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Happy Birthday is still copyrighted and generates royalties of $1 million per year.
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XGNOME vs. KDE: the game!

Namco licenses Pac-Man® from Hasbro. But that doesn't stop you from making "Janitor" in which you are a vacuum and are picking up paper wads (that look like white dots on your low-res screen). Or does it?
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XGNOME vs. KDE: the game!

Wasn't the Lotus v. Borland case reversed on appeal? See also Tetris Under Fire.
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XGNOME vs. KDE: the game!

I'm talking about direct rip-offs, including graphics

Does, for example, the csh/bash commandline in GNU look any different from the csh/bash commandline in UNIX?

and game-play

The bash syntax is the same as the sh syntax, or at least as similar as the game clones were to the Hasbro originals. And the POSIX functions are the same too.

as well as things like calling parts of the game the same thing.

ls, cd, rm, etc. are exactly as they are in UNIX®.

You know, a DIRECT rip-off.

A direct rip-off of UNIX was RMS's goal when he started the GNU project and the Free Software Foundation:

I chose to make the system compatible with Unix so that it would be portable, and so that Unix users could easily switch to it. The name GNU was chosen following a hacker tradition, as a recursive acronym for "GNU's Not Unix."

Pinocchio's rant on The Tetris Company has moved here.

Now, answering your question: Hasbro is a Tetris Company licensee.

Pinocchio's rant on The Tetris Company has moved here.

Now, answering your question: Hasbro is a Tetris Company licensee.

TETRIS® is a registered trademark of The Tetris Company LLC. (There was a /. story on this.) Hasbro, as a TETRIS® licensee, is doing what it's contractually obligated to do: defend the TETRIS® trademark.

So download freepuzzlearena, a clone of Tetris for Linux, DOS, and Windows 9x.

TETRIS® is a registered trademark of The Tetris Company LLC. (There was a /. story on this.) Hasbro, as a TETRIS® licensee, is doing what it's contractually obligated to do: defend the TETRIS® trademark.

So download freepuzzlearena, a clone of Tetris for Linux, DOS, and Windows 9x.

TETRIS® is a registered trademark of The Tetris Company LLC. (There was a /. story on this.) Hasbro, as a TETRIS® licensee, is doing what it's contractually obligated to do: defend the TETRIS® trademark.

So download freepuzzlearena, a clone of Tetris for Linux, DOS, and Windows 9x.

By your logic, if the GNU/Linux® System is a direct rip-off of the UNIX® System, then it's no better than piracy...
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XGNOME vs. KDE: the game!

"If you want to play our games on OS/2 or Linux, please purchase and install Microsoft Windows Me and reboot your computer when you want to play our games."
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XGNOME vs. KDE: the game!

Your suggested filesystem layout (/apps, /docs, /system) looks very Mac OS-like (/Applications, /Documents, /System Folder)...

The first process the Linux kernel starts is init, the mother of all processes (in more ways than one). Sure, init can (eventually) read an XML-based configuration file that points to each of its daemons and each of their config files, but where will:

• the kernel find init
• init find its config file

The kernel will at least have to be recompiled for these if we will be drifting away from /etc into /system/preferences like the Mac has.

a trained GUI monkey can automate anything (s)he wants to in Python

Provided the program you're trying to automate:

• exposes an API to Python, and
• is not under GNU GPL (I may be wrong about this).

• Make sure that it still looks good when you delete all <table> and related tags. A left-navigated (like PinEight.com) or right-navigated (like BSI's Everything2) two-column layout works nicely.
• Make sure that it still looks good when you remove the /images directory (or whatever your site uses for its graphics).
• Make sure it doesn't require ECMAScript (the language formerly known as Java®Script) or Java® applets.
• Most recent text browsers handle client-side imagemaps properly (given good alt= text) but there is a patch to make server-side image maps work on any browser.
  
  And most importantly:
• Test your work on as many browsers as you can find, even telnet to port 80 :-)

• Make sure that it still looks good when you delete all <table> and related tags. A left-navigated (like PinEight.com) or right-navigated (like BSI's Everything2) two-column layout works nicely.
• Make sure that it still looks good when you remove the /images directory (or whatever your site uses for its graphics).
• Make sure it doesn't require ECMAScript (the language formerly known as Java®Script) or Java® applets.
• Most recent text browsers handle client-side imagemaps properly (given good alt= text) but there is a patch to make server-side image maps work on any browser.
  
  And most importantly:
• Test your work on as many browsers as you can find, even telnet to port 80 :-)

• that the supplied Windows 2000 driver works with Windows 2000,
• that the supplied Windows 9x driver works with both Windows 98 and Windows Me and is 32-bit (not a VxD), and
• that whenever Digital Rights Management is turned on, the sound card driver disables all digital output (either from a connector on the card or to a disk file).

The MP3 player CPU is programmed to obey SDMI. SDMI is a buzzword that means, in effect, that portable digital audio media is write-only except through a DAC. Because a user program stored to the ARM's address space might send music data back to the Visor, any hacks that allow this might violate copyright law as amended by the Digital Millennium* Copyright Act.

Visual Bloat++ probably won't fit on a PocketPC, but I could definitely see some porting group produce Pocket GCC like another group (a Cygnus splinter group) produced DJGPP, the DOS-based GCC we know and love.
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XGNOME vs. KDE: the game!

What 96 probably means in this case is a 96 KHz 1-bit digital to analog converter. 1-bit DAC is 100% linear (high-bit-count DACs aren't) and do not need expensive precision resistors. It works by dithering the sound down to 1 bit per sample, but because it moves the quantization noise way out of the audible spectrum (a low pass filter at 20 to 22 KHz helps), it sounds nice.
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XGNOME vs. KDE: the game!

Another key is inexpensive memory sticks. It isn't really convenient to keep deleting / uploading mp3s to the same memory stick every time you want to listen to something different.

Do you mean "memory stick" (generic stick-shaped storage media) or Sony MemoryStick? Not only are MemoryStick products proprietary to Sony, but Sony is a member of both RIAA and MPAA (yes, both four-letter words) so you probably won't be able to put plain old MP3 files on them.

By default, Windows systems use invert capslock. Apple II, Mac, and Linux* systems, OTOH, use toupper() capslock. The Apple IIGS computer's BIOS had a function that could change the capslock behavior.

Windows Millennium Edition supports driver signing: companies submit their drivers to M$ and they get a logo license and a digital signature. Its audio pipeline will not play copyrighted data over an unsigned (i.e. untrusted) driver.
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XGNOME vs. KDE: the game!

It has been said that AOL bought Netscape because it wanted the Netscape.com portal.
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XGNOME vs. KDE: the game!

Some operating systems are not capable of providing synchronized multimedia because of features built into them to thwart covert channels. For example, their schedulers jitter the CPU time values so one process can't use the amount of CPU time it uses as a covert channel to leak classified information to another process.

UNIX® systems and GNU systems are in general not affected by this feature.

There are a few other codecs that are important including Sorenson (Quicktime's primary codec these days)

I wouldn't be surprised if Sorenson were patented up the ass.

Clause 10 of the GNU GPL allows authors to create exceptions to the License. Guile and libstdc++ both use an exception "this library may be linked to proprietary software."
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XGNOME vs. KDE: the game!

The PS2 has enough bandwidth to swap the whole of the GS's memory several times a frame.

So what do they do? Draw a whole bunch of polygons using texture set 1, swap in texture set 2, draw more polygons, swap in texture set 3, etc. until the frame is built? Sorry, rendering didn't work that way last time I checked.

It takes as long to move texture and screen data to and from the PowerVR as it does to swap textures on the PS2.

For several textures to be displayed on the same screen, they must all be in VRAM simultaneously, correct?

Let's say you are given half-price options for x shares of stock. You buy x shares at half price and then sell x/2 shares at market. What you effectively got was x free shares of Sega stock.
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XGNOME vs. KDE: the game!

kuro5hin.org coming soon: Mass moderation of stories. There's a "front page" and a "back page" for each section; the community votes to move stories from the back page to either the front page or /dev/null.
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XGNOME vs. KDE: the game!

w3m is a full-featured character-cell web browser. Unlike Lynx, w3m supports tables, making web site layout look more like what the designers intended.
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XGNOME vs. KDE: the game!

And with the PS2 being released soon - holding Sega shares would properly not be a wise idea.

PlayStation 2 is a fighting game platform. (Coincidentally, fighting is one of the four arcade genres, the others being racing, shooting at a movie, and pinball.) It doesn't have enough texture RAM to hold detailed textures for more than about four characters, and this is coincidentally the number of players in some fighting games (trying to show up Nintendo's Smash Bros.?).

Dreamcast, OTOH, seems more balanced in its technical capabilities.

The Slashdot "format" is not supposed to include penis birds, so my bird now rests on a "Reply to This" link.
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XGNOME vs. KDE: the game!

The article refers to station formats (top 40, c(o)untry, rap, etc.) not file formats (mp3, ogg, wma, mid, s3m). To gain legitimacy, Napster needs to support formats other than lossy-compressed wav files (mp3, wma). Support for tracked formats such as mod/xm, s3m/it, mid, etc. will bring more original (non-RIAA) content to Napster.
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XGNOME vs. KDE: the game!

...to goatse.cx. (Score:-1, Offtopic)
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XGNOME vs. KDE: the game!

Now, for some reasons not to use GPG:
PGP is more well known

Now, for some reasons not to use GNU/Linux:
Windows is more well known

I don't know; it just came out sounding silly.

Versions of PGP prior to 5 used (formerly) patented RSA and (still) patented IDEA; supporting RSA won't get them any closer to compatibility with pre-5.0 keys until the IDEA patent expires.
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XGNOME vs. KDE: the game!

Easy. Just place a cute bird in the mail program's .signature, as I did:

Please use PNG files for your customized advertisements. If you use GIF, Unisys will hunt you down.
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XGNOME vs. KDE: the game!

Don't use GIF. Use a small PNG file instead (provided you have a 4.0 or later browser).
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XGNOME vs. KDE: the game!

Revise your rule (which currently blocks *.js*) to block *.js without blocking *.jsp, perhaps using indexOf() in conjunction length of the string.
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XGNOME vs. KDE: the game!

Project Gutenberg redistributes only public domain etexts, but thanks to Disney, nothing written in the US on or after January 1, 1923, will ever enter the public domain.
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XGNOME vs. KDE: the game!

Project Gutenberg redistributes only public domain etexts, but thanks to Disney, nothing written in the US on or after January 1, 1923, will ever enter the public domain.
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XGNOME vs. KDE: the game!

I would love it if a new legal finding was made that US Patent Law had to be reinterpreted because the original specification had a faded decimal point - that the intent was to provide patents for 1.7 years instead of 17 years.

Not likely. Back when the original patent law was passed setting the "limited times," decimal for years was not common. The patent law drafters would have written "one (1) year and 255 days" were that their intent.

I would love it if a new legal finding was made that US Patent Law had to be reinterpreted because the original specification had a faded decimal point - that the intent was to provide patents for 1.7 years instead of 17 years.

Not likely. Back when the original patent law was passed setting the "limited times," decimal for years was not common. The patent law drafters would have written "one (1) year and 255 days" were that their intent.

Why not ignore .mp3 and use .ogg for your encoding?

Even though there is a common Winamp plugin (from vorbis.com) to play .ogg files of my band's music, the Napster client does not recognize .ogg. But there's a workaround, right?

I also wonder if the use of Win4Lin doesn't make your system vulnerable to Windows viruses (such as macro viruses in Word): since these applications now have access to your Linux file systems, they can easily destroy your data.

Only if it runs as root. The article over on LMN (which is running squishdot, a slash clone for zope) doesn't say one way or the other.

So what VMware does

Is patented. Which is why this program uses sort of a cross between Wine and VMWare.

Almost, except for the credit clause in older BSD licenses... Don't they have to give credit, or is this only if they claim they're using the BSD code?

Code licensed under any BSD-style license (even the BSDL 2.0 without the advertising clause) requires the original software's copyright notice (© Regents of UC Berkeley or something like that) to be inserted in the documentation. More BSD copyright information can be found at FreeBSD.org.

IV. The Software, or parts thereof, may be incorporated into other software which is not freely redistributable (i.e. software for which a fee is charged), as long as permission is granted from the authors of the Software.

Not necessarily. IANAL, but I remember that "without permission" can mean simply "read the license more closely." Your "permission" is granted in the GNU GPL.

GAS doesn't count; that was obviously intended for a compiler to use and it's extremely painful to write code for it; doubly so if you're used to writing Intel syntax rather than AT&T

Latest binutils (2.10) reportedly supports Intel syntax with a switch.