business that they're oftentimes pretty damned quick about getting a line out to you.
Yeah, just look at how quick Verizon has been to roll out FIOS. It's not as though there's anyone in this country still stuck on dialup!
And if you think that usage on Utilities isn't capped, you're naive.
Maybe, but it's pretty rare that I have a problem where the water stops running or the electricity stops flowing, caps or no caps. I spend more on Internet than I do on my electrical bill, and my connection seems to die at least a few times a week (besides which the connection is slow and the service stinks).
I'm not arguing about the analogy here. Did you notice that I didn't go into mathematics about the estimated force generated by the entire earth sneezing? That's because I don't actually care about your metaphor.
My point is you're using the logic of "Well, it's just one instance of someone doing something small, and that can't *possibly* have any effect." And I'm saying, "yeah, but lots of people doing lots of small things can add up." We're finding that you don't have to change the chemical makeup of the atmosphere very much to have an adverse affect. All those graphs where CO2 levels are going off the charts? Look at the scales on those charts-- CO2 increase in the atmosphere has been something like 0.005%, and we're all flipping out.
So if you're so smart, you tell me: exactly how much solar energy can we pull out of what hits the earth before we have a measurable effect? Exactly how much wind energy can we pull out of the jet stream before it makes a difference? Give me some really precise numbers on how much energy we'll be pulling out, and how much energy it will take.
And when you're done, explain how you figured that out, because apparently we don't need scientific study of these things anymore. We just need some random engineer to tell us the answers based on his little predictive model. (because we know predictive models are always so great at telling you what will actually happen)
I can rephrase your question as "how many sneezes will it take to stop a hurricane" to give you an idea of how many kites with turbines we would need to slow down the jet stream noticably - that's what I mean by a question of scale.
And I might rephrase your question as "how many lanterns would it take to cause global warming?" It would obviously take an insanely high number. But then figure out how many people there are on this planet, and multiply that by how much energy the average person is using. That's an insanely high number.
So how sure are you, that if you could combine and direct the force of everyone on the planet sneezing at once, how sure are you that we couldn't stop or divert a hurricane?
Consider mountains, trees, cities and what that does to the wind.
Yes, all of those things have a big effect on wind, but none of them are designed to efficiently pull massive amounts of energy out of the wind. To a large extent, they just channel and redirect the wind.
Anyway, settle down. I'm not trying to argue that global warming isn't happening. I'm saying, imagine going back in time to when people started burning coal and oil and telling them, "the vapors from burning that stuff might eventually cause massive environmental problems." They'd think you're crazy, because the world is so big and it's just a tiny little bit of vapor.
And now you're telling me that sucking massive amounts of energy out of the jetstream can't possibly have environmental impact. That's nice of you to say, and I'm sure you must be right because you're an engineer, and engineers know everything. On the other hand, I'll hold onto my questions and concerns, given that sometimes people are wrong, especially when modeling something as complex as the global climate.
I have a hard time believing that IE will be able to hold out like this over the long-term. One of the big hold-outs on IE are businesses who have legacy web apps. Sooner or later, they'll be willing to upgrade/replace those, and if you can simplify development and save money, and all you have to do is install a free web browser that works on your existing platform, people will do that.
Both Mozilla and Apple are already working on HTML5 and CSS3 support. I'm not sure about Opera, but I'd guess they're already working on it. Microsoft will probably drag their fee (as always), but you'll see support in Firefox, Safari, and Chrome well before that "10 year" timeframe.
Well, you'd at least need someone to create an editor to make it easy to develop. The company most likely to create such an editor would be Adobe, except that the functionality would compete directly with Flash. Is there any economic motivation for someone else to invest the money in creating a Flash-style editor to compete? Or for Adobe to integrate support for using Flash to create HTML5 interfaces instead of using the Flash format?
The true answer to the solar scaremonger and your wind question is that we are all very small compared with the power of the ocean, the size of a continent, the terror of a volcano or the height of the sky.
And that same argument gets used to argue that "global warming" is bunk. What's your opinion there? As small as we are, are we able to have an effect on the environment?
Yeah, but that's the advantage of operating what's essentially a cartel-- they don't have to really compete. Part of the reason they've kind of started to get reasonable about this stuff is that Sprint has been trying to really compete, because otherwise they're out of business. So they've started offering relatively cheap "unlimited" plans.
But where I really think things are going to fall apart for carriers is when someone offers real dumb-pipe high-speed wireless access. Once you can buy whatever device you want, not have to deal with whether carriers will "support" something, and have high bandwidth and low latency enough to support VoIP, cell carriers will find themselves in a world of hurt.
Of course, I wouldn't bet on that happening any time soon.
Why are other phone companies against tethering, or am I completely misunderstanding something?
Simply: they want you to pay for service, but they don't want you to really use it very much. They want to charge you a hefty fee for data access, and justify the price by saying it's "unlimited", but they really don't want you to use the service very much, because lots of people using it means they have to spend money to expand their infrastructure. If you can tether it to your computer, you'll probably use more bandwidth. Obviously they'd much prefer that you paid for their most expensive data plan and then never used it at all.
Part of the reason I bring it up is that I read an article a couple years ago, and someone had done the math and-- at least according to this guy-- in order to get enough energy out of solar energy to meet the current power requirements of the entire earth, we'd suck so much energy out of the system that it would lead to measurable global cooling. In order to meet the power requirements of the entire earth from wind power, we'd take enough energy out of the system to change weather patterns.
Now it wasn't clear whether any of this would be disastrous, But I wish people wouldn't pretend that they have everything all figured out, and they've finally located a whole bunch of free energy with no downsides. I'm not suggesting that we could harness all of that energy, but I don't know how much it would take to basically throw something a little off-course, which would then cause other problems down the line.
Can you prove exactly what will happen when you pull out enough energy to power NYC? I doubt you can.
Yeah, really I'm just saying "something doesn't add up". Monthly subscription, no additional obligations, unlimited downloads, and no DRM. It doesn't sound like something Universal would agree to.
It's still not "creating" energy any more than burning coal is. It's a different way in which energy is stored in the arrangement of matter, which makes it fuel. Of course, that means you have to gather the fuel and expend it to get the energy. The fuel is bound to be limited (even if the end is not yet in sight) and there is bound to be some kind of waste byproduct which must then be somehow disposed of.
Not to say that some of these solutions aren't better or worse than others. Maybe we'll actually be able to make fusion reactors that produce harmless waste. Who knows, maybe some day we'll even be able to turn matter completely into energy without any waste. I'd bet that even if we figure out something like that, there will be some kind of downside.
I think we have enough evidence to draw a conclusion: By the time a green tech gets into actual production it isn't green anymore. The real world at work?
Yeah, to a large extent, I think it is the real world at work. Nothing is free, and I don't mean that in terms of money. I mean anything that we use to "create" energy isn't really creating energy. Energy doesn't get created, it just gets collected, harnessed, and transfered. So pretty much anything we do to "create" energy will actually mean taking energy out of the environment somehow. That means it's going to have some kind of environmental impact.
So part of the problem is that these "greens" that you talk about, the people who want zero environmental impact, are people who want a free lunch and have no idea how the world works. They're utopianists. They're the same people who have some imagined model of government/economics that they think will solve all the world's problems. Hint: it's basically a big commune where we all share and everyone is always nice to each other.
They're also the people who 20 years ago thought the most important think for school children was "self esteem". They're the same people who think that if you just "be yourself", then people will like you, and that being honest and saying what you feel will solve all of your personal problems. They're the same sort of people who 40 years ago thought that love and freedom for tradition and social norms would fix the world.
They're children who think that all of our problems have simple and perfect solutions, and given a strategy to address certain problem, once they've discovered a down-side, they decide that it's complete unacceptable.
Right, but here was my point: imagine that instead of paying for cable TV, pay-per-view, and buying stuff on iTunes, you paid for a single service that gave you unrestricted access to download or stream any song you wanted, whenever you wanted, wherever you wanted. You didn't have to worry about buying big enough hard drives to store everything. You didn't need to worry about backups, since you could always re-download. Everything was fast, easy to find, and legal. There was even a very good recommendation engine to help you find new stuff.
Wouldn't that be worth some kind of fee? Some non-zero dollar amount, just to make it pleasant, convenient, comprehensive, and legal? Like you download from torrents. What if someone offered a method to make it easy to find trackers with any piece of content you like, and the resulting download would be completely legal, with no risk of harassment from your ISP or from the MPAA/RIAA? Would that be worth something? A few dollars a month?
Now maybe you wouldn't pay very much, but I'm sure there's some relatively high price at which the gross majority of people would happily pay for it, just to make things easy. Lots of people already pay close to $100/month for cable TV alone. And if you had such a service, there wouldn't be much point in trying to store everything locally. Not until you decided you wanted to quit the service, that is. But even so, it'd be worth paying a certain amount per month just for the online backup. of all that media.
I currently have >3,500 songs, and I don't have everything I want. Even "everything I want" would be small in relation to some people's libraries. If I were starting from zero (none of my music being legal) and wanted to get every song I wanted, paying $1080 over 3 years might well effectively mean $0.20/song or less.
Now I know Universal isn't willing to sell their songs on iTunes for $0.20/song. So really, I'm just wondering how this works out. What's the catch? How is Universal getting a deal that they're happy with, without putting in some additional draconian protection, a download limit, or ridiculous prices?
Do you produce enough new music each month to make a subscription a more viable option than say iTunes or buying CDs?
I think this is the biggest problem. It's hard to say how much new music would be needed-- maybe it wouldn't be a lot-- but I don't think media companies want their businesses to be dependent on consistently churning out high-quality product. Or why else would they keep pushing to extend copyrights?
You'd always forget some band or other, then months later slap your head in frustration and go 'Oh... I knew I should have downloaded more of the back catalogue of Oingo Boingo!'
So if you get a big enough list together, you sign up for another month, download all that, and you're done.
Listen, I'm not really saying this is a bad idea. For a long time now, I've thought that the way to get people to pay for music (to have no use of piracy) was essentially to provide a subscription service where music was "free". The idea here would be to erase the need to amass a "music collection" (on your local hard drive), because you could always just re-download what you want. The service would then allocate royalties based on the number of unique downloads, or something like that.
The problem is that it needs to be cheap, and there needs to be a steady influx of new music that people will want to listen to. If there isn't a lot of great new music, then the service better be very cheap. My sense is that record companies aren't going to accept less money, and personally I'm not too happy with the new music I hear. So for me, I'd probably join up to something like this for the convenient downloads, long enough to get legal copies of what I want, and then I'd quit.
If I commit slander over the telephone, is my telephone company liable in a civil suit? When I make a getaway from a bank robbery, is the federal government arrested for being an accomplice? They did provide my getaway driver with the interstate highway system, after all, so the government helped us escape.
Well, most people don't even really want something like FLAC. It will increase download times, and take up way more space on portable players unless you transcode. If you transcode and keep the lossy copy, then you'll be taking up a lot more space on your hard drive than if you just had the lossy copy. If you transcode on the fly, it'll take longer to sync your portable player. There are various complications in order to provide "higher quality" that will be inaudible to most people.
What I would *much* prefer, personally, would be a model where you're given options from the store on an ongoing basis. So, for example, let's say I buy a song from iTunes for $0.99, and I could choose whether I want to download it as ALAC, 256kbps AAC, 160kbps AAC, or 128kbps AAC. I choose 160kbps, but a year later I change my mind. I'd like to be able to go back and buy the ALAC version, but not for the full $0.99. I should only have to pay a nominal fee ($0.10?) to cover Apple's administration and bandwidth costs. That would be much closer to my ideal system.
What happens when you pull that much energy out of the jetstream? Does it change global air circulation? Do you get climate changes throughout the world?
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WebKit is open source and free which is a key reason its a serious challenge to Opera in the embedded space.
Yeah, whereas IE seems to be a good example of how vendor lock-in can overcome superior products, Opera seems to be a case study on how difficult it can be even for a very good product to compete in an area that has become commoditized by open source projects. Safari, Chrome, and Firefox are all very good browsers on the desktop, and Webkit generally seems to be taking over the mobile market, due to being free and having a small footprint.
Opera has to try to offer something more than these open source projects can, given the backing of companies like Apple and Google, I'd imagine that it won't be long before the open source competition catches up.
Well certainly when you look at the service being provided, I'm not sure why either DNS registration or SSL certs are so expensive. They're really just hosting a relatively small database with relatively light usage. There's the facade of security, but it's not as though registrars and CAs actually investigate people to verify identity (at least in most cases).
The only upside to increased prices is it provides some kind of limit to domain squatting and such. If domain registration were free, then every single possible domain would probably be taken by now.
Phone and cable have gotten better in the past 30 years. Landline phone and cable companies are so desperate for business that they're oftentimes pretty damned quick about getting a line out to you.
Yeah, just look at how quick Verizon has been to roll out FIOS. It's not as though there's anyone in this country still stuck on dialup!
And if you think that usage on Utilities isn't capped, you're naive.
Maybe, but it's pretty rare that I have a problem where the water stops running or the electricity stops flowing, caps or no caps. I spend more on Internet than I do on my electrical bill, and my connection seems to die at least a few times a week (besides which the connection is slow and the service stinks).
I'm not arguing about the analogy here. Did you notice that I didn't go into mathematics about the estimated force generated by the entire earth sneezing? That's because I don't actually care about your metaphor.
My point is you're using the logic of "Well, it's just one instance of someone doing something small, and that can't *possibly* have any effect." And I'm saying, "yeah, but lots of people doing lots of small things can add up." We're finding that you don't have to change the chemical makeup of the atmosphere very much to have an adverse affect. All those graphs where CO2 levels are going off the charts? Look at the scales on those charts-- CO2 increase in the atmosphere has been something like 0.005%, and we're all flipping out.
So if you're so smart, you tell me: exactly how much solar energy can we pull out of what hits the earth before we have a measurable effect? Exactly how much wind energy can we pull out of the jet stream before it makes a difference? Give me some really precise numbers on how much energy we'll be pulling out, and how much energy it will take.
And when you're done, explain how you figured that out, because apparently we don't need scientific study of these things anymore. We just need some random engineer to tell us the answers based on his little predictive model. (because we know predictive models are always so great at telling you what will actually happen)
I can rephrase your question as "how many sneezes will it take to stop a hurricane" to give you an idea of how many kites with turbines we would need to slow down the jet stream noticably - that's what I mean by a question of scale.
And I might rephrase your question as "how many lanterns would it take to cause global warming?" It would obviously take an insanely high number. But then figure out how many people there are on this planet, and multiply that by how much energy the average person is using. That's an insanely high number.
So how sure are you, that if you could combine and direct the force of everyone on the planet sneezing at once, how sure are you that we couldn't stop or divert a hurricane?
Consider mountains, trees, cities and what that does to the wind.
Yes, all of those things have a big effect on wind, but none of them are designed to efficiently pull massive amounts of energy out of the wind. To a large extent, they just channel and redirect the wind.
Anyway, settle down. I'm not trying to argue that global warming isn't happening. I'm saying, imagine going back in time to when people started burning coal and oil and telling them, "the vapors from burning that stuff might eventually cause massive environmental problems." They'd think you're crazy, because the world is so big and it's just a tiny little bit of vapor.
And now you're telling me that sucking massive amounts of energy out of the jetstream can't possibly have environmental impact. That's nice of you to say, and I'm sure you must be right because you're an engineer, and engineers know everything. On the other hand, I'll hold onto my questions and concerns, given that sometimes people are wrong, especially when modeling something as complex as the global climate.
No, it's a real problem with your argument. Either we're "too small and insignificant to make an impact in the environment" or we're not. Which is it?
I have a hard time believing that IE will be able to hold out like this over the long-term. One of the big hold-outs on IE are businesses who have legacy web apps. Sooner or later, they'll be willing to upgrade/replace those, and if you can simplify development and save money, and all you have to do is install a free web browser that works on your existing platform, people will do that.
Both Mozilla and Apple are already working on HTML5 and CSS3 support. I'm not sure about Opera, but I'd guess they're already working on it. Microsoft will probably drag their fee (as always), but you'll see support in Firefox, Safari, and Chrome well before that "10 year" timeframe.
Auto-download plugins? Why do I want plugins? Do you mean things like Firefox Addons?
Well, you'd at least need someone to create an editor to make it easy to develop. The company most likely to create such an editor would be Adobe, except that the functionality would compete directly with Flash. Is there any economic motivation for someone else to invest the money in creating a Flash-style editor to compete? Or for Adobe to integrate support for using Flash to create HTML5 interfaces instead of using the Flash format?
The true answer to the solar scaremonger and your wind question is that we are all very small compared with the power of the ocean, the size of a continent, the terror of a volcano or the height of the sky.
And that same argument gets used to argue that "global warming" is bunk. What's your opinion there? As small as we are, are we able to have an effect on the environment?
Yeah, but that's the advantage of operating what's essentially a cartel-- they don't have to really compete. Part of the reason they've kind of started to get reasonable about this stuff is that Sprint has been trying to really compete, because otherwise they're out of business. So they've started offering relatively cheap "unlimited" plans.
But where I really think things are going to fall apart for carriers is when someone offers real dumb-pipe high-speed wireless access. Once you can buy whatever device you want, not have to deal with whether carriers will "support" something, and have high bandwidth and low latency enough to support VoIP, cell carriers will find themselves in a world of hurt.
Of course, I wouldn't bet on that happening any time soon.
Why are other phone companies against tethering, or am I completely misunderstanding something?
Simply: they want you to pay for service, but they don't want you to really use it very much. They want to charge you a hefty fee for data access, and justify the price by saying it's "unlimited", but they really don't want you to use the service very much, because lots of people using it means they have to spend money to expand their infrastructure. If you can tether it to your computer, you'll probably use more bandwidth. Obviously they'd much prefer that you paid for their most expensive data plan and then never used it at all.
Part of the reason I bring it up is that I read an article a couple years ago, and someone had done the math and-- at least according to this guy-- in order to get enough energy out of solar energy to meet the current power requirements of the entire earth, we'd suck so much energy out of the system that it would lead to measurable global cooling. In order to meet the power requirements of the entire earth from wind power, we'd take enough energy out of the system to change weather patterns.
Now it wasn't clear whether any of this would be disastrous, But I wish people wouldn't pretend that they have everything all figured out, and they've finally located a whole bunch of free energy with no downsides. I'm not suggesting that we could harness all of that energy, but I don't know how much it would take to basically throw something a little off-course, which would then cause other problems down the line.
Can you prove exactly what will happen when you pull out enough energy to power NYC? I doubt you can.
Yeah, really I'm just saying "something doesn't add up". Monthly subscription, no additional obligations, unlimited downloads, and no DRM. It doesn't sound like something Universal would agree to.
It's still not "creating" energy any more than burning coal is. It's a different way in which energy is stored in the arrangement of matter, which makes it fuel. Of course, that means you have to gather the fuel and expend it to get the energy. The fuel is bound to be limited (even if the end is not yet in sight) and there is bound to be some kind of waste byproduct which must then be somehow disposed of.
Not to say that some of these solutions aren't better or worse than others. Maybe we'll actually be able to make fusion reactors that produce harmless waste. Who knows, maybe some day we'll even be able to turn matter completely into energy without any waste. I'd bet that even if we figure out something like that, there will be some kind of downside.
I think we have enough evidence to draw a conclusion: By the time a green tech gets into actual production it isn't green anymore. The real world at work?
Yeah, to a large extent, I think it is the real world at work. Nothing is free, and I don't mean that in terms of money. I mean anything that we use to "create" energy isn't really creating energy. Energy doesn't get created, it just gets collected, harnessed, and transfered. So pretty much anything we do to "create" energy will actually mean taking energy out of the environment somehow. That means it's going to have some kind of environmental impact.
So part of the problem is that these "greens" that you talk about, the people who want zero environmental impact, are people who want a free lunch and have no idea how the world works. They're utopianists. They're the same people who have some imagined model of government/economics that they think will solve all the world's problems. Hint: it's basically a big commune where we all share and everyone is always nice to each other.
They're also the people who 20 years ago thought the most important think for school children was "self esteem". They're the same people who think that if you just "be yourself", then people will like you, and that being honest and saying what you feel will solve all of your personal problems. They're the same sort of people who 40 years ago thought that love and freedom for tradition and social norms would fix the world.
They're children who think that all of our problems have simple and perfect solutions, and given a strategy to address certain problem, once they've discovered a down-side, they decide that it's complete unacceptable.
Right, but here was my point: imagine that instead of paying for cable TV, pay-per-view, and buying stuff on iTunes, you paid for a single service that gave you unrestricted access to download or stream any song you wanted, whenever you wanted, wherever you wanted. You didn't have to worry about buying big enough hard drives to store everything. You didn't need to worry about backups, since you could always re-download. Everything was fast, easy to find, and legal. There was even a very good recommendation engine to help you find new stuff.
Wouldn't that be worth some kind of fee? Some non-zero dollar amount, just to make it pleasant, convenient, comprehensive, and legal? Like you download from torrents. What if someone offered a method to make it easy to find trackers with any piece of content you like, and the resulting download would be completely legal, with no risk of harassment from your ISP or from the MPAA/RIAA? Would that be worth something? A few dollars a month?
Now maybe you wouldn't pay very much, but I'm sure there's some relatively high price at which the gross majority of people would happily pay for it, just to make things easy. Lots of people already pay close to $100/month for cable TV alone. And if you had such a service, there wouldn't be much point in trying to store everything locally. Not until you decided you wanted to quit the service, that is. But even so, it'd be worth paying a certain amount per month just for the online backup. of all that media.
I currently have >3,500 songs, and I don't have everything I want. Even "everything I want" would be small in relation to some people's libraries. If I were starting from zero (none of my music being legal) and wanted to get every song I wanted, paying $1080 over 3 years might well effectively mean $0.20/song or less.
Now I know Universal isn't willing to sell their songs on iTunes for $0.20/song. So really, I'm just wondering how this works out. What's the catch? How is Universal getting a deal that they're happy with, without putting in some additional draconian protection, a download limit, or ridiculous prices?
Do you produce enough new music each month to make a subscription a more viable option than say iTunes or buying CDs?
I think this is the biggest problem. It's hard to say how much new music would be needed-- maybe it wouldn't be a lot-- but I don't think media companies want their businesses to be dependent on consistently churning out high-quality product. Or why else would they keep pushing to extend copyrights?
You'd always forget some band or other, then months later slap your head in frustration and go 'Oh... I knew I should have downloaded more of the back catalogue of Oingo Boingo!'
So if you get a big enough list together, you sign up for another month, download all that, and you're done.
Listen, I'm not really saying this is a bad idea. For a long time now, I've thought that the way to get people to pay for music (to have no use of piracy) was essentially to provide a subscription service where music was "free". The idea here would be to erase the need to amass a "music collection" (on your local hard drive), because you could always just re-download what you want. The service would then allocate royalties based on the number of unique downloads, or something like that.
The problem is that it needs to be cheap, and there needs to be a steady influx of new music that people will want to listen to. If there isn't a lot of great new music, then the service better be very cheap. My sense is that record companies aren't going to accept less money, and personally I'm not too happy with the new music I hear. So for me, I'd probably join up to something like this for the convenient downloads, long enough to get legal copies of what I want, and then I'd quit.
If I commit slander over the telephone, is my telephone company liable in a civil suit? When I make a getaway from a bank robbery, is the federal government arrested for being an accomplice? They did provide my getaway driver with the interstate highway system, after all, so the government helped us escape.
Well, most people don't even really want something like FLAC. It will increase download times, and take up way more space on portable players unless you transcode. If you transcode and keep the lossy copy, then you'll be taking up a lot more space on your hard drive than if you just had the lossy copy. If you transcode on the fly, it'll take longer to sync your portable player. There are various complications in order to provide "higher quality" that will be inaudible to most people.
What I would *much* prefer, personally, would be a model where you're given options from the store on an ongoing basis. So, for example, let's say I buy a song from iTunes for $0.99, and I could choose whether I want to download it as ALAC, 256kbps AAC, 160kbps AAC, or 128kbps AAC. I choose 160kbps, but a year later I change my mind. I'd like to be able to go back and buy the ALAC version, but not for the full $0.99. I should only have to pay a nominal fee ($0.10?) to cover Apple's administration and bandwidth costs. That would be much closer to my ideal system.
What happens when you pull that much energy out of the jetstream? Does it change global air circulation? Do you get climate changes throughout the world?