Depends on where you live and what you're heating. Ignoring regional variations in costs and heating needs, a natural gas forced-air system will heat the entire house, requiring substantially more money than electric radiators, which are per-room.
Combine this with places where electricity is remarkably cheap (e.g. large hydro works) and natural gas is expensive (e.g. all imported), and you are better off heating with electricity. Even if you live in an area with cheap natural gas, electric radiators allowing you to heat only the spaces you're using may end up saving you money over heating a whole house at night to keep the temperature toasty in two occupied bedrooms. This is especially true in Mediterranean climates, where natural indoor temperatures remain above 12 C even in the winter, thus requiring a comparatively small "bump" to hit the desired 20-22 C range.
In any case, waste heat generated by electronics is salutary, so long as the electronics are being used for their primary purpose as well.
Yeah, right, because in 2008, two willing, adult humans can't even necessarily get married. But sure, humans and nonsentient machines in 30 years. Sounds probable.
that doesn't change the fact that it is still safe, and thereby an existence proof that cocaine can be consumed safely.
Not to intrude into your logic-free zone or anything, but the safe consumption of coca tea has zero bearing on the safety of narcotic cocaine, the refined drug.
It is the exact same statement as "consuming poppyseed bagels proves that doing heroin is safe!" It's not just a matter of degrees, it's a matter of multiple orders of magnitude.
Wikipedia and Snopes both disagree with you and say that cocaine, by way of coca leaf extract, was present in Coca-Cola.
It is utterly disingenuous to claim that the minute quantities of an unprocessed, unconcentrated, unpurified, and unisolated alkaloid is anything analogous to the drug.
Coca leaf extract is not cocaine, nor are the effects identical on the whole.
People consume poppy seeds, whereas opiates are made from other parts of the plant.
Opium is made from the seed pods of poppy plants. You're talking about a distinction without a difference. The seeds themselves contain opiate alkaloids exactly as the coca leaf contains cocaine alkaloids, and in quite similar concentrations.
If you consume coca leaf you consume cocaine. If you consume poppy seeds you don't consume opiates.
Bzzt! Both products contain similar low concentrations of the alkaloids in question. The fact that you are drawing this nonexistent line suggests that you do not, in fact, know what you're talking about.
If you eat poppy seeds you are consuming opiates, if your premise that the consumption of coca leaf tea is the consumption of cocaine is granted. Your original premise, that cocaine is "safe" because its alkaloids are present in minute concentrations in complex organic suspensions consumed by people, remains completely idiotic, regardless of whatever pedantic wrangling you'd like to engage in.
The quantity of coca tea or poppy seeds you'd need to consume to begin to approximate the physiological and psychological effects of the smallest doses of the refined and superconcentrated drugs are equally astronomical.
It sounds to me like Apple's behavior is exactly the kind of behavior that the court's majority opinion should be considered anti-competitive and illegal under the law.
How so? Anyone can buy from their distribution channel and sell the products. Whether they can match or undercut Apple's own pricing has nothing to do with competition law.
Sounds like a viable class action case to me.
For what?
It seems like it would be fairly easy to show material loses in court from your inability to sell iPhones.
You'd have to have a right to sell iPhones in order for that to even begin to make sense, and you don't. Totally outside the issue of MAP policies and retailer relations, the bottom line is that you have no such right. Any company can decline to supply you with their products to sell for any reason, including no reason at all. There's nothing anticompetitive about this. You can always go to their competitors and sell their products instead.
Flatly untrue. Cocaine was never used in Coca-Cola at all, and the coca extract that was used was not an "active ingredient".
In its native regions, coca tea was used constantly. This is not cocaine, and it remains in use today as a mild stimulant with certain low-level medicinal uses as well. Coca tea contains a low concentration, suspended among a number of other alkaloids and is not remotely comparable.
In neither case is concentrated, purified, isolated cocaine the ingredient. What you're describing, apart from being ignorant, amounts to the same thing as saying that poppy consumption is identical to opiate abuse.
Here's a term for you to look up: de facto. Promotions and loss leaders are the exact reasone that wholesale prices are de facto minimums and not explicit minimums. Come on now. In trying to be smart, you sail right past the point.
Loss leaders are exactly that: losses. You can't permanently sell a product at a loss unless you're making it up somewhere else. Furthermore, products with MAP guidelines are not loss leaders. They tend to be some combination of high-end, specialty, or boutique products.
If the market were completely free, anyone could build and or sell even cloned items.
No. A different company could build functionally identical products, even using the same suppliers, but the free market doesn't wash away property rights, nor does it nullify the power of contracts (indeed, a truly free market approaches an absolute right to contract not burdened by pesky "consumer rights" or "fairness"). "Free market" isn't a pass to do whatever you want--that's not a market at all.
In a truly free market, the best value would always come to be.
Says who? Certainly not the free market, which says that I have a right to set my price and the terms of that price with any prospective distributor.
How is anyone helped by higher wholesale costs? If I'm selling a product for $850 wholesale for MAP members (vs. $900 for general wholesale), contingent on a MAP of $950 and an MSRP of $1000, the participating retailer grosses at least $100, and probably closer to $150.
On the other hand, if I am barred from instituting a MAP, my incentive to discount wholesale purchases disappears. I set wholesale price at $925, then the would-be participating MAP retailer gets screwed out of $75. There's minimal attendant downward pressure on the consumer price, and again I'm inciting a margins race that rewards Walmart and Best Buy at the expense of the smaller dealers I want to support.
Even if I leave wholesale prices alone, I always retain the power to terminate my relationships with any distributors for any reason. So I can just stop resupplying suppliers who drop too far below MSRP, leaving retailers with nothing but a fuzzy cap and my whims instead of a straightforward, published expectation.
In neither case is the ultimate market effect different, and in neither case does the distributor/retailer gain or lose any more freedom of choice in the matter.
In a free market, minimum pricing wouldn't work because there would be multiple other sellers of identical products.
No, there most certainly would not. If Sony sets a minimum price on its products, then you can go to Samsung or someone else, but only Sony would be selling Sony products.
Minimum pricing would (and does) work where people want that product and not its competitors. Competitors would have to dramatically reduce prices or produce and successfully market a FAR superior product, particularly if the difference between market mean wholesale and MAP is relatively small such that people are not moved by the non-existence of MAP guidelines.
Yeah, $400,000 doesn't sound like a lot until you consider that he doesn't have to pay for anything while he's in office. There are no Air Force One bills; his household staff is paid out of the nation's pocket, and there's even a multi-million dollar budget for decorating the residence with furniture, art, and whatever else the First Family wants. No filling up at the pump; no Comcast bill, no paying to heat that six-story mansion he lives in. No medical copays, no need to pay for insurance.
And I think you'd be hard-pressed to find anyone more powerful than the President of the United States of America. Wealthier, sure. Influential in a specific industry, yeah. But overall? I think not.
If I sell you an apple from my apple tree then what right should I have to say that you sell that apple at?
None. But MAP isn't about that. You can sell your EXISTING inventory at whatever price you want, since you've purchased it and it's in your storeroom. If you don't comply with MAP guidelines though, the manufacturer will refuse to resupply you in the future, as is their right in a "capitalist society". Thus, you as the retailer will never be given more apples to sell from that apple tree.
This whole system just seems abusive and will make it harder for competition to ensue which last I checked was meant to be what a capitalist society was all about.
Actually, the problem with minimum advertised prices is that they are pro-competition.
Consider the following. Big Box retailer BB can leverage its massive volumes to carve a tighter margin on the products, and then because of the number of units BB moves, can get preferential pricing on the wholesale purchases. Your local shop L can't match that and stay in business; he can't get the volume discounts, either. The only way to prevent the number of retail outlets from collapsing is to ensure that smaller vendors like L can compete on price. This in turn means that other factors come into play: maybe BB is more convenient and carries more products, while L has a better return policy and gives shoppers personal attention.
BB can still discount its wares for promotions and sell its inventory at whatever price it wants, and because it's such a major source, it probably won't be cut off by the manufacturer. Now you can argue that economic efficiency mandates that L go out of business because his overhead can't be trimmed to BB's levels, but that's the problem with an unbridled capitalist system: it destroys competition based on non-price factors (customer service, eco-friendliness, supplier diversity, etc.).
Ultimately, the manufacturer always sets a de facto minimum price: its wholesale price. Usually with a MAP program, though, there's something else involved. Apple, for instance, subsidizes displays and advertising and offers a rebate system. You're not required to become an authorized reseller or participate in the program, but if you do, you get some benefits out of it. You could always just pay the flat wholesale price and then charge whatever you wanted for the end product--but at some point you still have to make a profit. Other companies (particularly audio gear) offer extra inventory for participation in their programs--e.g. you pay for 100 units and agree to sell at or above MAP, and they deliver 105 units.
The reason the courts don't fight MAP is because they're usually (a) voluntary programs, (b) part of the manufacturer's right to sell his or her products to whomever he wishes under whatever terms he wishes, and (c) it can't be stopped, as manufacturers can simply increase their wholesale prices to very near the MSRP, making it essentially impossible to profit without selling above the manufacturer's suggested price.
The ability to make money over and over on creations like this is a relatively recent idea.
So, too, is general public access to the creations. If you really want to talk about it honestly, then what's also very recent is the ability to reproduce it. The idea that the legal protections in place on the creation of works in the more distant past doesn't make sense is troubled by the simple fact that copyright-like systems have developed in every major geopolitical power as technology improved.
In the past, copyright was replaced by a natural bar to reproduction--inadequate technology to serve as a replacement for the works. As technology improved, protections improved for artists' rights. As tastes improved, cost of creation improved as well, creating an industry of financiers. In no case has a different model been implemented; in no society has the right of an owner to dispose of his work been declared a non-right.
You're talking about striking a balance that removes essentially all power from the creator, providing nothing in exchange. That is historically unprecedented, despite ill-formed conceits about copyright being a modern creation. Copying is a modern creation, too. And if it made sense to permit it freely, someone would have declined to extend existing legal protections to copying. Yet no one did so.
People, in general, are not going to stop writing, painting, or making music because of a lack of copyright.
No, but they're going to stop distributing it publicly on such a scale and at such cheap prices. If you want to go back to patronage, that's fine, but with it comes a concentration of high art in the hands of the wealthy, relying solely on generous benefactors to provide public access at all.
The category of works created by local artists will still be available, but with it goes the variety and the idea of a national culture.
No. Like all notebooks, the panels in MacBook Pros are 6-bit. The story on Slashdot here was about some idiots discovering this fact and raising hell, claiming that the millions of colors come from dithering. Unfortunately, they never bothered to look at the competition.
There is no such assertion in any Slashdot story I can find. Feel free to post a link to the story you misunderstand, though.
As a lawyer rather than a technologist, perhaps Professor Lessig doesn't realise that a YouTube video must be downloaded to be viewed, at least in a manner that would have the RIAA sue you if it was one of their copyrighted works.
Perhaps as a technologist rather than a lawyer, you don't realize that this claim is untrue. Even the RIAA is not so stupid as to attempt to reopen the cached copy issue. Streaming media, regardless of browser caching, is not a reproduction until and unless it is copied from the cache to a normal, persistent directory. In the case of YouTube, neither are you distributing if you're simply a viewer. A torrent is a different story.
You're going to have to offer some support for your claims.
I did, by showing an assortment of proprietary projects that contributed equally to the development and release of OS X.
I think I've shown pretty clearly how Apple benefits from open source.
ONCE AGAIN, you have still failed to support your basic premise: that Apple's success with OS X occured ONLY because of OPEN SOURCE software, and that it therefore COULD NOT HAVE HAPPENED without it.
There is no empirical support for that claim. Once again, I will ask for evidentiary support of the claim that it was the open source nature of the projects in question that defined their use. Once again, I will ask for evidentiary support for ignoring the reality of a given project's functionality in favor of its development method. Once again, I will ask how your analysis simply sidesteps the four years of internal development, lack of community involvement, and staggering volume of non-OSS code contained in the operating system. Once again, I will wait for you to ignore these questions in favor of a glib and ignorant repetition.
And keep in mind that you entered into a conversation on a question about whether open source software could ever "catch up" with proprietary software.
That is not the case. The question was why open source software, building in part on other open source software, can't catch up to Apple, who did the same.
his wasn't some hypothetical about whether Apple is theoretically awesome enough in your opinion that they could have written a Unix all by themselves, but apparently you're dead set on turning it into one.
You could not be further from the truth. The issue is a simple one, but since you can't support it, you build straw men.
One final time, it was your unsupported proposition that started this, and you carry the burden of proof. When you can articulate a clear basis for that view, I'd be happy to talk numbers.
No, open source has a lot to do with my argument. If the software had come from non-open proprietary projects, then (a) they would have had to pay for them; and (b) they wouldn't benefit from continued community support.
Apple never came close to leveraging its cash supply on OS X, nor is the price of acquiring suitable technologies inhibitively high. As for "community support", I don't really see any indication that it has been a factor in OS X development on the whole.
Using open source projects is indeed a good, rational decision. But yet again, it does not support your essential challenged point: Apple's success "only because it was able to build off of an open source base" (emphasis added). I have yet to see anything in your argument that suggests that that success is credited specifically to open source development in any part.
Again, the selection of suitably mature products was instrumental in the project's relative quality. But there is nothing to suggest that the very first OS X release (relatively light on the open source) would have been either slower in arrival or worse in quality without those few open source projects.
You've ignored the essential point...the open sourceness has nothing to do with your argument, except that they elected to go with certain elements based on open source projects (along with quite a few from proprietary development).
Finder, Aqua, Carbon, Classic mode, CoreAudio, CoreImage and all the other Core technologies, Quartz, Quicktime, Spotlight, and all the ancillary applications are theirs. Rosetta, iTunes, and rumor has it, part of Time Machine were purchased and converted from proprietary projects.
From NeXT: Cocoa, Interface Builder, and Darwin (by way of OpenStep for Mach), among others.
The question remains why you think open source projects, as opposed to careful selection of a good set of underlying products, coupled with millions of dollars of focused improvement and work, should be credited for their success. Very little was left unchanged from any open source project built into the system.
Apple was able to make OSX such a successful OS as quickly as it did only because it was able to build off of an open source base.
I have never understood this argument or seen any empirical support for it. Most of OS X was written in house or brought over from NeXT. It was made quickly because it was able to build off an existing base, some components of which are from open source projects. Whether a given base happened to be open source or not is simply historical happenstance.
Apple was able to get iTunes off the ground because it bought out another proprietary project. I don't see any reason to interpret a difference between the path of iTunes and Safari in terms of speed, success, or quality.
If this is a feature you want badly, then just do it. Such a bizarre and utterly inconsistent keyboard shortcut system will likely never be a standard feature. You'd have to launch some sort of program to select and remember sequential multiple windows, and then remember the dynamic assignments. People don't do that.
How you can think that selecting a window through available means, which takes less than one second, is slow, is some sort of geek neurosis. Setting up the "static" assignments also takes less than ten seconds, and if the windows you work with really change that often, then how could you possibly remember which is which with any sort of reliability?
You can kind of do this on the Linux/BSD console but it's more limited. I'm looking for something like the text console but for the GUI and where you get to pick your "working set" of 9 or so windows from as many windows you have open.
Sounds like a combination of Spaces and Exposé fits that bill exactly. KDE already has the multiple virtual desktops, and I'm sure there's some Exposé clone for Linux out there somewhere.
HDCP is in most monitors and most video cards these days. Where, then, can you take your business? If you say Linux, then its presence in the hardware is irrelevant, and in any case you already had a laundry list of reasons to use Linux.
For this to be a dealbreaker just means that you're looking for a reason. All you have to do to avoid it is...not buy HDCP-enabled (or disabled, rather) content. Yeah, it sucks that Apple finally caved, but there's a small revolt brewing over the lack of Blu-ray (Why? Who knows), and the studios just won't ever allow 1080p digital distribution without HDCP or a successor, because they suck like that.
But since no one else seems to be stepping up to compete in HD video content without DRM, then it's their ball and their game.
Slashdot Mirror
Depends on where you live and what you're heating. Ignoring regional variations in costs and heating needs, a natural gas forced-air system will heat the entire house, requiring substantially more money than electric radiators, which are per-room.
Combine this with places where electricity is remarkably cheap (e.g. large hydro works) and natural gas is expensive (e.g. all imported), and you are better off heating with electricity. Even if you live in an area with cheap natural gas, electric radiators allowing you to heat only the spaces you're using may end up saving you money over heating a whole house at night to keep the temperature toasty in two occupied bedrooms. This is especially true in Mediterranean climates, where natural indoor temperatures remain above 12 C even in the winter, thus requiring a comparatively small "bump" to hit the desired 20-22 C range.
In any case, waste heat generated by electronics is salutary, so long as the electronics are being used for their primary purpose as well.
Yeah, right, because in 2008, two willing, adult humans can't even necessarily get married. But sure, humans and nonsentient machines in 30 years. Sounds probable.
that doesn't change the fact that it is still safe, and thereby an existence proof that cocaine can be consumed safely.
Not to intrude into your logic-free zone or anything, but the safe consumption of coca tea has zero bearing on the safety of narcotic cocaine, the refined drug.
It is the exact same statement as "consuming poppyseed bagels proves that doing heroin is safe!" It's not just a matter of degrees, it's a matter of multiple orders of magnitude.
Wikipedia and Snopes both disagree with you and say that cocaine, by way of coca leaf extract, was present in Coca-Cola.
It is utterly disingenuous to claim that the minute quantities of an unprocessed, unconcentrated, unpurified, and unisolated alkaloid is anything analogous to the drug.
Coca leaf extract is not cocaine, nor are the effects identical on the whole.
People consume poppy seeds, whereas opiates are made from other parts of the plant.
Opium is made from the seed pods of poppy plants. You're talking about a distinction without a difference. The seeds themselves contain opiate alkaloids exactly as the coca leaf contains cocaine alkaloids, and in quite similar concentrations.
If you consume coca leaf you consume cocaine. If you consume poppy seeds you don't consume opiates.
Bzzt! Both products contain similar low concentrations of the alkaloids in question. The fact that you are drawing this nonexistent line suggests that you do not, in fact, know what you're talking about.
If you eat poppy seeds you are consuming opiates, if your premise that the consumption of coca leaf tea is the consumption of cocaine is granted. Your original premise, that cocaine is "safe" because its alkaloids are present in minute concentrations in complex organic suspensions consumed by people, remains completely idiotic, regardless of whatever pedantic wrangling you'd like to engage in.
The quantity of coca tea or poppy seeds you'd need to consume to begin to approximate the physiological and psychological effects of the smallest doses of the refined and superconcentrated drugs are equally astronomical.
It sounds to me like Apple's behavior is exactly the kind of behavior that the court's majority opinion should be considered anti-competitive and illegal under the law.
How so? Anyone can buy from their distribution channel and sell the products. Whether they can match or undercut Apple's own pricing has nothing to do with competition law.
Sounds like a viable class action case to me.
For what?
It seems like it would be fairly easy to show material loses in court from your inability to sell iPhones.
You'd have to have a right to sell iPhones in order for that to even begin to make sense, and you don't. Totally outside the issue of MAP policies and retailer relations, the bottom line is that you have no such right. Any company can decline to supply you with their products to sell for any reason, including no reason at all. There's nothing anticompetitive about this. You can always go to their competitors and sell their products instead.
Flatly untrue. Cocaine was never used in Coca-Cola at all, and the coca extract that was used was not an "active ingredient".
In its native regions, coca tea was used constantly. This is not cocaine, and it remains in use today as a mild stimulant with certain low-level medicinal uses as well. Coca tea contains a low concentration, suspended among a number of other alkaloids and is not remotely comparable.
In neither case is concentrated, purified, isolated cocaine the ingredient. What you're describing, apart from being ignorant, amounts to the same thing as saying that poppy consumption is identical to opiate abuse.
Here's a term for you to look up: de facto. Promotions and loss leaders are the exact reasone that wholesale prices are de facto minimums and not explicit minimums. Come on now. In trying to be smart, you sail right past the point.
Loss leaders are exactly that: losses. You can't permanently sell a product at a loss unless you're making it up somewhere else. Furthermore, products with MAP guidelines are not loss leaders. They tend to be some combination of high-end, specialty, or boutique products.
If the market were completely free, anyone could build and or sell even cloned items.
No. A different company could build functionally identical products, even using the same suppliers, but the free market doesn't wash away property rights, nor does it nullify the power of contracts (indeed, a truly free market approaches an absolute right to contract not burdened by pesky "consumer rights" or "fairness"). "Free market" isn't a pass to do whatever you want--that's not a market at all.
In a truly free market, the best value would always come to be.
HAH.
Says who? Certainly not the free market, which says that I have a right to set my price and the terms of that price with any prospective distributor.
How is anyone helped by higher wholesale costs? If I'm selling a product for $850 wholesale for MAP members (vs. $900 for general wholesale), contingent on a MAP of $950 and an MSRP of $1000, the participating retailer grosses at least $100, and probably closer to $150.
On the other hand, if I am barred from instituting a MAP, my incentive to discount wholesale purchases disappears. I set wholesale price at $925, then the would-be participating MAP retailer gets screwed out of $75. There's minimal attendant downward pressure on the consumer price, and again I'm inciting a margins race that rewards Walmart and Best Buy at the expense of the smaller dealers I want to support.
Even if I leave wholesale prices alone, I always retain the power to terminate my relationships with any distributors for any reason. So I can just stop resupplying suppliers who drop too far below MSRP, leaving retailers with nothing but a fuzzy cap and my whims instead of a straightforward, published expectation.
In neither case is the ultimate market effect different, and in neither case does the distributor/retailer gain or lose any more freedom of choice in the matter.
In a free market, minimum pricing wouldn't work because there would be multiple other sellers of identical products.
No, there most certainly would not. If Sony sets a minimum price on its products, then you can go to Samsung or someone else, but only Sony would be selling Sony products.
Minimum pricing would (and does) work where people want that product and not its competitors. Competitors would have to dramatically reduce prices or produce and successfully market a FAR superior product, particularly if the difference between market mean wholesale and MAP is relatively small such that people are not moved by the non-existence of MAP guidelines.
Yeah, $400,000 doesn't sound like a lot until you consider that he doesn't have to pay for anything while he's in office. There are no Air Force One bills; his household staff is paid out of the nation's pocket, and there's even a multi-million dollar budget for decorating the residence with furniture, art, and whatever else the First Family wants. No filling up at the pump; no Comcast bill, no paying to heat that six-story mansion he lives in. No medical copays, no need to pay for insurance.
And I think you'd be hard-pressed to find anyone more powerful than the President of the United States of America. Wealthier, sure. Influential in a specific industry, yeah. But overall? I think not.
If I sell you an apple from my apple tree then what right should I have to say that you sell that apple at?
None. But MAP isn't about that. You can sell your EXISTING inventory at whatever price you want, since you've purchased it and it's in your storeroom. If you don't comply with MAP guidelines though, the manufacturer will refuse to resupply you in the future, as is their right in a "capitalist society". Thus, you as the retailer will never be given more apples to sell from that apple tree.
This whole system just seems abusive and will make it harder for competition to ensue which last I checked was meant to be what a capitalist society was all about.
Actually, the problem with minimum advertised prices is that they are pro-competition.
Consider the following. Big Box retailer BB can leverage its massive volumes to carve a tighter margin on the products, and then because of the number of units BB moves, can get preferential pricing on the wholesale purchases. Your local shop L can't match that and stay in business; he can't get the volume discounts, either. The only way to prevent the number of retail outlets from collapsing is to ensure that smaller vendors like L can compete on price. This in turn means that other factors come into play: maybe BB is more convenient and carries more products, while L has a better return policy and gives shoppers personal attention.
BB can still discount its wares for promotions and sell its inventory at whatever price it wants, and because it's such a major source, it probably won't be cut off by the manufacturer. Now you can argue that economic efficiency mandates that L go out of business because his overhead can't be trimmed to BB's levels, but that's the problem with an unbridled capitalist system: it destroys competition based on non-price factors (customer service, eco-friendliness, supplier diversity, etc.).
Ultimately, the manufacturer always sets a de facto minimum price: its wholesale price. Usually with a MAP program, though, there's something else involved. Apple, for instance, subsidizes displays and advertising and offers a rebate system. You're not required to become an authorized reseller or participate in the program, but if you do, you get some benefits out of it. You could always just pay the flat wholesale price and then charge whatever you wanted for the end product--but at some point you still have to make a profit. Other companies (particularly audio gear) offer extra inventory for participation in their programs--e.g. you pay for 100 units and agree to sell at or above MAP, and they deliver 105 units.
The reason the courts don't fight MAP is because they're usually (a) voluntary programs, (b) part of the manufacturer's right to sell his or her products to whomever he wishes under whatever terms he wishes, and (c) it can't be stopped, as manufacturers can simply increase their wholesale prices to very near the MSRP, making it essentially impossible to profit without selling above the manufacturer's suggested price.
The ability to make money over and over on creations like this is a relatively recent idea.
So, too, is general public access to the creations. If you really want to talk about it honestly, then what's also very recent is the ability to reproduce it. The idea that the legal protections in place on the creation of works in the more distant past doesn't make sense is troubled by the simple fact that copyright-like systems have developed in every major geopolitical power as technology improved.
In the past, copyright was replaced by a natural bar to reproduction--inadequate technology to serve as a replacement for the works. As technology improved, protections improved for artists' rights. As tastes improved, cost of creation improved as well, creating an industry of financiers. In no case has a different model been implemented; in no society has the right of an owner to dispose of his work been declared a non-right.
You're talking about striking a balance that removes essentially all power from the creator, providing nothing in exchange. That is historically unprecedented, despite ill-formed conceits about copyright being a modern creation. Copying is a modern creation, too. And if it made sense to permit it freely, someone would have declined to extend existing legal protections to copying. Yet no one did so.
People, in general, are not going to stop writing, painting, or making music because of a lack of copyright.
No, but they're going to stop distributing it publicly on such a scale and at such cheap prices. If you want to go back to patronage, that's fine, but with it comes a concentration of high art in the hands of the wealthy, relying solely on generous benefactors to provide public access at all.
The category of works created by local artists will still be available, but with it goes the variety and the idea of a national culture.
No. Like all notebooks, the panels in MacBook Pros are 6-bit. The story on Slashdot here was about some idiots discovering this fact and raising hell, claiming that the millions of colors come from dithering. Unfortunately, they never bothered to look at the competition.
There is no such assertion in any Slashdot story I can find. Feel free to post a link to the story you misunderstand, though.
The 18 bit display was the first hint.
Hint of what? That it's a notebook? Yes.
No LCD panel manufacturer currently ships 24-bit notebook panels.
As a lawyer rather than a technologist, perhaps Professor Lessig doesn't realise that a YouTube video must be downloaded to be viewed, at least in a manner that would have the RIAA sue you if it was one of their copyrighted works.
Perhaps as a technologist rather than a lawyer, you don't realize that this claim is untrue. Even the RIAA is not so stupid as to attempt to reopen the cached copy issue. Streaming media, regardless of browser caching, is not a reproduction until and unless it is copied from the cache to a normal, persistent directory. In the case of YouTube, neither are you distributing if you're simply a viewer. A torrent is a different story.
You're going to have to offer some support for your claims.
I did, by showing an assortment of proprietary projects that contributed equally to the development and release of OS X.
I think I've shown pretty clearly how Apple benefits from open source.
ONCE AGAIN, you have still failed to support your basic premise: that Apple's success with OS X occured ONLY because of OPEN SOURCE software, and that it therefore COULD NOT HAVE HAPPENED without it.
There is no empirical support for that claim. Once again, I will ask for evidentiary support of the claim that it was the open source nature of the projects in question that defined their use. Once again, I will ask for evidentiary support for ignoring the reality of a given project's functionality in favor of its development method. Once again, I will ask how your analysis simply sidesteps the four years of internal development, lack of community involvement, and staggering volume of non-OSS code contained in the operating system. Once again, I will wait for you to ignore these questions in favor of a glib and ignorant repetition.
And keep in mind that you entered into a conversation on a question about whether open source software could ever "catch up" with proprietary software.
That is not the case. The question was why open source software, building in part on other open source software, can't catch up to Apple, who did the same.
his wasn't some hypothetical about whether Apple is theoretically awesome enough in your opinion that they could have written a Unix all by themselves, but apparently you're dead set on turning it into one.
You could not be further from the truth. The issue is a simple one, but since you can't support it, you build straw men.
One final time, it was your unsupported proposition that started this, and you carry the burden of proof. When you can articulate a clear basis for that view, I'd be happy to talk numbers.
No, open source has a lot to do with my argument. If the software had come from non-open proprietary projects, then (a) they would have had to pay for them; and (b) they wouldn't benefit from continued community support.
Apple never came close to leveraging its cash supply on OS X, nor is the price of acquiring suitable technologies inhibitively high. As for "community support", I don't really see any indication that it has been a factor in OS X development on the whole.
Using open source projects is indeed a good, rational decision. But yet again, it does not support your essential challenged point: Apple's success "only because it was able to build off of an open source base" (emphasis added). I have yet to see anything in your argument that suggests that that success is credited specifically to open source development in any part.
Again, the selection of suitably mature products was instrumental in the project's relative quality. But there is nothing to suggest that the very first OS X release (relatively light on the open source) would have been either slower in arrival or worse in quality without those few open source projects.
You've ignored the essential point...the open sourceness has nothing to do with your argument, except that they elected to go with certain elements based on open source projects (along with quite a few from proprietary development).
Finder, Aqua, Carbon, Classic mode, CoreAudio, CoreImage and all the other Core technologies, Quartz, Quicktime, Spotlight, and all the ancillary applications are theirs. Rosetta, iTunes, and rumor has it, part of Time Machine were purchased and converted from proprietary projects.
From NeXT: Cocoa, Interface Builder, and Darwin (by way of OpenStep for Mach), among others.
The question remains why you think open source projects, as opposed to careful selection of a good set of underlying products, coupled with millions of dollars of focused improvement and work, should be credited for their success. Very little was left unchanged from any open source project built into the system.
Apple was able to make OSX such a successful OS as quickly as it did only because it was able to build off of an open source base.
I have never understood this argument or seen any empirical support for it. Most of OS X was written in house or brought over from NeXT. It was made quickly because it was able to build off an existing base, some components of which are from open source projects. Whether a given base happened to be open source or not is simply historical happenstance.
Apple was able to get iTunes off the ground because it bought out another proprietary project. I don't see any reason to interpret a difference between the path of iTunes and Safari in terms of speed, success, or quality.
As for "less than one second" = geek neurosis...
QED.
Lose the Usenet underscores. They're obnoxious.
If this is a feature you want badly, then just do it. Such a bizarre and utterly inconsistent keyboard shortcut system will likely never be a standard feature. You'd have to launch some sort of program to select and remember sequential multiple windows, and then remember the dynamic assignments. People don't do that.
How you can think that selecting a window through available means, which takes less than one second, is slow, is some sort of geek neurosis. Setting up the "static" assignments also takes less than ten seconds, and if the windows you work with really change that often, then how could you possibly remember which is which with any sort of reliability?
So do it. Keyboard shortcuts are pretty flexible with the right tools.
Personally, I don't see the problem with using either the mouse or the arrow keys. There are Mac utilities to do it, and it's pretty damn easy for Windows users: http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/keyboard-ninja/keyboard-ninja-assign-a-hotkey-to-any-window/. KDE provides a pretty decent keyboard shortcuts configuration tool, khotkey.
You can kind of do this on the Linux/BSD console but it's more limited. I'm looking for something like the text console but for the GUI and where you get to pick your "working set" of 9 or so windows from as many windows you have open.
Sounds like a combination of Spaces and Exposé fits that bill exactly. KDE already has the multiple virtual desktops, and I'm sure there's some Exposé clone for Linux out there somewhere.
And your option is what, then?
HDCP is in most monitors and most video cards these days. Where, then, can you take your business? If you say Linux, then its presence in the hardware is irrelevant, and in any case you already had a laundry list of reasons to use Linux.
For this to be a dealbreaker just means that you're looking for a reason. All you have to do to avoid it is...not buy HDCP-enabled (or disabled, rather) content. Yeah, it sucks that Apple finally caved, but there's a small revolt brewing over the lack of Blu-ray (Why? Who knows), and the studios just won't ever allow 1080p digital distribution without HDCP or a successor, because they suck like that.
But since no one else seems to be stepping up to compete in HD video content without DRM, then it's their ball and their game.