They resume flights. Things appear perfectly normal. In a few weeks time, small numbers of engine failures and instrument and control failures start happening, apparently randomly. It is said to have no relation to the dust. It is very hard to track down the cause, or tell if its unusual for some reason, or just statistical noise, because the planes have been flying all over the world, not just in the affected areas. A few weeks after that, we have three or four total engine failures at once over built up areas in Europe. Or maybe over the Atlantic. People meet and consider what to do.

Then a 747 goes down in the middle of the Atlantic.

Same old, same old. Always start with an arbitrary point in the Apple line, and demand to have it met at a given price. Wrong, proves nothing. Always start with a need, then find a Dell or HP that meets it, then look at how much you'll have to pay for a Mac that meets it. You'll pay double. Sometimes a bit less.

I can't find the spec you are asking for at under $2k - well, I haven't tried, but doubt that you can. So what? Its not what I need, either at $2k or $1500. So at either price, its too expensive.

Good post. Hits the nail on the head. Look at purpose and use, then look at what meets it, and you will generally end up paying double for a Mac. At least. This last post says he paid one third, and it does not surprise me. Don't believe build quality either. Macs do not have better components, and they are not more thoughtfully assembled. The cases are shinier. But no, they are not better components, they're not better cooled, they are no more long lived. In fact, often the components are decidedly entry level. Nor are they more reliable or longer lived. So what explains the rave reports on this subject? Cognitive Dissonance, is what.

Yes. But not if you try to match an Apple spec exactly, then you will mostly find yourself paying roughly the same. The answer is yes, because if you try to match what you need, instead of matching their price points, you will find that the Apple offering you have to go to a higher model than you need, and because they come out of the box with such a weird mixture of high and low end stuff, you will then need to add options, and you will end up spending about twice as much.

You can see this pretty clearly across the range, but if you look at the Mini its especially clear. You insist on having a jacket pocket sized core 2 machine. By the time you find one, its going to cost roughly the same, or maybe you can do it yourself assembly for somewhat less, but its not worth it.

Does this prove the Mac is good value, or no more expensive? Yes, if you really, really need to put it in a coat pocket. Otherwise its grossly overpriced, you can get better quality and more performant hardware for about half the price. You'll find the same thing happens with the floor standers, and actually, if you really think about what you need you'll find the same thing with the all in ones. People will always say to you, you cannot get as big an LCD screen as that, with that computer built into it, for much under that. Maybe not, but if you do not really need it to be all in one, and if you think about what you need and realize that actually two or three smaller screens would give you what you will most need in daily work, and that what will help a lot will be something better than an entry level graphic card.... And if you already have a monitor....

So yes, they are way over priced. But not because you can buy the same thing cheaper from someone else. Because what you're buying is way over priced for what you really need. And what you get is not better than what you really need. Just different.

So their whole stated goal of removing DRM from the iTunes Store and never wanting it there in the first place... where does that fit?

They were lying. Simple.

As a matter of fact, this is not true, he did not buy his first ISP then. I do not know what year it was, later than that at any rate, but he did not buy it. The real story is, News in the UK became convinced they could repeat their success with football and TV. The idea was that if you had compelling content, you could make everyone buy your access vehicle to get to it. It had worked with sport on Sky, so it would work with all the News content on the Internet.

Only problem was, they had no access. So they reached a deal with BT in the UK, who would supply wholesale internet access. The result was called UK Online. It was supposed to be a mixture of content and access. Some who were around at the time tried to explain to BT and to News that this was not going to work. It would not work because it would limit the fabulous online News content to the few who changed ISPs. But it would also limit ISP subscriptions to those who really wanted the News content. The argument was thus made: better just sell the content on its own to anyone who could access it, ie to anyone with an Internet access.

News refused to do this, on the grounds that the content would not bear the tariff. They could not see that this showed that they were just selling Internet access at a high price with a glorified sort of home page. BT could not see it either, and in one lovely episode, forbade their advertising department from fielding ads which referred to 'all the great content available on the web'. Content, you see, was supposed to be joined at the hip to access, in walled gardens.... The web was not supposed to be content, it could not be talked about in public as that. There was, it was said, a market for combined content and access. There was another Rupert in BT at the time, a computer illiterate senior manager, whose reaction to a web site was to ask to have a printout of that. I heard that one of his staff, a Macfanatic of the time, wrote him a little website in hypercard and then printed out the cards, to explain to him how it worked!

The end game was predictable. UK Online never worked, never got to critical mass, was finally sold to Tiscali, who went bust and were sold to Carphone Warehouse, and its an historical memory now. Times and all the other papers went online free.

News however persists with the desire to sell all its compelling content. And to deny access to it to all but the favored. Is it going to work any better this time around? I doubt it. But do not cite the history of News in its first ISP as evidence of commercial acumen. Say rather, that they adopted the AOL model just when it was dissolving. As indeed did Apple, with e-World, for similar reasons.

Agreed. This is where Apple has been going for a long time now, and the world of a locked down device, where you only access media through one controlled point, where all apps have to be obtained from one supplier who keeps a tight lock on what can be installed, that's a wet dream for Big Content. If you think about it, the most important aspect of it is that you can bar hacks that will unlock DRMd media. As long as you just had DRMd media, but freedom to install whatever software you wanted, and the ability to transfer files from machine to machine simply by copying them across, DRM was always going to be readily hackable.

What we are moving towards is a situation where you will buy your content from Apple only, you will not be able to copy it without Apple's consent, you will install no apps that Apple does not like. So DRM will really work. Not only that, but all the content will at last be family friendly and politically correct. No need to worry about nasty subversive political sites, or swimsuit pictures showing up unexpectedly.

Apple is far, far worse than Microsoft. Microsoft is an old fashioned tech company, similar in attitude to IBM or HP etc. Its anti competitive of course, very market share focussed. But it does not have this stifling desire to control what customers do and read, it does not worry much about what content is accessed by the products it sells which give it its market share.

Apple is not really, in spirit, a tech company at all, or rather, its a unique sort of tech company, its a tech company in the tradition of Walt Disney 1955. So it is always thinking, how to use its tech position to control what customers do, think and read. That is the fundamental aim to which all its design tends. Its natural allies are Big Content companies. It has sometimes been said that Apple had DRM imposed on it against its will. Don't believe it. DRM and lockin are central to the Apple value system, they are shared values with the content and media industries. It seems inexplicable to Apple fans that it should be trying to ban the reading of perfectly lawful publications on its devices. You have to realize that Apple thinks of itself as Walt Disney 1955, but who in the 21st century has chosen to deliver its family friendly and politically correct content via computers and tablets. This is all of a piece, part of the same thing. This is why your music was DRMd, even when the rights owners did not want it to be. DRM is central to the Apple vision of how the world should work, as is content censorship.

I read that you cannot activate the iPad from Linux. Now, why would that be, exactly....? Its because open source is the enemy for Apple, even more than for MS, because it represents intellectual freedom. That is what is really at issue here. Do you want to live in a world in which a sort of latter day Disney tells you what you can read? Most of the press and media do. They cannot wait to be part of that latter day Disney consortium. That's the appeal of Apple today.

The Slate article is spot on. Its come a long way, and its ended up, like many revolutionaries, turning into a far worse version of what it originally campaigned against.

Surely if its a one shot thing, a customer version of webconverger or maybe slitaz?

Before prostate surgery for you or someone you know, whether robotic or human, check it out very carefully. I did on behalf of someone else, and came to the conclusion that the optimal treatment is intermittent hormone blockage. The technique is, you have total hormonal block for about 9 to 15 months - until PSA falls to zero. Then you go off the blockade.

The rationale is that prostate cancer grows in the presence of testosterone. When testosterone is removed, it dies. It then, in the total absence of testosterone, becomes hormone refractory, that is, it grows in the absence of hormone. You then restore the hormone, and it reverses again.

That at least was my own conclusion, and what I will try if need be. I concluded that local treatments have almost universal side effects of impotence and incontinence, which I think are underreported. And that the dangerous forms of the cancer are probably inoperable locally anyway.

If over some age, don't know quite what, perhaps 80, I concluded there is no point in surgery. We will almost all of us die with prostate cancer. Very few of us will die of it. Over 80, local treatment is probably almost never a good idea.

And do not forget that the biopsy procedure is not risk free, particularly for older men. It can induce total urinary blockage. This then leads to permanent catheterization, which will inevitably result in blockages, followed by hospital visits in the middle of the night, followed by MRSA infections. This happened in a case I knew well. The result was real misery for quite a few years, followed eventually by death from the complications of repeated MRSA infections.

As I said sadly at the time, the tragedy is, he was one of the few men of his age in the country who when biopsied did not test positive. But even if it had, surgery was impossible given his heart health. It wasted the rest of a life, for no good reason.

I wish this were true. And to some extent it is true. You can get hearing aids 'free' in the UK under the NHS. But what sort of hearing aids are they? They are simple amplifiers, of the kind that were first made back in the fifties or sixties.

Now, the NHS supplies batteries on an exchange basis, also free. However, the problem with the aids is not the batteries. The problem is that the small pipes that lead from the mike to the speaker get blocked with moisture or wax or whatever.

So, you are an 80 year old lady with one of these things. You have a man around, reasonably handy, you are in luck, he is going to take a look, figure out some kind of pipe cleaner device, realise this has to be done once a month or every couple of weeks, and you will be OK. You will still have all the problems of analog amplification devices, the feedback, the background noise amplification etc. But at least it will work the way it is supposed to. Badly, but it will work.

You don't have a man around you are SOL.

As with many aspects of the NHS, what is happening is that treatment options are made available, but very restricted ones. So what the poster would do in the UK, as in the US, is buy his own. And it would cost just as much in the UK as in the US to get an equivalent digital device. Well, more, because you don't have Costco.

Now, ask yourself, how much better off am I really in the UK? Not much. You want as a US resident what the UK National Health Service supplies, you can go buy it. It will probably cost less than $20.

Its similar to proclaiming that the NHS makes consultant appointments for skin cancer checks free. Well, yes, if you are prepared to wait three months and take whoever's turn it is. You want to see someone next week, pay.

You got to compare like with like.

After lots of false leads and starts, it seems like the professional answer is simple in concept but complicated in execution: it is portable or virtualized apps. But actually getting your app to install portably requires either spending a lot of money, or doing a lot of quite careful work. Very surprising that this is not something that people think of when you ask them, and I've run the problem by people with lots of experience, whose knowledge I greatly respect. Whether this client is prepared to pay for it, well, we will see. It may be that a cheap and dirty solution with a cloneable VM is all they'll go for.

If its so great, why do we have to make it a crime to watch TV in the UK, if you do not subscribe to it. Whether you watch it or not.

We don't make it a crime to read newspapers without subscribing to the Times.

This commonly stated point of view is plain wrong. Apple, like all other suppliers of any product, does business in accordance with the law of the applicable jurisdiction. The law relating to the installation of OSX on white boxes is copyright, specifically Title 17, first sale, contract law, and the various sale of goods and consumer protection legislation. The question is whether Apple can simultaneously sell OSX at retail in the form of fully functioning retail copies, and also then tell the buyer on what hardware he may install it.

Psystar fell at the first fence in terms of testing this. Their method of operation breached copyright.

What they did was to buy a copy of OSX. They then installed it on a Mini. So far they were legal.

Next they modified this installed copy, which created a derivative work. Probably at this point they were borderline. If done solely for their own use, probably they would have been OK.

But they now went on to use this as a master copy to install the derivative work on other machines. Breach of copyright.

They next transferred the derivative works to customers, sometimes having included other copies of OSX than the one installed from, sometimes even failing to do that. This was also breach of copyright. Even were the modifications essential to use with the new machine, transfer of those modifications is only lawful under Title 17 if you get the consent of the copyright holder.

But this is all about Psystar's method of operation. It is not about the rights and wrongs of the matter. Whether if you install OSX on a white box, or have someone do it for you on the white box you own, and with a retail copy you own, is a quite different issue and has not been tested. It is going to turn on the issue of whether you are the owner, or the licensee. The case of Blizzard and the case of Vernor vs Autodesk are in conflict here, and the issue is moot.

If you are the owner, then contrary to the above post, your installation on the machine of your choice is protected by section 117 of Title 17. This allows you to make any adaptations and copies which are essential to use with a machine. If your copies are lawful, then circumventing protections in order to make them will also be lawful. In terms of the EULA and contract law, it is not clear that post sale restrictions on use are in fact enforceable. It is not clear, for instance, that if Apple were to put in their EULA the condition that you were forbidden to load and run Open Office on your Mac, this would be enforceable. Other conditions that are not clearly enforceable might include if MS forbade you to install Windows for dual boot on a Mac, if they forbade you to install Windows in a VM, if they forbade you to run Office under Wine.

It is a common cry of the Mac Fanatic that OSX is Apple's and they can do what they like, and if you don't like it don't buy it. But it is both false in terms of the way that business law works in the US, and it is wrong as a matter of public policy, since were it correct, it would permit wholesale anti competitive action by companies, which would have the potential for harming Apple and its customers as much as anyone. The whole intellectual pseudo problem is created by the desire of the Mac Fanatics to have one set of rules for Apple, and another for everyone else. But this is not how the law works.

Bottom line: if they sell it at retail you can install it on whatever you want. If they do not like this, it is them that has to change, and stop selling it at retail in a form which is installable on machines they do not like. And if you can do it yourself, you can pay someone to do it, as long as you own the software and hardware at the time of the work being done.

In the UK, the issue is the public sector unions.

No amount of cajoling will make nurses wash their hands between patients. There has to be some form of sanction. But the UK health industry is nationalized, therefore it is represented by the government employees trade union, and that is opposed fiercely to all discipline of all sorts. There are thus no sanctions whatever, and the result is that despite endless government initiatives, hand wash stations all over the place in hospitals, hands are not being washed. And there are still infections. It is one of the great unspoken risks about going in for surgery in the UK.

In fact, if you go in to one of the few hospitals that pre screens patients for MRSA, the people doing the screening, the first thing they ask is if you have been in hospital recently. If you say no, they tell you that you will almost certainly be clear. The main vector of infection in the UK is the National Health Service. If you know many people who have been hospitalized, you find that many of them have been infected. And many more die of it than is admitted. The cause of death on the certificate will be the proximate cause. Whether they had a bad case of MRSA when they died of it, who knows?

As long as people on wards dealing with patients have no sanctions to fear from not washing their hands, enough of them will not bother to make it impossible to really change matters, and as long as they are all represented by Unison with its close links to the Labour Party, there will be no sanctions.

So we will see people talking about contracting out of hospital cleaning services - an obsession with Unison, but irrelevant, and we'll also hear about over prescribing of antibiotics, also not the problem. Do something to make these guys wash their hands, and the operative word is MAKE, and the problem will vanish overnight.