There are some cases where it is not possible to distinguish between 'ability to and chooses not', and 'can't'.
In the absence of total surveillance, that's most cases. Really. If he doesn't take the spoon because it's in a locked room, because he's afraid of retribution, or because he's internalised rules of behaviour, or whatever other reason... it doesn't matter. Force, the threat of force, education, or wakalixes. The result is the same.
it sounded like you were justifing preemptive actions agianst someone because he has the ability to violate your rights.
I wasn't justifying anything. If I say 'F = G m1 m2 / r^2' does that justify the death of someone who falls from a rooftop? I'm merely describing the way groups of people behave... whether they're a playground clique or a nation.
You can not, from the outside of a person's head, distinguish between "that person does not have the ability to do X" and "that person has the ability to do X and chooses not to".
Following the logic that your last post suggests would result in a constant state of war between all people
Only those people who aren't capable of forsaking the ability to follow through on every opportunity that presents itself, by internalising restrictions on their freedoms.
There hasn't been thousands of years of human activity in the past 20 years.
I'm sorry, I don't understand the point you're making here. Perhaps I'm not smart enough to understand what you're getting at, or maybe you're assuming I know something that's common knowledge among your circle of friends, but I'm honestly baffled... this seems to be a comlete non-sequiter and I'd really appreciate the reasoning that connects this cryptic comment with what I wrote.
"Suppose ten people do this, and they decide that an eleventh person's freedom is a threat?"
Then they need to get a brain. Another's freedom is never a threat.
On the other hand, what if they decide that the eleventh person's planned actions will violate their rights?
They have no idea of knowing what the eleventh person's planned actions are. They can only know what the eleventh person has an opportunity to do, and they can reason about what that person's planned actions may be. They may have very good evidence to support their reasoning, or they may have little evidence, but that's all they have... an argument that the eleventh person may take advantage of an opportunity in a way that violates their rights.
Giving up a freedom means, among other things, giving up the ability to pursue an opportunity. If I would have had the opportunity to do domething, but I'm prevented from doing so, then my freedom has been restricted.
So, these ten people have already agreed among themselves to give up the freedom that this opportunity represents, because they believe that the benefits of giving up this freedom are worth it. The eleventh person has not agreed to give up this freedom, and it is inherently impossible to know if this eleventh person is planning on taking advantage of this opportunity in order to violate their rights.
They can either grant the 11th person the freedom to pursue that opportunity, or they can deny the 11th person the freedom to pursue that opportunity. In some situations there is the third option of waiting until you can tell if the 11th person's actions are going to violate your rights or not, but that option is not often there. If it were, there would be no need for gates and fences and traffic laws and SEC rules and postal regulations, you could just watch everyone, all the time, and act when they were JUST ABOUT TO violate your rights.
So, in the general case, there's no difference between "the 11th person's freedom is a threat" and "the 11th person's planned actions will violate their rights", because "the 11th person's planned actions" are something that you can only know by observing their actual actions.
Since no one's inherant right[1] to force others is any greater than anyone elses, (assuming there is any to begin with) this means that each and every human has the right to Liberty.
Suppose two people agree to give up some of that liberty in exchange for something they both value more. What do you say about that?
Why do so many people correlate being an environmentalist with being left-wing?
Because everyone knows that the left is opposed to progress, that's why they call themselves progressives. And nobody who calls themselves a conservative could know anything about conservation.
but we should remember that these weapons did exist, they were saught, and they were USED by Saddam's military.
Yep, and Reagan and Bush Sr knew about it and gave him the nod to keep doing it as long as he kept the pressure on Iran.
The point wasn't "Saddam never had these weapons" or "Saddam doesn't want to make these weapons again", it was "We don't have enough evidence that he's still got an active program to go to war".
The one that's been delayed by thousands of years of human activity, that really started cranking just before the Industrial Revolution really got underway? Well, at least your comment's timely, there was a nice long article in a recent Scientific American (if I recall the magazine correctly) on this.
not one person anywhere who had an intelligence organization reporting to them stood up and said "We don't think Iraq has anything".
It's a good thing that I didn't just stand up and say "I didn't think Iraq had anything", then. I said the experts were not the people promoting the 'forced consensus that Iraq had WMDs' as a justification for war, and the phrase "the forced consensus that Iraq had WMDs" was a quote from the original poster... if you have a problem with that go back and take it up with him.
All you really appear to lack is the consensus of 13 years of two u.n. inpection regimes who actually spent time on the ground in Iraq trying to disarm it.
Could you elaborate on what that consensus was, then? Because it sure wasn't a consensus for going to war. Even the US members of the teams didn't support that.
the absolute failure of U.S. media to even resemble the claim that they "don't dare defy" the administration
The US media who... after the WMDs weren't found... spent weeks agonising over their failure to follow through on good leads? Those media? Or are you thinking of some other media from a parallel universe where they didn't act as if 9/11 was a 'get out of the spotlight free' card for George Bush.
Of course what you meant to say was "Bonjour halo effect". Psychological warfare is so last century, anyway, these days it's all about "market engineering".
We're looking at Microsoft from different directions, here. You're looking at the desktop, and what the OS looked like. I'm looking at the minicomputer and server side, and how the OS worked.
Microsoft Xenix was a good OS. But it never really did go mainstream.
Depends on what you mean by "mainstream". As a multi-user OS it was pretty damn mainstream in the small-business world, and its effect on operating systems at Microsoft has been huge... and all that is much more important than how "good" it was. In 1982, being the best small-business OS didn't take a whole lot of work.
Nor did being the most popular SINGLE-user small-business OS. First that was CP/M, then Microsoft bought QDOS and turned it into MS-DOS. And almost immediately started making it look like Xenix: the main changes in every new version of MS-DOS after 1.4 up to the unreleased 4.0 were the result of putting as many Xenix features in MS-DOS as was even vaguely sensible. They added at least one system call that didn't make a lot of sense for a single-tasking OS but made a huge amount of sense if they were planning on making MS-DOS and Xenix at least source-compatible with each other. Which would have been a big win for Microsoft, because they used Xenix internally and ran their compilers on it.
But remember where DOS came from... CP/M and MS-DOS 1.x were built around a DEC-style user interface and API with DEC-style file names and command lines. Both Microsoft and Digital Research got started in the DEC world, and did things the DEC way.
And later on, Microsoft got one of DEC's OS engineers, a man who had been a lead (maybe the lead, there's a bit of controversy about that:-) ) in RSX-11 and VMS. You'd expect the OS he developed at Microsoft to look pretty similar to the ones he left behind. With file names like DEV:[PLACE]FILE.EXT like RSX-11 and VMS and for that matter CP/M used. Oh, what was in [PLACE} varied... in CP/M it was a "user area", in RSX-11 and RSTS it was a "UIC" (user and group numbers), in VMS it was a path seperated by periods, *or* a UIC. TOPS had a similar path, but surrounded it with "".
Similarly, in DEC operating systems a file was an array of records, with a variety of conventions for what the records in a text file looked like. In CP/M and MS-DOS 1.x a file was an array of blocks... if it was a text file, and the last block was too long, you just laid down a "^Z" and left the rest of the last block padded with whatever rubbish was there. You'd expect NT to have structured files, bringing the CP/M model up to the DEC one.
And if Microsoft didn't need to retain compatibility with MS-DOS, NT probably would have looked like that, but MS-DOS had gone down a different path inthe early '80s, as Microsoft made it look more like Xenix. It had files that were an array of bytes, and the ^Z was still honored but only for compatibility... it didn't need to be there. It kept the DEC-style carriage-return-linefeed line separator, but it also accepted plain linefeed and some programs were creating UNIX-style linefeed-separated files. It had paths, and it used \ as the default path separator because it had inherited the CP/M-style/-delimited switches, but Microsoft was making more and more programs honor SWITCHAR and it accepted either C:\DOS\FORMAT.EXE or C:/DOS/FORMAT.EXE...
So, NT has UNIX style flat files, it has a filename syntax that's halfway between DEC-style and UNIX-style, and has a whole bunch of other features that are halfway between RSX and Xenix based on how far the transformation of MS-DOS into Xenix-lite had gone before Bill pulled the plug and jettisoned Xenix.
So in that sense, it's had a huge impact on the OS that's about as mainstream as you can get right now. If Bill Gates hadn't decided that Xenix was the future, even if he later changed his mind and decided that Macintosh and his own Macintosh-alike were the future, NT wouldn't have looked anything like it does today.
No. It wasn't "SCO Xenix" that had more users than all other commercial UNIX systems combined. It was "Microsoft Xenix", back when Microsoft was going to make MS-DOS into a kind of "Xenix Lite", back when you could make the MS-DOS file names and command options "Xenix Compatible" by setting your SWITCHAR to "-", back when Bill Gates hadn't yet fallen in love with the Macintosh.
What?
"To create a new standard, it takes something that's not just a little bit different, it takes something that's really new and really captures people's imagination, and the Macintosh, of all the machines I've ever seen, is the only one that meets that standard." - Bill Gates, 1984
Whoa.
"Not only is the universe stranger than we imagine, it is stranger than we can imagine." -- Sir Arthur Eddington (1882 - 1944)
That was later, after Microsoft jettisoned it (and their customers). Speaking as one of the customers Microsoft turned over to SCO, things went downhill FAST after that.
What happened the last time we, as a nation, took drastic and pre-emptive action based on a "consensus" of highly self-interested "experts?" We invaded Iraq.
When did that happen? The last time the US invaded Iraq they did it despite the opposition of the experts.
the forced consensus that there were WMDs in Iraq
I don't recall any such consensus from any experts. I recall assertions from the US administration, and a US press that refused to defy him after 9/11, but the international press was less credulous and the experts (particularly the experts who knew the most about it) were in no way weighing in on the side of the WMDs. All the push for invading Iraq because of the presence of WMDs came from the US administration and their suspiciously secret and unconvincing "evidence".
By the time of the invasion even the US administration had quit talking so much about WMDs and more about regime change and what a monster Saddam was, because they knew they weren't getting the consensus they wanted.
In fact pro-WMD side more resembles the anti-Global-Warming side, down to the refusal to provide evidence, ignoring the most knowledgable experts in favor of people who do science by press release, and having the might of the most powerful nation on Earth as their strongest argument.
Meanwhile what we have on the other side is a consensus of experts, not US newscasters and the US administration they don't dare defy, just like when the people trying to force the same kind of consensus in the face of the evidence gave George the maneuvering room to get his invasion of Iraq off the ground.
In other words, it didn't happen, you're making it up.
'took the initiative in creating' is very vague wording - meant to imply something without specifically stating it.
It's vague wording, it's bad wording, it's blah blah blah... you know what it its? It's speechifying. He was using a phrase that sounded good. The next sentence is "I took the initiative in moving forward a whole range of initiatives..." Does that mean he was responsible for moving them forward, that nobody else had anything to do with moving them forward? No.
There's no indication that he either believed he created the Internet, all by himself, or that he had any intent to deceive. OK, he's a politician, he's supposed to be better at using language than the rest of us, but we all know that politicians screw up just like everyone else. Look at the current President, or his father's vice president.
On the other hand your other example, "No controlling legal authority", that's clearly intended to deceive. There's this big fat incentive to deceive sitting there behind it. There's a motive, and it's a big one, and it's not an innocent motive like enthusiasm or pride.
But in a world where people can flat out lie and can be shown to have lied and the only consequence is that the people who reported the lie... not the people who made it but the people who reported it, admit guilt, the idea that anyone could still be holding on to this idea that "Gore said he invented the Internet" meant anything more than "George Bush said 'nucular'"... it just boggles my mind.
That's right, any patent-related lawsuit against Apple voids the license.
Well, I'll set aside the "there's other kinds of patent-related lawsuits" bit, and get right to the point. And that is, I'm trying to see the downside to this clause for anyone who is acting ethically.
You're OK with the GPL, I take it. You don't consider the GPL a Trojan Horse or whatever it is you see in the APSL that bothers you, even though the GPL has a key clause that maks it a trjan horse, and the GNU manifesto makes clear that aspect of the GPL is one of the main reasons for it existing. Now, I'm not making a statement about whether the GPL is good or not, the GPL is clearly useful for a lot of people and has been an effective open source license. But it is a clear precedent that just being a trojan horse is not enough to make a license "non-free".
This clause prevents you from filing a patent infringement case against Apple except defensively. This is a problem if there's a good reason for filing a patent infringement case against Apple, other than defensively... IF you're in a business where access to Apple's source code is sufficiently important that this is a deterrent.
The distance between existing practice and the goal of the patent system... particularly in the areas of patent law that Apple is likely to violate... is so huge that while I am open to being convinced that this is a bad thing it'll take some doing. I don't see how this can be used effectively against individual creators, or against companies whose use of Apple's source code is an incidental part of their business, it's only useful against companies for which the software they're getting from Apple is going into their core business.
Now, what kind of patents are they likely to be holding?
Slashdot Mirror
For all the crap Windows gets, there's a reason it got to the top. And it wasn't just marketing.
Price isn't part of marketing?
There are some cases where it is not possible to distinguish between 'ability to and chooses not', and 'can't'.
In the absence of total surveillance, that's most cases. Really. If he doesn't take the spoon because it's in a locked room, because he's afraid of retribution, or because he's internalised rules of behaviour, or whatever other reason... it doesn't matter. Force, the threat of force, education, or wakalixes. The result is the same.
it sounded like you were justifing preemptive actions agianst someone because he has the ability to violate your rights.
I wasn't justifying anything. If I say 'F = G m1 m2 / r^2' does that justify the death of someone who falls from a rooftop? I'm merely describing the way groups of people behave... whether they're a playground clique or a nation.
You can not, from the outside of a person's head, distinguish between "that person does not have the ability to do X" and "that person has the ability to do X and chooses not to".
Following the logic that your last post suggests would result in a constant state of war between all people
Only those people who aren't capable of forsaking the ability to follow through on every opportunity that presents itself, by internalising restrictions on their freedoms.
There hasn't been thousands of years of human activity in the past 20 years.
I'm sorry, I don't understand the point you're making here. Perhaps I'm not smart enough to understand what you're getting at, or maybe you're assuming I know something that's common knowledge among your circle of friends, but I'm honestly baffled... this seems to be a comlete non-sequiter and I'd really appreciate the reasoning that connects this cryptic comment with what I wrote.
"Suppose ten people do this, and they decide that an eleventh person's freedom is a threat?"
Then they need to get a brain. Another's freedom is never a threat.
On the other hand, what if they decide that the eleventh person's planned actions will violate their rights?
They have no idea of knowing what the eleventh person's planned actions are. They can only know what the eleventh person has an opportunity to do, and they can reason about what that person's planned actions may be. They may have very good evidence to support their reasoning, or they may have little evidence, but that's all they have... an argument that the eleventh person may take advantage of an opportunity in a way that violates their rights.
Giving up a freedom means, among other things, giving up the ability to pursue an opportunity. If I would have had the opportunity to do domething, but I'm prevented from doing so, then my freedom has been restricted.
So, these ten people have already agreed among themselves to give up the freedom that this opportunity represents, because they believe that the benefits of giving up this freedom are worth it. The eleventh person has not agreed to give up this freedom, and it is inherently impossible to know if this eleventh person is planning on taking advantage of this opportunity in order to violate their rights.
They can either grant the 11th person the freedom to pursue that opportunity, or they can deny the 11th person the freedom to pursue that opportunity. In some situations there is the third option of waiting until you can tell if the 11th person's actions are going to violate your rights or not, but that option is not often there. If it were, there would be no need for gates and fences and traffic laws and SEC rules and postal regulations, you could just watch everyone, all the time, and act when they were JUST ABOUT TO violate your rights.
So, in the general case, there's no difference between "the 11th person's freedom is a threat" and "the 11th person's planned actions will violate their rights", because "the 11th person's planned actions" are something that you can only know by observing their actual actions.
A little too simplified, but that is the essence of legitimate government.
Next step. Suppose ten people do this, and they decide that an eleventh person's freedom is a threat?
Since no one's inherant right[1] to force others is any greater than anyone elses, (assuming there is any to begin with) this means that each and every human has the right to Liberty.
Suppose two people agree to give up some of that liberty in exchange for something they both value more. What do you say about that?
Why do so many people correlate being an environmentalist with being left-wing?
Because everyone knows that the left is opposed to progress, that's why they call themselves progressives. And nobody who calls themselves a conservative could know anything about conservation.
I wonder if the poor fellow gets your point?
but we should remember that these weapons did exist, they were saught, and they were USED by Saddam's military.
Yep, and Reagan and Bush Sr knew about it and gave him the nod to keep doing it as long as he kept the pressure on Iran.
The point wasn't "Saddam never had these weapons" or "Saddam doesn't want to make these weapons again", it was "We don't have enough evidence that he's still got an active program to go to war".
Nope, it was the coming ice age.
The one that's been delayed by thousands of years of human activity, that really started cranking just before the Industrial Revolution really got underway? Well, at least your comment's timely, there was a nice long article in a recent Scientific American (if I recall the magazine correctly) on this.
cleaner air means more sunshine which means more global warming.
I suggest you meditate on how you make ice in the desert before accepting that kind of claim uncritically.
not one person anywhere who had an intelligence organization reporting to them stood up and said "We don't think Iraq has anything".
... after the WMDs weren't found ... spent weeks agonising over their failure to follow through on good leads? Those media? Or are you thinking of some other media from a parallel universe where they didn't act as if 9/11 was a 'get out of the spotlight free' card for George Bush.
It's a good thing that I didn't just stand up and say "I didn't think Iraq had anything", then. I said the experts were not the people promoting the 'forced consensus that Iraq had WMDs' as a justification for war, and the phrase "the forced consensus that Iraq had WMDs" was a quote from the original poster... if you have a problem with that go back and take it up with him.
All you really appear to lack is the consensus of 13 years of two u.n. inpection regimes who actually spent time on the ground in Iraq trying to disarm it.
Could you elaborate on what that consensus was, then? Because it sure wasn't a consensus for going to war. Even the US members of the teams didn't support that.
the absolute failure of U.S. media to even resemble the claim that they "don't dare defy" the administration
The US media who
Dude! They had hollow aluminum tubes!!!! You KNOW what that shit is used for!
Giant bongs?
Of course what you meant to say was "Bonjour halo effect". Psychological warfare is so last century, anyway, these days it's all about "market engineering".
We're looking at Microsoft from different directions, here. You're looking at the desktop, and what the OS looked like. I'm looking at the minicomputer and server side, and how the OS worked.
:-) ) in RSX-11 and VMS. You'd expect the OS he developed at Microsoft to look pretty similar to the ones he left behind. With file names like DEV:[PLACE]FILE.EXT like RSX-11 and VMS and for that matter CP/M used. Oh, what was in [PLACE} varied... in CP/M it was a "user area", in RSX-11 and RSTS it was a "UIC" (user and group numbers), in VMS it was a path seperated by periods, *or* a UIC. TOPS had a similar path, but surrounded it with "".
/-delimited switches, but Microsoft was making more and more programs honor SWITCHAR and it accepted either C:\DOS\FORMAT.EXE or C:/DOS/FORMAT.EXE...
Microsoft Xenix was a good OS. But it never really did go mainstream.
Depends on what you mean by "mainstream". As a multi-user OS it was pretty damn mainstream in the small-business world, and its effect on operating systems at Microsoft has been huge... and all that is much more important than how "good" it was. In 1982, being the best small-business OS didn't take a whole lot of work.
Nor did being the most popular SINGLE-user small-business OS. First that was CP/M, then Microsoft bought QDOS and turned it into MS-DOS. And almost immediately started making it look like Xenix: the main changes in every new version of MS-DOS after 1.4 up to the unreleased 4.0 were the result of putting as many Xenix features in MS-DOS as was even vaguely sensible. They added at least one system call that didn't make a lot of sense for a single-tasking OS but made a huge amount of sense if they were planning on making MS-DOS and Xenix at least source-compatible with each other. Which would have been a big win for Microsoft, because they used Xenix internally and ran their compilers on it.
But remember where DOS came from... CP/M and MS-DOS 1.x were built around a DEC-style user interface and API with DEC-style file names and command lines. Both Microsoft and Digital Research got started in the DEC world, and did things the DEC way.
And later on, Microsoft got one of DEC's OS engineers, a man who had been a lead (maybe the lead, there's a bit of controversy about that
Similarly, in DEC operating systems a file was an array of records, with a variety of conventions for what the records in a text file looked like. In CP/M and MS-DOS 1.x a file was an array of blocks... if it was a text file, and the last block was too long, you just laid down a "^Z" and left the rest of the last block padded with whatever rubbish was there. You'd expect NT to have structured files, bringing the CP/M model up to the DEC one.
And if Microsoft didn't need to retain compatibility with MS-DOS, NT probably would have looked like that, but MS-DOS had gone down a different path inthe early '80s, as Microsoft made it look more like Xenix. It had files that were an array of bytes, and the ^Z was still honored but only for compatibility... it didn't need to be there. It kept the DEC-style carriage-return-linefeed line separator, but it also accepted plain linefeed and some programs were creating UNIX-style linefeed-separated files. It had paths, and it used \ as the default path separator because it had inherited the CP/M-style
So, NT has UNIX style flat files, it has a filename syntax that's halfway between DEC-style and UNIX-style, and has a whole bunch of other features that are halfway between RSX and Xenix based on how far the transformation of MS-DOS into Xenix-lite had gone before Bill pulled the plug and jettisoned Xenix.
So in that sense, it's had a huge impact on the OS that's about as mainstream as you can get right now. If Bill Gates hadn't decided that Xenix was the future, even if he later changed his mind and decided that Macintosh and his own Macintosh-alike were the future, NT wouldn't have looked anything like it does today.
You mean SCO Xenix?
No. It wasn't "SCO Xenix" that had more users than all other commercial UNIX systems combined. It was "Microsoft Xenix", back when Microsoft was going to make MS-DOS into a kind of "Xenix Lite", back when you could make the MS-DOS file names and command options "Xenix Compatible" by setting your SWITCHAR to "-", back when Bill Gates hadn't yet fallen in love with the Macintosh.
What?
"To create a new standard, it takes something that's not just a little bit different, it takes something that's really new and really captures people's imagination, and the Macintosh, of all the machines I've ever seen, is the only one that meets that standard." - Bill Gates, 1984
Whoa.
"Not only is the universe stranger than we imagine, it is stranger than we can imagine." -- Sir Arthur Eddington (1882 - 1944)
that "best small-system UNIX" was SCO.
That was later, after Microsoft jettisoned it (and their customers). Speaking as one of the customers Microsoft turned over to SCO, things went downhill FAST after that.
Not everything Microsoft does is "evil". They had the best small-system UNIX in the world back in the '80s, for example. And Interix is pretty cool...
What happened the last time we, as a nation, took drastic and pre-emptive action based on a "consensus" of highly self-interested "experts?" We invaded Iraq.
When did that happen? The last time the US invaded Iraq they did it despite the opposition of the experts.
the forced consensus that there were WMDs in Iraq
I don't recall any such consensus from any experts. I recall assertions from the US administration, and a US press that refused to defy him after 9/11, but the international press was less credulous and the experts (particularly the experts who knew the most about it) were in no way weighing in on the side of the WMDs. All the push for invading Iraq because of the presence of WMDs came from the US administration and their suspiciously secret and unconvincing "evidence".
By the time of the invasion even the US administration had quit talking so much about WMDs and more about regime change and what a monster Saddam was, because they knew they weren't getting the consensus they wanted.
In fact pro-WMD side more resembles the anti-Global-Warming side, down to the refusal to provide evidence, ignoring the most knowledgable experts in favor of people who do science by press release, and having the might of the most powerful nation on Earth as their strongest argument.
Meanwhile what we have on the other side is a consensus of experts, not US newscasters and the US administration they don't dare defy, just like when the people trying to force the same kind of consensus in the face of the evidence gave George the maneuvering room to get his invasion of Iraq off the ground.
In other words, it didn't happen, you're making it up.
"Every device a Jedi builds adds functionality until it can cut your head off." -- The first law of Jedi Hacking.
My Open Letter to Apple about the biggest security flaw they've left hanging. It's purely a theoretical problem so far.
'took the initiative in creating' is very vague wording - meant to imply something without specifically stating it.
It's vague wording, it's bad wording, it's blah blah blah... you know what it its? It's speechifying. He was using a phrase that sounded good. The next sentence is "I took the initiative in moving forward a whole range of initiatives..." Does that mean he was responsible for moving them forward, that nobody else had anything to do with moving them forward? No.
There's no indication that he either believed he created the Internet, all by himself, or that he had any intent to deceive. OK, he's a politician, he's supposed to be better at using language than the rest of us, but we all know that politicians screw up just like everyone else. Look at the current President, or his father's vice president.
On the other hand your other example, "No controlling legal authority", that's clearly intended to deceive. There's this big fat incentive to deceive sitting there behind it. There's a motive, and it's a big one, and it's not an innocent motive like enthusiasm or pride.
But in a world where people can flat out lie and can be shown to have lied and the only consequence is that the people who reported the lie... not the people who made it but the people who reported it, admit guilt, the idea that anyone could still be holding on to this idea that "Gore said he invented the Internet" meant anything more than "George Bush said 'nucular'"... it just boggles my mind.
That's right, any patent-related lawsuit against Apple voids the license.
Well, I'll set aside the "there's other kinds of patent-related lawsuits" bit, and get right to the point. And that is, I'm trying to see the downside to this clause for anyone who is acting ethically.
You're OK with the GPL, I take it. You don't consider the GPL a Trojan Horse or whatever it is you see in the APSL that bothers you, even though the GPL has a key clause that maks it a trjan horse, and the GNU manifesto makes clear that aspect of the GPL is one of the main reasons for it existing. Now, I'm not making a statement about whether the GPL is good or not, the GPL is clearly useful for a lot of people and has been an effective open source license. But it is a clear precedent that just being a trojan horse is not enough to make a license "non-free".
This clause prevents you from filing a patent infringement case against Apple except defensively. This is a problem if there's a good reason for filing a patent infringement case against Apple, other than defensively... IF you're in a business where access to Apple's source code is sufficiently important that this is a deterrent.
The distance between existing practice and the goal of the patent system... particularly in the areas of patent law that Apple is likely to violate... is so huge that while I am open to being convinced that this is a bad thing it'll take some doing. I don't see how this can be used effectively against individual creators, or against companies whose use of Apple's source code is an incidental part of their business, it's only useful against companies for which the software they're getting from Apple is going into their core business.
Now, what kind of patents are they likely to be holding?
Yeh, I read that.
I heard Tcl/Tk Aqua had been incorporated into Tiger. I guess this is one reason why.