Perhaps there are places where one can legally lie to the cops, but I was charged and convicted for "providing false information to an officer" when I was a kid, because I told them I had car insurance when I didn't.
They also charged me with "not having insurance", and "not having proof of insurance" (separate charges in that state; not all states criminalize both, and a couple don't require insurance at all).
In any event, the cops just charged me with a whole bunch of shit so that some of it might stick. That's how our frail and clumsy "justice" system works: spew lots of charges so you can throw some out to "work out a deal."
Interesting comments, but you make the common mistake of confusing a single source with a monopoly.
A product is not a market. A monopoly requires a market.
Sony does not have a monopoly on "System of a Down" CDs. Apple does not have a monopoly on the Macintosh. Microsoft does not have a monopoly on Windows. BMW does not have a monopoly on BMWs.
Microsoft did establish a monopoly in PC operating systems, since they eliminated competing products within a market (the desktop PC industry), and prevented the introduction of new competition. Microsoft does not have a monopoly in video game consoles.
If Apple were to gain full control of online music sales, they'd have a monopoly; today there are still several competing products led by powerful interests.
There's also a difference between having a temporary monopoly position (which is common in emerging markets) and acting as a monopolist to destroy competition and create a long term dominating position in a market. Apple is not exercising monopoly control to prevent competitors from doing business.
If Apple began signing exclusive contracts with labels, or if they licensed iPod software to all hardware music player makers exclusive of other designs (excluding competition from WMP or Linux or Sony software, say), then yes, Apple would be a monopolist like Microsoft.
If Microsoft made their own PC, and it was so much better than other PC makers that it cleaned up the market, they would no longer have a monopoly, since they would be selling a product (the WinPC) , not selling within a market (the PC industry). They would, like Apple's iPod, have a very successful product, not a monopoly of a market, since there would not be a PC market.
There is simply no sense in declaring a "monopoly" when a company is the single source of a product. Monopoly means single control, so the word only makes sense in a context where there should be multiple parties sharing control, in a free market. There is no expectation of competition in the manufacture of Xbox, BMWs, iPods, or Rubic's Cubes.
Being successful or having a popular product does not make you a monopolist. Rubic didn't establish a monopoly on the Rubic's Cube, or in hand held puzzle games, despite the fact that it was a hot seller and there wasn't really any effective competing thing with similar sales.
Similarly, Google and Apple both offer popular services/products that don't have much effective competition. But competitors exist, and more effective marketers with better products could compete.
A Monopoly is usually a bad thing in a market, because it distorts the market pressures to innovate and prevents effective competition. Monopolies are useful when competition would hurt consumers. For example in healthcare, transportation or cable TV utilities, competition might end up in service disruption, or providers only choosing to do business in areas that made them money. Governments allow monopolies (or sell the right to be granted a monopoly) in some markets to ensure someone will provide the service.
Is BSD proprietary? UC offers it under license, and grants a similar royalty free license as Adobe does for PDF.
Anyone can create an implementation of the PDF standard without paying Adobe anything. Apple used it for their imaging model; every app in Mac OS X can generate PDFs. Apple don't pay Adobe anything.
Insisting that PDF is proprietary, simply because Adobe invented it, makes "proprietary" a worthless word.
"such activity is already illegal - there is no need for an additional measure to prevent me from doing that", which sidesteps the rather obvious problem of how to create fair way to sell intellectual property. Rights holders clearly do see the need to prevent people from ripping their stuff. A looter might say "theft is already illegal, nobody needs bars and alarms to prevent it," but that's because they see things from a different perspective than the people they are ripping off.
Being illegal doesn't stop anything, that's why we have cops and car alarms. Without enforcement and/or protection, having a law is effectively pointless.
I'm certainly in favor of the DMCRA and explicit fair use rights, but I just think its disingenuous to act like (in typical Slashdot fashion) everything is cool as long as we can break and exploit everyone else's IP and do what we like with other's content, simply because 1) we've made a purchase at some point (confusing a license with a royalty free distribution agreement) or 2) because we can.
I'm playing a devils advocate because so few people get it unless they are actually losing money to IP theft (which, btw, I'm not).
Well if you crawl from under your rock, there is some debate about encumbering guns to try to prevent accidental deaths, both through physical means (safety locks) and legal ones (waiting periods, background checks). We also do similar things to prevent death, injury and property damage involving:
cars machinery tools
The thing is, society spends resources in proportion to risk/loss/damage, and since hammers are not causing lots of death, we aren't working on encumbering them very hard. We do try to make airgun nailers safe, however.
How about a less apt comparison, to make your point that theft is warranted when a purchase is also involved somewhere along the line:
"we don't have safety devices encumbering bananas, to prevent people from stabbing themselves in the eye!"
with that handled, how about looking at your point critically:
If you buy a CD, do you have the right upload it to a torrent and obliterate the music marketplace? If you buy a student copy of Office, do you have the right to install it on all the PCs in your company? If you buy a GPS device, do you have the right to hack it to use military grade accuracy? If you buy an iPod, and you hack the ability to play WMA, do you have the right to use it for that? how about distributing your hack? how about cracking Fairplay AAC? How about WMA encryption?
Your answers will depend a lot on what companies you fancy, which you hate, how much money you make, and if you make your money from licensing fees, royalties, and software development or flipping burgers and washing cars.
In any event, simply believing something doesn't make it "the case" or factual or right.
Also include smaller scale, non-scientific projects that require a long term ROI: public transportation.
Public transportation in the US, like NASA, is similarly beholden to political pork barrel bullshit. It's embarrassing to compare transportation, urban planning and related quality of life issues in American cities to socialist or communist efforts that built effective, safe transportation systems.
That just happens to be another thing socialism delivers well. America has poured all its resources into building freeways, which destroyed urban centers and helped create the ugly suburban sprawl and associated parking lot hell.
Even in San Francisco, public transportation does not get built unless some political group is getting paid off. BART builds a heavy rail urban subway through low density 'burbs and erects gigantic parking lots designed to fit the bill of politicians' "bringing BART to my district" rather than creating effective transportation. Most recently, BART built a $4 billion extension to SFO, creating a long underground scenic trip to compete with the existing, faster, more direct Caltrain - which is also a publicly run (into the ground) system.
SF' MUNI is completing the Third Street rail extension into the poor Bayview district, but as a political handout, not to bring effective transportation. If they wanted that, they'd have designed it to be faster than the bus it replaces. Next up: the Central Subway, a billion dollar handout to Chinatown interests that does nothing to solve any transportation problem, and spends up money that could have dramatically improved transportation to the Richmond via Geary, benefiting Chinatown and SF far more than a super expensive project to nowhere.
All of which are examples of how American political dealing screws the public and rewards private sector contractors without any sort of fiscal responsibility. For the communists, getting people around was just planned and accomplished. Not an overall win, but score one for the red team.
An example of how to match the benefits of a free market with central government:
Have the government specify objectives and how good a public project needs to be, then bid the project out. Reward overall best bidding and proven ability to get (and keep) things working. Penalize contractors for failure, reward them for lowering costs.
In practice, the US government specifies what actually will get done, then often pays too much for public projects that veer out of control, then simply covers the overruns while paying bonuses to dysfunctional contractors. No accountability, no rewards for innovation.
American public works projects have, more frequently than not, been abysmal failures ever since WWII. Rather than guiding and using the free market to accomplish public works, politically self serving government plans are dictated like Fascism, incentives removed like Communism, but then private contractors are just handed the money. The government needs to do effective, high level management, and leave engineering to the private sector.
A porked American public project is worse than a Commie 10-year plan.
As I understand, the northern Germans brought their language to what is now the UK, and for centuries the language we now call Old English retained the same complex grammar as German.
Since Latin was the language associated with classical study and learning, intellectuals brought a lot of vocabulary into English, resulting in the original German vocabulary being considered rough, while the smarty Latin based words were considered sophisticated. We still use a Latin-based English word over a German-based English word when trying to sound smart:
God vs Deity Earth vs Terrestrial Father vs Paternal Shit vs Excrement Blood pressure vs Hemostat Iron vs Ferrite
But English lost the structural grammar of German when the ruling English kings switched to speaking French, leaving English to the commoners, who found little use for keeping up with 16 ways to say "the", and needing to change verbs, adjectives and nouns to indicate tense, case, gender (three genders in the case of German!) and number.
When the intellectuals picked English back up, its grammar was streamlined dramatically, making it simpler but leaving more room for ambiguity.
So a comparison of languages based on grammar rule matches would have to take into account the history involved in the evolution of the language, particularly involving who spoke the language and how much effort the intellectual or scribe class put into playing the role of grammar nazi to protect the structure of wording.
The complexity of a grammar is likely to be related the tenacity of a culture's grammar keepers; even so, it appears there are natural human instincts that introduce rules of grammar, even amoung people without a classical education. It also seems like ancient languages frequently had arcanely complex grammars, indicating that grammar is not a recent invention, and that languages are not necessarily growing increasingly more complex in the obvious ways one might guess.
Symantec is publishing a self serving press release full of intentional lies as a news item, and idiot news outlets like the Register are publishing it without criticism.
Shame on both!
How about reporting:
"Symantic issued an official sensationist panic warning to Mac users who have not bought their product. It is unclear how Symantec's products will secure the Mac platform from exploits, since they do nothing to secure a system from a user with physical access. The company may also consider selling volcano insurance and eating babies"
From the actual Register story:
"While the number of vendor-confirmed vulnerabilities in OS X has remained relatively constant during the last two reporting periods [12 months], Symantec predicts this could change in the future. Symantec's analysis on a rootkit (OSX/Weapox) reveals it is designed to take advantage of OS X. This particular trojan demonstrates that as OS X increases in popularity, so too will the scrutiny it receives from potential attackers."
So Symantec: - is shy to report that there are no exploited vulnerabilities - analyzed a OS X root kit and determined it ran on OS X - thinks the adware/malware market, driven by demand for easy to zombify PCs, is somehow poised to launch specialized attacks on inherently secured systems via non-replicating trojans that require root access to install.
Which is worse, Symantic's bullshit misinformation, or the Register's uncritical dissemination?
I think advocating for or against a "Hydrogenous" network might cause a flamewar, teehee.
Maybe you were thinking of heterogeneous? or androgynous? Hard to tell because attempting to read a few lines of your post made my face explode. It's 'unpossible' to read your posting.
Yes, Oz is right - you are burning hydrocarbons - so no matter how much "thermal efficiency" you achieve (putting energy to work as opposed to wasting it as heat), you will still have all the same elements you started with: after mixing + fire and + oxygen your + hydrocarbons (gasoline)
= will now be
+ hydro+oxygen (water) and + carbon+oxygen (carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide), + unburned, hydrocarbons + ozone compounds + carbon soot, + nitrogen+oxides and whatever else.
Carbon doesn't corrode your engine, that would be oxygen. You're exposing your iron/steel engine parts to heat and oxygen, and eventually you're going to see oxidation (rust) of your metal parts.
If you simplify the world by definining complex ideas using buzzwords, you can draw make all sorts of ill fitting connections.
OpenDoc may have been "modular", but everything modular is not related to OpenDoc. If fact, the two ideas you link have nothing in common, and your ability to connect the two based on one buzzword is sobering. In fact, it makes Jesus cry.
MS is not copying Apple's product release strategy either; there is no "strategy" involved with releasing minor updates to product.
What Microsoft is copying is the straw-grabbing desperation of Apple from 91-96, where they announced one OS inititive after another as their development plans fell like flies in a microwave oven.
Well if you can't back up your wild assertions, then call me names.
If your posts haven't been moderated up, why is it you have 2 points on every comment in the thread? I know little about/. mod points, but it looked a bit lame to me that you'd reply with some mouth off bullshit and instantly be moderated up, repeatedly and throughout the day. Do you have an entourage of script kiddies or do you do it yourself?
And how did you know I liked wine and hitched rides on trains?
Apple historically has had no server marketshare. With Mac OS X, Apple has been receiving far more attention than they ever have before. Prior to the Xserve, Apple didn't even offer a server.
There isn't a practical problem with Darwin's technology in the server space; Darwin is making people take Apple seriously.
OpenStep isn't selling Macs. Good hardware, a reliable operating system, consumer apps and decent marketing are selling Macs.
If OpenStep was the value, NeXT would have been able to sell it prior to 1996, and Apple would have been able to migrate from System 7 to OpenStep with Rhapsody and the Yellow Box for Windows. That effort failed miserably, if you hadn't noticed.
Sun can't sell Solaris themselves, and they flushed OpenStep down the toilet. As did IBM, after paying $10 million for it. You can speculate all you like, but it's pretty obvious that that you are just wrong:
Darwin is a practical, modern, functional operating system, and it's serving Mac OS X well. It's not an ancient and broken academic mistake. OpenStep worked on Mach for a decade; ripping it out to install a more popular kernel would be asinine.
You can't even articulate a real problem in Darwin.
It appears you are simply spouting poop so you can login behind yourself and moderate your gibberish up a point. Good for you.
So what were the superior alternatives Apple had, that Tevanian **tricked his development team into using** to "save face"?
The NT kernel? The Linux kernel? Licensing Solaris? BeOS?
OpenStep was great, but Apple bought NeXTStep for the OS, because that's what they needed: a core OS. As it turned out, they needed OpenStep *less* than they needed the OS: Rhapsody (OpenStep) failed as a strategy, so Apple had to resurrect NeXTStep to build a PPC Mac OS X (killing any hopes for OpenStep as a cross platform framework).
Is there any question that Darwin is a "good base"?
Practically:
It WORKS! It shipped! It's making money! And it is drawing developers' attention to Mac OS X. Go to any OSS project page and look for Mac OS X support.
You're the one talking about theoretical problems - but you aren't able to articulate anything.
So Apple uses Mach+BSD in Darwin because "Jobs & Next sold Apple on it and have to save face"?
Ridiculous if you think about it.
Jobs and NeXT WERE Apple as soon as Apple acquired them. They spent most of four years (97-00) developing Rhapsody prior to releasing Darwin and Mac OS X.
Do you think Apple failed to pick something better as a foundation because they wanted to trick themselves?
And thanks for you astute comments regarding the I/O Kit only being useful for developing drivers for a platform that employs it.
Yeah the value NeXT added was obviously OpenStep, since Mach+BSD was mostly available by itself for free from CMU and UCB and the OSF.
But if you are arguing that the reason NeXTStep (or OPENSTEP/Mach) didn't replace Windows was because its kernel was poor and/or outdated technology, then I'll have to assume you don't know much. The barrier to entry in the PC operating system market was, quite famously, not technology.
Even Linux, which is in many ways superior to Windows NT, took a decade to get established, and Linux is FREE. Further, Linux didn't win out over other kernel developments because it was such killer technology, but because it was good enough and FREE.
NeXT's profitability and/or return to investors has exactly what to do with the value of their technology? The fact is, they did have a market, and were selling their user operating system for $800 to serious clients in markets that demanded something better than Windows: national security, finance, etc.
Apple's Darwin receives less excitement than Linux from the industry at large because, like Apple's mkLinux before it, it primarily runs on and is developed for the minority PowerPC platform.
Apple has - by far - the largest distribution of a UNIX like operating system running on the desktop, and coincidentally, the largest desktop-oriented development platform of a UNIX like operating system.
The fact that Darwin is disguised inside a commercial operating system doesn't mean nobody is interested in it. There are simply far more established distributions (Linux and BSDs) available to use for most purposes one could imagine, particularly on PC hardware.
If you are arguing that hobbyists with PCs are not clamoring for Darwin, well, I'll agree. Why would they be? But do you think the major factor is Darwin's underlying technology, or is it more practical barriers, such as Mach's non-existant user/developer base on PCs over the last decade?
There are lots of *NIX distributions that serve rather narrow purposes, but that doesn't mean they are bad technology or not valuable. Apple's Darwin primarily serves Mac OS X developers; Apple encourages but doesn't benefit much from other uses of Darwin.
It is therefore commendable that Apple not just opened Darwin, but also contributes significant technologies in it that could be put to use by other distros, including Linux. Some of these are things the OSS would never have been able to develop, from a practical standpoint:
launchd netinfo HFS+ I/O Kit streaming server
Even more valuably, Darwin is exposing UNIX to a mainstream desktop user-base (that Linux had historically been unable to break into), and is presenting and exposing real world research and development on how to best serve the needs of desktop users in UNIX. That is a huge contribution to UNIX in itself.
Additionally, I believe that exposing and developing new technologies and new ways to do things in a kernel will benefit our general understanding better than shooting down anything that isn't popular and already in use, and just doing the same old thing forever. Otherwise, we might as well run Windows.
Apple can afford to be a lot more "laid back" about Mac users not paying for every Mac OS X license, since Apple's made some money on an accompanying Mac hardware sale. And customers who have a Mac and upgrade the OS are likely to buy another Mac to replace it.
It's a far cry different to "allow" PC users to pirate Mac OS X, because not only have they contributed nothing to Apple's hardware sales, but are unlikely to do so in the future, if they can buy another PC and know they can continue to use Apple's OS for free.
Microsoft can similarly afford to absorb some license piracy because they've autosold a copy of Windows as a tax on nearly every PC built. Of course, they'd rather you pay for upgrades because there isn't really any other way for Microsoft to grow the Windows market.
Apple doesn't autosell Mac OS X on anyone else's hardware, so they need to sell Macs to have a revenue stream.
The original point of OpenStep was that the UI could run anywhere and look and act natively, from OpenStep/Mach to Windows to OpenStep/Solaris. I'd think the look wouldn't be a problem.
The real problem is that Mac OS X is a huge superset to OpenStep. So while one could write GNUStep code and then eventually get it working on Mac OS X, why?
The result would be code that would not longer work under GNUStep! It'd be easier get there by writing to XCode in the first place. Or write to X Window to it works somewhere else. Writing to GNUStep is like writing in Latin. Yes you can. Why would you, outside of an intellectual exercise?
And yes, while nothing in OpenStep is in Darwin, the version number of Darwin is useful in comparing Apple's internal OS version number, (as opposed to the marketing version of Mac OS X) the same way Windows 2000 went by "NT 5.0" internally.
The reason KDE & GNOME get attention is that it's easier for opensource committee development to copy something that exists (the Windows Desktop) than it is to decide on creating something wholly original. The former is a technical exercise, the latter is a political direction + strategy + technical exercise.
Open source provides less expensive alternatives the same way generic drug companies provide less expensive alternatives. But neither OSS nor generics invent many miracles ("really interesting alternatives") on their own. For that, we have commercial developers.
While the market for NeXTStep was not mainstream, NeXT wasn't "unable to sell it". If you go back and read financial information and things written about NeXT in 1993-95, rather than the revisionist Dvorak hindsight type stuff, you'd know that not only was NeXT profitable, but was doing well; Apple was the company in trouble. You're right, NeXT did stop focusing on NeXTStep, but it was because their focus changed to selling WebObjects. And WO was essentially OpenStep applied for web development. WebObjects had similar per dev seat licensing, along with a $50,000 commercial deployment license (which Apple later changed to $699).
Talking about a "tiny installed base" is a bit derisive for a company that made a million dollar profit in 1994.
Calling Apple's kernel an "obsolete 1980s academia design with poor performance" is laughable, particularly for a linux advocate.
The old Linux kernel is an early 80's design. The Mach/BSD kernel NeXT developed was what everyone in the mid-90's was working on: OSF, Taligent, Apple. And Apple used it in developing mkLinux in 1995.
You are confusing "obsolete" with "modern", or perhaps just joining the uninformed group-think argument beating up on anything that relates to Mach (which in Darwin is NOT implemented as a microkernel).
Please explain how any of these modern features are obsolete in comparison to the old way of doing UNIX that Linux followed:
Apple's I/O Kit vs recompiling the Linux kernel to add a driver launchd vs Linux' DIY keep your process active and running
You can argue about merits of Apple's technology, but trying to suggest that Apple has obsolete old stuff nobody wants is just Linux..
GNUStep is an interesting project, but I sounds like you are suggesting that there isn't much work involved in bringing GNUStep up to speed with Mac OS X.
Unfortunatley, that's not the case at all. Had Apple been able to replace the Mac System 7 with Rhapsody, as planned, GNUStep might have been more relevant, since Rhapsody was largely just OpenStep with Classic, running on PowerPC.
Mac OS X is dramatically different in architecture. It has a rich procedural set of foundation libraries based nominally on the carbonized / modernized Mac OS toolbox, and Cocoa has made massive changes in scope and ability since OpenStep 4.
Darwin is at version 8, suggesting four major versions ahead of OpenStep 4. And Mac OS X didn't follow a straight path of development from OpenStep; Apple reworked everything to fit a very different market and strategy.
Suggesting that GNUStep could ever be an viable open source version of Mac OS X is like suggesting that OS/2, with a little work, could serve as a "mostly-compatible" Win32 platform alternative to Windows xp.
In the context of not wasting one's efforts, that is truly an ironic suggestion.
You know FreeBSD is free. And of course, the value in Mac OS X comes from NeXTStep, Apple's other proprietary and commercial technologies, and Apple's work in updating 4.3 BSD to something more modern.
Free software isn't worth much without the development work needed to apply it.
You also know must know that you're talking out your ass about khtml - and I think you're doing it because it's easier to make broad, sweeping comments that repeat simple ideas you've heard rather than express an informed opinion.
Yeah Slashdot! Who needs information when you can have ignorant opinions instead?
Apple took a $795 user operating system ($1295 with the development system), moderized it, added new technologies (many of which were open sourced) and open sourced the core OS.
They now sell it commerically (with the development system) for ~$120.
Meanwhile, they are giving away:
-Darwin -QuickTime streaming server -Webkit -Launchd -Netinfo -I/O Kit
Nobody in the open source community really asked for any of those things, Apple just opened them.
Then again, the things that people want from Apple has never been part of "a free operating system" that Apple benefitted from:
I believe the Quakers and Amish are both pacifist, yet both are obviously religious. There are lots of pacifist religions in Asia.
Jehovah's Witnesses have got in trouble around the world for refusing to join or even support the military (won't even work in military hospitals) and are wholly politically neutral.
Religion isn't necessary for war (see radical godless Communism), its just that both are seemingly ubiquitous forces in human nature, and its difficult to unravel connections between the two.
America's war in Iraq is hardly motivated by religiousness, even if the right wing is fermenting support for war to gain political power for itself. Bush is there for money, political power and control of resources.
The mega-suburban churches are whipping up support for the war so they can get in with the administration and start demanding favors: invoke an American state religion that banishes freedom of belief, freedom of expression (particularly if boobs are involved), and civil rights for anybody who falls outside the state moral code.
Religion? Do you think these people really even believe in a god, or is it just more politics as usual?
Have you ever synced anything using Bluetooth?
I gave up syncing my Palm phone over BT because it was so slow. I can't imagine wanting to copy over ~4 MB music files using BT.
Mouse yes, iPod no.
Interesting ideas, but some of the observations are from the 60s. Today's reality, created by American government policy of creating "cheaper" gas supply since WW II (and subsidizing highways):
1) Consumers can be offered a wider variety of goods and services, but rather than getting FL orange juice, you're getting foreign fruit juice, that comes from globalized policies that choose cheap fruit that is easy to transport rather than tastes good, and rape the land and the workers who produce it, creating widespread problems with poverty. Not just juice, but all your food, clothing and raw materials can be shipped in from third world megafarms, sweatshops, or cut from the rain forests.
But hey, its cheaper in the store, just like gas! Cheaper is good, right?
2) Customers not only can drive further to get goods, they have to. Because Walmart and big box retail have destroyed the malls, which destroyed downtown businesses. Survival of the fittest? Actually in this case, we've destroyed sustainable local economies and replaced them with highly efficient megacorps that offer really low prices. And really low paychecks, no benefits and little job security. Since they wipe out other business' ability to compete, we've lost economic strength at the price of cheapness, and are discovering the benefits of a huge, needy poverty class replacing our middle class.
3) Workers not only can commute, they have to. Transit is slower than highways because transit is starved of funds and generally only built for the purpose of political aggrandizing and favors, rather than actually moving people around. The neighborhoods that people desire living in were built around transit. Desirable neighborhoods in LA, San Francisco, NY and most other American cities (as well as most European cities), sprang from transit lines, creating dense town centers. Our charming small towns were built along rail lines. Today's development builds sweeping parking lots and expressways around everything, using more land and forcing longer drives to get anywhere. And once you're there, there's nothing interesting or special to see. Just homogenous sprawl and and big box retail chain stores. But everything is cheap.
4) Workers might get paid more, but if jobs that use their skills are replaced by megacorps who can afford to build temples of cheapness, its more likely they will be stuck working at Walmart making minimum wage and getting their benefits from the state welfare system. But its cheap for the rest of us.
5) Mobile, efficient companies can just outsource their work overseas. And replace technical positions by sending work to India, where people speak such good English and have American names.
6) Globalization means suppliers are not in Georgia, but in South America and China. America has already ceded its manufacturing to China, so at this point, we can just ship finished goods into the country and enjoy CHEAP stuff.
7) Why would Americans buy products from other states when they have easy access to cheaper stuff from China? It's Cheap!
And of course, there is the trade deficit, but who cares when we have cheap Chinese stuff at Walmart? After all it's all we can afford since being laid off and sent to work at megacorp.
Higher standards of living and better economic growth are happening overseas.
Cheap gas produced a contorted marketplace that marked up the price of transit to the point of making it inefficient by comparison. After all, its easier to get there in a car if the government bulldozes land for your freeway, builds the "FREE" freeway for you, secures unrealistically low prices for your fuel, and then makes laws demanding that all developments must pay for you to park next to their establishment by building huge parking lots. Some of the greatest costs involved with transit projects are the building of mega parking lots to entice drivers to park their cars prior to taking transit.
Not even mentioned is the reliance on foreign production of oil, or how government subs
Slashdot Mirror
Perhaps there are places where one can legally lie to the cops, but I was charged and convicted for "providing false information to an officer" when I was a kid, because I told them I had car insurance when I didn't.
They also charged me with "not having insurance", and "not having proof of insurance" (separate charges in that state; not all states criminalize both, and a couple don't require insurance at all).
In any event, the cops just charged me with a whole bunch of shit so that some of it might stick. That's how our frail and clumsy "justice" system works: spew lots of charges so you can throw some out to "work out a deal."
Interesting comments, but you make the common mistake of confusing a single source with a monopoly.
A product is not a market.
A monopoly requires a market.
Sony does not have a monopoly on "System of a Down" CDs.
Apple does not have a monopoly on the Macintosh.
Microsoft does not have a monopoly on Windows.
BMW does not have a monopoly on BMWs.
Microsoft did establish a monopoly in PC operating systems, since they eliminated competing products within a market (the desktop PC industry), and prevented the introduction of new competition. Microsoft does not have a monopoly in video game consoles.
If Apple were to gain full control of online music sales, they'd have a monopoly; today there are still several competing products led by powerful interests.
There's also a difference between having a temporary monopoly position (which is common in emerging markets) and acting as a monopolist to destroy competition and create a long term dominating position in a market. Apple is not exercising monopoly control to prevent competitors from doing business.
If Apple began signing exclusive contracts with labels, or if they licensed iPod software to all hardware music player makers exclusive of other designs (excluding competition from WMP or Linux or Sony software, say), then yes, Apple would be a monopolist like Microsoft.
If Microsoft made their own PC, and it was so much better than other PC makers that it cleaned up the market, they would no longer have a monopoly, since they would be selling a product (the WinPC) , not selling within a market (the PC industry). They would, like Apple's iPod, have a very successful product, not a monopoly of a market, since there would not be a PC market.
There is simply no sense in declaring a "monopoly" when a company is the single source of a product. Monopoly means single control, so the word only makes sense in a context where there should be multiple parties sharing control, in a free market. There is no expectation of competition in the manufacture of Xbox, BMWs, iPods, or Rubic's Cubes.
Being successful or having a popular product does not make you a monopolist. Rubic didn't establish a monopoly on the Rubic's Cube, or in hand held puzzle games, despite the fact that it was a hot seller and there wasn't really any effective competing thing with similar sales.
Similarly, Google and Apple both offer popular services/products that don't have much effective competition. But competitors exist, and more effective marketers with better products could compete.
A Monopoly is usually a bad thing in a market, because it distorts the market pressures to innovate and prevents effective competition. Monopolies are useful when competition would hurt consumers. For example in healthcare, transportation or cable TV utilities, competition might end up in service disruption, or providers only choosing to do business in areas that made them money. Governments allow monopolies (or sell the right to be granted a monopoly) in some markets to ensure someone will provide the service.
Is Linux proprietary? Somebody owns the name.
Is BSD proprietary? UC offers it under license, and grants a similar royalty free license as Adobe does for PDF.
Anyone can create an implementation of the PDF standard without paying Adobe anything. Apple used it for their imaging model; every app in Mac OS X can generate PDFs. Apple don't pay Adobe anything.
Insisting that PDF is proprietary, simply because Adobe invented it, makes "proprietary" a worthless word.
SGI invented OpenGL, it is proprietary?
you make a valid point, but then say:
"such activity is already illegal - there is no need for an additional measure to prevent me from doing that", which sidesteps the rather obvious problem of how to create fair way to sell intellectual property. Rights holders clearly do see the need to prevent people from ripping their stuff. A looter might say "theft is already illegal, nobody needs bars and alarms to prevent it," but that's because they see things from a different perspective than the people they are ripping off.
Being illegal doesn't stop anything, that's why we have cops and car alarms. Without enforcement and/or protection, having a law is effectively pointless.
I'm certainly in favor of the DMCRA and explicit fair use rights, but I just think its disingenuous to act like (in typical Slashdot fashion) everything is cool as long as we can break and exploit everyone else's IP and do what we like with other's content, simply because 1) we've made a purchase at some point (confusing a license with a royalty free distribution agreement) or 2) because we can.
I'm playing a devils advocate because so few people get it unless they are actually losing money to IP theft (which, btw, I'm not).
Well if you crawl from under your rock, there is some debate about encumbering guns to try to prevent accidental deaths, both through physical means (safety locks) and legal ones (waiting periods, background checks). We also do similar things to prevent death, injury and property damage involving:
cars
machinery
tools
The thing is, society spends resources in proportion to risk/loss/damage, and since hammers are not causing lots of death, we aren't working on encumbering them very hard. We do try to make airgun nailers safe, however.
How about a less apt comparison, to make your point that theft is warranted when a purchase is also involved somewhere along the line:
"we don't have safety devices encumbering bananas, to prevent people from stabbing themselves in the eye!"
with that handled, how about looking at your point critically:
If you buy a CD, do you have the right upload it to a torrent and obliterate the music marketplace?
If you buy a student copy of Office, do you have the right to install it on all the PCs in your company?
If you buy a GPS device, do you have the right to hack it to use military grade accuracy?
If you buy an iPod, and you hack the ability to play WMA, do you have the right to use it for that? how about distributing your hack? how about cracking Fairplay AAC? How about WMA encryption?
Your answers will depend a lot on what companies you fancy, which you hate, how much money you make, and if you make your money from licensing fees, royalties, and software development or flipping burgers and washing cars.
In any event, simply believing something doesn't make it "the case" or factual or right.
Now back to what you were doing.
Also include smaller scale, non-scientific projects that require a long term ROI: public transportation.
Public transportation in the US, like NASA, is similarly beholden to political pork barrel bullshit. It's embarrassing to compare transportation, urban planning and related quality of life issues in American cities to socialist or communist efforts that built effective, safe transportation systems.
That just happens to be another thing socialism delivers well. America has poured all its resources into building freeways, which destroyed urban centers and helped create the ugly suburban sprawl and associated parking lot hell.
Even in San Francisco, public transportation does not get built unless some political group is getting paid off. BART builds a heavy rail urban subway through low density 'burbs and erects gigantic parking lots designed to fit the bill of politicians' "bringing BART to my district" rather than creating effective transportation. Most recently, BART built a $4 billion extension to SFO, creating a long underground scenic trip to compete with the existing, faster, more direct Caltrain - which is also a publicly run (into the ground) system.
SF' MUNI is completing the Third Street rail extension into the poor Bayview district, but as a political handout, not to bring effective transportation. If they wanted that, they'd have designed it to be faster than the bus it replaces. Next up: the Central Subway, a billion dollar handout to Chinatown interests that does nothing to solve any transportation problem, and spends up money that could have dramatically improved transportation to the Richmond via Geary, benefiting Chinatown and SF far more than a super expensive project to nowhere.
All of which are examples of how American political dealing screws the public and rewards private sector contractors without any sort of fiscal responsibility. For the communists, getting people around was just planned and accomplished. Not an overall win, but score one for the red team.
An example of how to match the benefits of a free market with central government:
Have the government specify objectives and how good a public project needs to be, then bid the project out. Reward overall best bidding and proven ability to get (and keep) things working. Penalize contractors for failure, reward them for lowering costs.
In practice, the US government specifies what actually will get done, then often pays too much for public projects that veer out of control, then simply covers the overruns while paying bonuses to dysfunctional contractors. No accountability, no rewards for innovation.
American public works projects have, more frequently than not, been abysmal failures ever since WWII. Rather than guiding and using the free market to accomplish public works, politically self serving government plans are dictated like Fascism, incentives removed like Communism, but then private contractors are just handed the money. The government needs to do effective, high level management, and leave engineering to the private sector.
A porked American public project is worse than a Commie 10-year plan.
As I understand, the northern Germans brought their language to what is now the UK, and for centuries the language we now call Old English retained the same complex grammar as German.
Since Latin was the language associated with classical study and learning, intellectuals brought a lot of vocabulary into English, resulting in the original German vocabulary being considered rough, while the smarty Latin based words were considered sophisticated. We still use a Latin-based English word over a German-based English word when trying to sound smart:
God vs Deity
Earth vs Terrestrial
Father vs Paternal
Shit vs Excrement
Blood pressure vs Hemostat
Iron vs Ferrite
But English lost the structural grammar of German when the ruling English kings switched to speaking French, leaving English to the commoners, who found little use for keeping up with 16 ways to say "the", and needing to change verbs, adjectives and nouns to indicate tense, case, gender (three genders in the case of German!) and number.
When the intellectuals picked English back up, its grammar was streamlined dramatically, making it simpler but leaving more room for ambiguity.
So a comparison of languages based on grammar rule matches would have to take into account the history involved in the evolution of the language, particularly involving who spoke the language and how much effort the intellectual or scribe class put into playing the role of grammar nazi to protect the structure of wording.
The complexity of a grammar is likely to be related the tenacity of a culture's grammar keepers; even so, it appears there are natural human instincts that introduce rules of grammar, even amoung people without a classical education. It also seems like ancient languages frequently had arcanely complex grammars, indicating that grammar is not a recent invention, and that languages are not necessarily growing increasingly more complex in the obvious ways one might guess.
Symantec is publishing a self serving press release full of intentional lies as a news item, and idiot news outlets like the Register are publishing it without criticism.
Shame on both!
How about reporting:
"Symantic issued an official sensationist panic warning to Mac users who have not bought their product. It is unclear how Symantec's products will secure the Mac platform from exploits, since they do nothing to secure a system from a user with physical access. The company may also consider selling volcano insurance and eating babies"
From the actual Register story:
"While the number of vendor-confirmed vulnerabilities in OS X has remained relatively constant during the last two reporting periods [12 months], Symantec predicts this could change in the future. Symantec's analysis on a rootkit (OSX/Weapox) reveals it is designed to take advantage of OS X. This particular trojan demonstrates that as OS X increases in popularity, so too will the scrutiny it receives from potential attackers."
So Symantec:
- is shy to report that there are no exploited vulnerabilities
- analyzed a OS X root kit and determined it ran on OS X
- thinks the adware/malware market, driven by demand for easy to zombify PCs, is somehow poised to launch specialized attacks on inherently secured systems via non-replicating trojans that require root access to install.
Which is worse, Symantic's bullshit misinformation, or the Register's uncritical dissemination?
I think advocating for or against a "Hydrogenous" network might cause a flamewar, teehee.
Maybe you were thinking of heterogeneous? or androgynous? Hard to tell because attempting to read a few lines of your post made my face explode. It's 'unpossible' to read your posting.
Yes, Oz is right - you are burning hydrocarbons - so no matter how much "thermal efficiency" you achieve (putting energy to work as opposed to wasting it as heat), you will still have all the same elements you started with: after mixing
+ fire and
+ oxygen your
+ hydrocarbons (gasoline)
= will now be
+ hydro+oxygen (water) and
+ carbon+oxygen (carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide),
+ unburned, hydrocarbons
+ ozone compounds
+ carbon soot,
+ nitrogen+oxides and whatever else.
Carbon doesn't corrode your engine, that would be oxygen. You're exposing your iron/steel engine parts to heat and oxygen, and eventually you're going to see oxidation (rust) of your metal parts.
If you simplify the world by definining complex ideas using buzzwords, you can draw make all sorts of ill fitting connections.
OpenDoc may have been "modular", but everything modular is not related to OpenDoc. If fact, the two ideas you link have nothing in common, and your ability to connect the two based on one buzzword is sobering. In fact, it makes Jesus cry.
MS is not copying Apple's product release strategy either; there is no "strategy" involved with releasing minor updates to product.
What Microsoft is copying is the straw-grabbing desperation of Apple from 91-96, where they announced one OS inititive after another as their development plans fell like flies in a microwave oven.
Well if you can't back up your wild assertions, then call me names.
/. mod points, but it looked a bit lame to me that you'd reply with some mouth off bullshit and instantly be moderated up, repeatedly and throughout the day. Do you have an entourage of script kiddies or do you do it yourself?
If your posts haven't been moderated up, why is it you have 2 points on every comment in the thread? I know little about
And how did you know I liked wine and hitched rides on trains?
What are you, 15 or 60?
Apple historically has had no server marketshare. With Mac OS X, Apple has been receiving far more attention than they ever have before. Prior to the Xserve, Apple didn't even offer a server.
There isn't a practical problem with Darwin's technology in the server space; Darwin is making people take Apple seriously.
OpenStep isn't selling Macs. Good hardware, a reliable operating system, consumer apps and decent marketing are selling Macs.
If OpenStep was the value, NeXT would have been able to sell it prior to 1996, and Apple would have been able to migrate from System 7 to OpenStep with Rhapsody and the Yellow Box for Windows. That effort failed miserably, if you hadn't noticed.
Sun can't sell Solaris themselves, and they flushed OpenStep down the toilet. As did IBM, after paying $10 million for it. You can speculate all you like, but it's pretty obvious that that you are just wrong:
Darwin is a practical, modern, functional operating system, and it's serving Mac OS X well. It's not an ancient and broken academic mistake. OpenStep worked on Mach for a decade; ripping it out to install a more popular kernel would be asinine.
You can't even articulate a real problem in Darwin.
It appears you are simply spouting poop so you can login behind yourself and moderate your gibberish up a point. Good for you.
You're still an idiot jackass without a point.
So what were the superior alternatives Apple had, that Tevanian **tricked his development team into using** to "save face"?
The NT kernel?
The Linux kernel?
Licensing Solaris?
BeOS?
OpenStep was great, but Apple bought NeXTStep for the OS, because that's what they needed: a core OS. As it turned out, they needed OpenStep *less* than they needed the OS: Rhapsody (OpenStep) failed as a strategy, so Apple had to resurrect NeXTStep to build a PPC Mac OS X (killing any hopes for OpenStep as a cross platform framework).
Is there any question that Darwin is a "good base"?
Practically:
It WORKS! It shipped! It's making money! And it is drawing developers' attention to Mac OS X. Go to any OSS project page and look for Mac OS X support.
You're the one talking about theoretical problems - but you aren't able to articulate anything.
So Apple uses Mach+BSD in Darwin because "Jobs & Next sold Apple on it and have to save face"?
Ridiculous if you think about it.
Jobs and NeXT WERE Apple as soon as Apple acquired them. They spent most of four years (97-00) developing Rhapsody prior to releasing Darwin and Mac OS X.
Do you think Apple failed to pick something better as a foundation because they wanted to trick themselves?
And thanks for you astute comments regarding the I/O Kit only being useful for developing drivers for a platform that employs it.
What a ridiculous jackass you are.
Yeah the value NeXT added was obviously OpenStep, since Mach+BSD was mostly available by itself for free from CMU and UCB and the OSF.
But if you are arguing that the reason NeXTStep (or OPENSTEP/Mach) didn't replace Windows was because its kernel was poor and/or outdated technology, then I'll have to assume you don't know much. The barrier to entry in the PC operating system market was, quite famously, not technology.
Even Linux, which is in many ways superior to Windows NT, took a decade to get established, and Linux is FREE. Further, Linux didn't win out over other kernel developments because it was such killer technology, but because it was good enough and FREE.
NeXT's profitability and/or return to investors has exactly what to do with the value of their technology? The fact is, they did have a market, and were selling their user operating system for $800 to serious clients in markets that demanded something better than Windows: national security, finance, etc.
Apple's Darwin receives less excitement than Linux from the industry at large because, like Apple's mkLinux before it, it primarily runs on and is developed for the minority PowerPC platform.
Apple has - by far - the largest distribution of a UNIX like operating system running on the desktop, and coincidentally, the largest desktop-oriented development platform of a UNIX like operating system.
The fact that Darwin is disguised inside a commercial operating system doesn't mean nobody is interested in it. There are simply far more established distributions (Linux and BSDs) available to use for most purposes one could imagine, particularly on PC hardware.
If you are arguing that hobbyists with PCs are not clamoring for Darwin, well, I'll agree. Why would they be? But do you think the major factor is Darwin's underlying technology, or is it more practical barriers, such as Mach's non-existant user/developer base on PCs over the last decade?
There are lots of *NIX distributions that serve rather narrow purposes, but that doesn't mean they are bad technology or not valuable. Apple's Darwin primarily serves Mac OS X developers; Apple encourages but doesn't benefit much from other uses of Darwin.
It is therefore commendable that Apple not just opened Darwin, but also contributes significant technologies in it that could be put to use by other distros, including Linux. Some of these are things the OSS would never have been able to develop, from a practical standpoint:
launchd
netinfo
HFS+
I/O Kit
streaming server
Even more valuably, Darwin is exposing UNIX to a mainstream desktop user-base (that Linux had historically been unable to break into), and is presenting and exposing real world research and development on how to best serve the needs of desktop users in UNIX. That is a huge contribution to UNIX in itself.
Additionally, I believe that exposing and developing new technologies and new ways to do things in a kernel will benefit our general understanding better than shooting down anything that isn't popular and already in use, and just doing the same old thing forever. Otherwise, we might as well run Windows.
Apple can afford to be a lot more "laid back" about Mac users not paying for every Mac OS X license, since Apple's made some money on an accompanying Mac hardware sale. And customers who have a Mac and upgrade the OS are likely to buy another Mac to replace it. It's a far cry different to "allow" PC users to pirate Mac OS X, because not only have they contributed nothing to Apple's hardware sales, but are unlikely to do so in the future, if they can buy another PC and know they can continue to use Apple's OS for free. Microsoft can similarly afford to absorb some license piracy because they've autosold a copy of Windows as a tax on nearly every PC built. Of course, they'd rather you pay for upgrades because there isn't really any other way for Microsoft to grow the Windows market. Apple doesn't autosell Mac OS X on anyone else's hardware, so they need to sell Macs to have a revenue stream.
The original point of OpenStep was that the UI could run anywhere and look and act natively, from OpenStep/Mach to Windows to OpenStep/Solaris. I'd think the look wouldn't be a problem.
The real problem is that Mac OS X is a huge superset to OpenStep. So while one could write GNUStep code and then eventually get it working on Mac OS X, why?
The result would be code that would not longer work under GNUStep! It'd be easier get there by writing to XCode in the first place. Or write to X Window to it works somewhere else. Writing to GNUStep is like writing in Latin. Yes you can. Why would you, outside of an intellectual exercise?
And yes, while nothing in OpenStep is in Darwin, the version number of Darwin is useful in comparing Apple's internal OS version number, (as opposed to the marketing version of Mac OS X) the same way Windows 2000 went by "NT 5.0" internally.
The reason KDE & GNOME get attention is that it's easier for opensource committee development to copy something that exists (the Windows Desktop) than it is to decide on creating something wholly original. The former is a technical exercise, the latter is a political direction + strategy + technical exercise.
Open source provides less expensive alternatives the same way generic drug companies provide less expensive alternatives. But neither OSS nor generics invent many miracles ("really interesting alternatives") on their own. For that, we have commercial developers.
While the market for NeXTStep was not mainstream, NeXT wasn't "unable to sell it". If you go back and read financial information and things written about NeXT in 1993-95, rather than the revisionist Dvorak hindsight type stuff, you'd know that not only was NeXT profitable, but was doing well; Apple was the company in trouble.
..
You're right, NeXT did stop focusing on NeXTStep, but it was because their focus changed to selling WebObjects. And WO was essentially OpenStep applied for web development. WebObjects had similar per dev seat licensing, along with a $50,000 commercial deployment license (which Apple later changed to $699).
Talking about a "tiny installed base" is a bit derisive for a company that made a million dollar profit in 1994.
Calling Apple's kernel an "obsolete 1980s academia design with poor performance" is laughable, particularly for a linux advocate.
The old Linux kernel is an early 80's design. The Mach/BSD kernel NeXT developed was what everyone in the mid-90's was working on: OSF, Taligent, Apple. And Apple used it in developing mkLinux in 1995.
You are confusing "obsolete" with "modern", or perhaps just joining the uninformed group-think argument beating up on anything that relates to Mach (which in Darwin is NOT implemented as a microkernel).
Please explain how any of these modern features are obsolete in comparison to the old way of doing UNIX that Linux followed:
Apple's I/O Kit vs recompiling the Linux kernel to add a driver
launchd vs Linux' DIY keep your process active and running
You can argue about merits of Apple's technology, but trying to suggest that Apple has obsolete old stuff nobody wants is just Linux
GNUStep is an interesting project, but I sounds like you are suggesting that there isn't much work involved in bringing GNUStep up to speed with Mac OS X.
Unfortunatley, that's not the case at all. Had Apple been able to replace the Mac System 7 with Rhapsody, as planned, GNUStep might have been more relevant, since Rhapsody was largely just OpenStep with Classic, running on PowerPC.
Mac OS X is dramatically different in architecture. It has a rich procedural set of foundation libraries based nominally on the carbonized / modernized Mac OS toolbox, and Cocoa has made massive changes in scope and ability since OpenStep 4.
Darwin is at version 8, suggesting four major versions ahead of OpenStep 4. And Mac OS X didn't follow a straight path of development from OpenStep; Apple reworked everything to fit a very different market and strategy.
Suggesting that GNUStep could ever be an viable open source version of Mac OS X is like suggesting that OS/2, with a little work, could serve as a "mostly-compatible" Win32 platform alternative to Windows xp.
In the context of not wasting one's efforts, that is truly an ironic suggestion.
You know FreeBSD is free. And of course, the value in Mac OS X comes from NeXTStep, Apple's other proprietary and commercial technologies, and Apple's work in updating 4.3 BSD to something more modern.
Free software isn't worth much without the development work needed to apply it.
You also know must know that you're talking out your ass about khtml - and I think you're doing it because it's easier to make broad, sweeping comments that repeat simple ideas you've heard rather than express an informed opinion.
Yeah Slashdot! Who needs information when you can have ignorant opinions instead?
Apple took a $795 user operating system ($1295 with the development system), moderized it, added new technologies (many of which were open sourced) and open sourced the core OS.
They now sell it commerically (with the development system) for ~$120.
Meanwhile, they are giving away:
-Darwin
-QuickTime streaming server
-Webkit
-Launchd
-Netinfo
-I/O Kit
Nobody in the open source community really asked for any of those things, Apple just opened them.
Then again, the things that people want from Apple has never been part of "a free operating system" that Apple benefitted from:
- QuickTime (particularly the commercial codecs)
- OpenStep / Cocoa / Carbon APIs
- Quartz compositor, Q. Extreme
- Core Image, Video, etc; Core Data
So mentioning the GPL isn't applicable at all. Apple has borrowed from and contributed things back using BSD style licenses.
Trying for force people to share isn't freedom.
I believe the Quakers and Amish are both pacifist, yet both are obviously religious. There are lots of pacifist religions in Asia.
Jehovah's Witnesses have got in trouble around the world for refusing to join or even support the military (won't even work in military hospitals) and are wholly politically neutral.
Religion isn't necessary for war (see radical godless Communism), its just that both are seemingly ubiquitous forces in human nature, and its difficult to unravel connections between the two.
America's war in Iraq is hardly motivated by religiousness, even if the right wing is fermenting support for war to gain political power for itself. Bush is there for money, political power and control of resources.
The mega-suburban churches are whipping up support for the war so they can get in with the administration and start demanding favors: invoke an American state religion that banishes freedom of belief, freedom of expression (particularly if boobs are involved), and civil rights for anybody who falls outside the state moral code.
Religion? Do you think these people really even believe in a god, or is it just more politics as usual?
Have you ever synced anything using Bluetooth? I gave up syncing my Palm phone over BT because it was so slow. I can't imagine wanting to copy over ~4 MB music files using BT. Mouse yes, iPod no.
Interesting ideas, but some of the observations are from the 60s. Today's reality, created by American government policy of creating "cheaper" gas supply since WW II (and subsidizing highways):
1) Consumers can be offered a wider variety of goods and services, but rather than getting FL orange juice, you're getting foreign fruit juice, that comes from globalized policies that choose cheap fruit that is easy to transport rather than tastes good, and rape the land and the workers who produce it, creating widespread problems with poverty. Not just juice, but all your food, clothing and raw materials can be shipped in from third world megafarms, sweatshops, or cut from the rain forests.
But hey, its cheaper in the store, just like gas! Cheaper is good, right?
2) Customers not only can drive further to get goods, they have to. Because Walmart and big box retail have destroyed the malls, which destroyed downtown businesses. Survival of the fittest? Actually in this case, we've destroyed sustainable local economies and replaced them with highly efficient megacorps that offer really low prices. And really low paychecks, no benefits and little job security. Since they wipe out other business' ability to compete, we've lost economic strength at the price of cheapness, and are discovering the benefits of a huge, needy poverty class replacing our middle class.
3) Workers not only can commute, they have to. Transit is slower than highways because transit is starved of funds and generally only built for the purpose of political aggrandizing and favors, rather than actually moving people around. The neighborhoods that people desire living in were built around transit. Desirable neighborhoods in LA, San Francisco, NY and most other American cities (as well as most European cities), sprang from transit lines, creating dense town centers. Our charming small towns were built along rail lines.
Today's development builds sweeping parking lots and expressways around everything, using more land and forcing longer drives to get anywhere. And once you're there, there's nothing interesting or special to see. Just homogenous sprawl and and big box retail chain stores. But everything is cheap.
4) Workers might get paid more, but if jobs that use their skills are replaced by megacorps who can afford to build temples of cheapness, its more likely they will be stuck working at Walmart making minimum wage and getting their benefits from the state welfare system. But its cheap for the rest of us.
5) Mobile, efficient companies can just outsource their work overseas. And replace technical positions by sending work to India, where people speak such good English and have American names.
6) Globalization means suppliers are not in Georgia, but in South America and China. America has already ceded its manufacturing to China, so at this point, we can just ship finished goods into the country and enjoy CHEAP stuff.
7) Why would Americans buy products from other states when they have easy access to cheaper stuff from China? It's Cheap!
And of course, there is the trade deficit, but who cares when we have cheap Chinese stuff at Walmart? After all it's all we can afford since being laid off and sent to work at megacorp.
Higher standards of living and better economic growth are happening overseas.
Cheap gas produced a contorted marketplace that marked up the price of transit to the point of making it inefficient by comparison. After all, its easier to get there in a car if the government bulldozes land for your freeway, builds the "FREE" freeway for you, secures unrealistically low prices for your fuel, and then makes laws demanding that all developments must pay for you to park next to their establishment by building huge parking lots. Some of the greatest costs involved with transit projects are the building of mega parking lots to entice drivers to park their cars prior to taking transit.
Not even mentioned is the reliance on foreign production of oil, or how government subs