YLNT is hilarious. That's the appeal: funniness.

Leopard has a number of features that make life easier for devs. More Mac apps that you'd think are Leopard only.

#37

The issue of "what'll happen to domesticated animals," I have to say, really isn't much of a "gotcha." Every vegetarian has heard all of this before and we all have our own answers.

First, cows will *always* be raised for meat. Always. I cannot imagine a scenario where the entire world to a man gives up eating meat.

Second, as I said above, the issue that many vegetarians care about the most is cruelty. Cruelty that is necessary for large-scale industrial meat production, for sure, but that is not necessary for meat per se. Meat could be reserved for special occasions, and the animals could be treated with respect.

Third, whatever you think about vegetarianism, it's indisputable that Americans eat way, way too much meat. People tend to overdose on protein and skimp on other food sources. If you care about health (not to mention the environment-- industrial meat production caused more pollution than automobiles), you should want people to eat less meat even if you don't care at all about animal cruelty. Less meat should be raised under nearly any analysis.

Fourth: Zoos.

* Yes, I would have no rational objection to vat-grown human meat. But not everything I do is rational. The "ick factor" is real, even if irrational.

* Humans have to give some moral consideration to animals, but not the same as to humans. I would say that it is always immoral to eat human meat, but not immoral to eat ethically raised animals. The fact that many animals have evolved over thousands of years to be food for humans is another consideration.

"what do we do with all the cows?"

Many vegetarians genuinely do not object to cows being raised for meat, provided they are allowed to live their typical way of life.

Grazing in the sun on grass. That sort of thing.

As opposed to being confined to a small pen and force-fed unnatural (subsidized) corn feed-stock that makes them sick, and which requires they be pumped full of medicine.

How is this evidence that PETA "hates people?"

I'm a vegetarian, but I have no objection in principle to killing animals. Cows have coevolved with humans to be a food source. Tit for tat.

I only object to factory farms which raise animals in unnatural, cruel conditions. It's just easier to be a (semi)vegetarian, than to do research into the source of every last piece of meat to come my way.

Once you are aware of the horror of modern industrial animal farming, all you can do is (1) stop eating meat from those sources, (2) ignore it, or (3) somehow try to justify the unnecessary infliction of cruelty by pretending you "need" to eat something you don't, or by denying that any moral consideration of animals is justified.

(I say semi-vegetarian, because I really don't care too much about the well-being of, say, fish and insects. And I care about birds and lizards less than I care about mammals. This irrational line-drawing is the way that all morality works-- most people care about their family and neighbors than about people far away across the world. Once you recognize this, you can manage it to avoid excess parochialism. Anyway.)

With vat-grown meat, the only things you have to worry about are health and perhaps some kind of environmental sustainability. It's a perfect technological solution to a moral dilemma that many people take seriously. It would allow you to eat meat without having to worry about denying animals their eudaemonia. Sign me up!

Yep. With WestLaw and Lexis, you're paying for the annotations. Their search and other purely computerized offerings are pretty shitty, although their printed cased reporters are near perfectly done.

I'm all in favor of public domain annotations and so forth. But even the best case syllabus prepared by a court pales when compared with the annotations offered by any of the commercial services.

I just watched "The Queen." The representation of him in that is hilarious.

A lower dollar might help America rebuild an industrial base. A low dollar coupled with high technology and high wages could move us towards more automated manufacturing. So there's an upside.

Maybe this mortage meltdown will finally make people realize this: Real Estate. Is. NOT. A. Good. Investment.

You are never better off spending more to own, than you would be to rent the same property. Never. It is always better to take the difference and invest it elsewhere.

And "spending more" includes the money you are spending on maintenance and taxes. Renting is a great way to outsource the hassle of owning, also.

The only people who make serious money off real estate, do so from development-- by buying in an area that, because of their actions or those of others, is about to notch up its economic activity. Bubbles aside, land and buildings in stable economic areas appreciate at a rate that about tracks that of the economy. Bonds are a better investment than this, often.

I've never quite understood why entertainment companies are so afraid of these lawsuits about "stolen ideas." I mean, you're *allowed* to steal other people's ideas.

Diet Pepsi is delicious. I like the taste of it much, much better than I like the taste of regular Pepsi or Coke. It tastes like clean.

My heart now belongs to Coke Zero, however.

You sleep better if you only sleep, have sex, and read for a few minutes in bed.

Ugh. I agree, that was a terrible interface.

Cory, great post and great comments.

Wu's proposal would presumably remove a revenue stream (licensing) from many content owners, and would be vigorously opposed on that ground.

Copyright law can be circular in that if the law says that you need a license to use a sample, using a sample without getting the license causes a "harm" to the original song owner: he doesn't get his license fee. But if the law didn't recognize that right, and if the sample was used without a license and the second song didn't substitute, then there would be no harm.

Another tricky area would be derivative works, which Wu does mention in his update where he talks about "adaptations." For instance, I would not support a system that allowed movies to be made of a novel without the author's permission, even though the movie does not substitute for the novel.

@Tycho

I'm not going to keep belaboring this point, so it's going to be my last post.

Checksumming is not something to be "broken" or "worked around." It's a *feature* that amarok etc are going to have to *implement*.

This is a hugely, hugely important difference. This is not DRM or anything like it. It's one of the many valid uses of encryption technology--- it's the same principle as a digital signature. And the key is just sitting there in iTunes for anyone to copy.

Cory would have a lot more impact if he paid attention to these nuances, instead of being the boy who cries wolf.

@NOAMJAMSKI

Nope.

The purpose of a checksum is to ensure data integrity. They're used all the time... they're like a little signature that you can use to tell when even one bit of your data has changed. They are very useful in preventing database corruption.

The purpose of a checksum is not "to block synching with Linux," in other words. They have a valid and well-known purpose that any engineer would attest to. Absent evidence to the contrary, I have to assume that that is the same reason they're being used here.

Apple has no legal or moral obligation to ensure that unsupported devices and software will continue to work with their products. Their only obligation is to not go ridiculously out of their way to *block* those unauthorized third parties-- either through technical or through legal means.

Enough with the panic, already. Apple is allowed to update their products.