No, it's not just as good. I like to convert music to V3 for my phone (320 is overkill, takes too much space). Converting from a lossy source sucks.

No. You obviously haven't looked at how it works. The torrent downloading part is an additional/optional feature of Indietorrent for sharing free music.
Both Indietorrent and Bandcamp provide music with a streaming preview and then as a simple direct download.

While I know that the average listener hasn't heard of Bandcamp before, an average young musician likely has. And it's up to the musicians to promote their music online and link to whatever store they sell their music in. The "installed base" for stores like Bandcamp or Indietorrent is anyone that has a browser, no extra software required, anywhere in the world (Google Music is US only, at least for now). It's not like with selling software, where compatibility is an issue and the installed base with a specific OS is crucial.

Yeah, Google being well known is an advantage, I can't deny that. But Google won't do any promotion for you, your band will be lost among the million others. Or actually they will do promotion, but they'll only pick the musicians they see profitable, just like a major ("evil") label would.

So for your average musician, I don't see how this is in any way revolutionary, seeing how there are already plenty of online stores for independent musicians out there. Google is just another player, but admittedly with a bigger reach.

With Indietorrent the musicians can keep 90%.
With Bandcamp the musicians can keep 85%.
(Minus Paypal/processing fees, but still a much better deal than they get with Google, Apple or Amazon.)

Plus those stores don't require customers to install programs, they let you download music directly from the browser, also in lossless (FLAC) format, if you want.

Come on, now. They can't afford to not support MP3. But they can and do ignore some less known formats (lossless audio in general is less known).

Same reason Amazon forces the use of their own format with Kindle. They are the biggest e-reader makers with the biggest e-book store, so they can afford to ignore EPUB, which is/was sort of a standard, but e-books were -just like lossless audio- a bit of a niche until recently.

And Microsoft isn't any better at this with their WMAL (yet another lossless format).

Sure, that could've been one of the reasons _in the past_. It's no longer a reason now. All things equal, FLAC is less CPU demanding than ALAC, for both encoding and decoding.

But people who can't see an obvious marketing tactic by Apple are blind. There's a rumor that Apple will start selling lossless music in 2012 and why wouldn't they enforce their own format if they can?
Making ALAC open source is just a strategy to get more manufacturers on board, so that iTunes ALAC purchases will work on non-Apple devices.

I think he was asking why _Apple_ doesn't use/support FLAC, since there are no technical advantages to using ALAC.

And the answer is simple, Apple doesn't want people to consume media from outside of iTunes, which is what most FLAC media is.

By open sourcing ALAC they want to make it more accessible to manufacturers. My guess is they're planning on selling lots of lossless music on iTunes in the future and it makes more business sense to enforce their own format.

The only reason Apple doesn't support FLAC on their devices/iTunes is because FLAC music usually comes from outside of their iTunes store. And they surely don't want people to not get music elsewhere.
If Apple had any regard for open (source) standards they would've added support for FLAC, since technically it's a good format (maybe not the best, but good) and it's pretty much the de facto lossless standard, even tho lossless in general is not very popular.

And now with open sourcing ALAC it seems like they want to make it more accessible to manufacturers, so that they can freely sell ALAC (lossless) music in iTunes and hardware/software manufacturers will have no choice but to support yet another redundant format (well, if they want to serve Apple costumers).

I wouldn't mind it so much if ALAC had some clear technical advantages, but it doesn't. FLAC is pretty much the same in compression ratio, but is more efficient in encoding and decoding.
I don't want to sound like a fan of FLAC. If you have better alternatives, bring them on. But ALAC is not one, sorry.

IOW, it's business as usual from Apple.

"It's the Web's power users who are pushing Chrome to new heights."

I think that depends on the definition of power users. Because judging by customization and advanced features, Firefox or Opera would be better choices for power users.

Most Chrome users I know are the exact opposite of power users, they like Chrome because it's simple, it "just opens pages".
Nothing wrong with that if it works for you. But the point of tweaking and customizing a browser is not to make life more complicated, but to eventually save time when browsing by doing something faster. For example, a regular user will first open a new tab and then navigate to Youtube.com to search for a video of 'something', while a power user will highlight the word 'something' and "search with Youtube" from the context menu, saving quite some time in the process.

I know Chrome probably has that functionality as well, and don't get me wrong it's a good browser in many aspects. But the point is that the average (!) Chrome user doesn't use those features. I'd say the average Chrome user is barely any more of a power user than the average IE user.
So I wouldn't say Chrome adaptation is being pushed by power users, but much more by power marketing.

I would tend to agree with the parent post.

The web server is a nice idea, but it would've been better as a separate program. Same for the bittorrent client, which isn't even needed. Won't even waste time with widgets. But that's probably it as far as questionable extra features go (which is subjective, I guess). IF they didn't waste too much development time with these 3 I don't have big objections.
But if they did waste time instead of fixing some known bugs, it's harder to accept. And some "stable" releases (10.50, 11.10..) have definitely been rushed out prematurely. And some old power users' suggestions haven't gotten enough attention, IMO.
I did get the feeling that they started targeting "casual" users more in the last versions, but that market is conquered by advertisement as well and Opera can't compete with Google or Microsoft there. So it could perhaps be better if they focus on power users instead and build a solid base of happy users.

What's the reasoning behind only allowing the top 200 web sites anyway?
Why are websites with less traffic bad?

This is wrong on so many levels.

>And won't the music industry go apeshit over this?

1. Apple probably has some deals with the industry. Even if the industry only gets $1 from your $25, it's better than the $0 they got before.
2. Once you're in the iTunes "ecosystem" (I hate that word) you'll be much more likely to spend some more money there.

Native HTML(5) audio would be better, but:
1. Some browsers play OGG, some play MP3 only (for now). Google would have to keep two copies of the same music to satisfy all.
2. HTML5 support is still a bit buggy in some browsers. And many of the currently used browsers don't even support HTML5.
3. Flash might allow for some more control/restrictions.