Rather than hearing gossip from AT&T reps who almost certainly know virtually nothing about the final details of iPhone marketing (the only information I'm aware of them being provided is a brochure that explains how the thing works), why don't we wait until we get official announcements from Apple and AT&T. Not only are these rumors almost certainly based upon speculation and technological ignorance, but even if both Apple and AT&T have provisionally decided to go with them, there's still a strong chance of them changing their minds in the next week or two.
It's not even 100% clear if the iPhone will need a contract at this stage. Apple hastily removed language implying such from the online version of their ads, and AT&T has internal codes set up for selling iPhones with GoPhone plans, according to some reportage. This week we've seen Apple at a high-level flip flopping on various issues, such as the pretense of ZFS in Leopard (initially ruled out, then changed to present in a stripped down form), and the ability of Leopard's bootcamp to be used as a switcher between suspended versions of Windows and Mac OS X.
There are alternatives to all three you know. I've always thought Bruce Perens did a pretty good job of representing both the open-source and free-software communities.
Torvalds is influential because of his success at promoting a single piece of software (the Linux kernel), but he's not even a fan of open-source or free-software, making often pseudo-pragmatic decisions (such as the terrible BitKeeper fiasco) that go against the grain of what the communities want and need. His attitude to the GPLv3 process was singularly unconstructive and divisive.
I'd rather see someone who actually supports the aims of the FS/OSS communities be heralded as a good representative. For all their faults, RMS and ESR do at least try, and Perens seems to actually do a good job of it, getting the message out without being exclusionary and alienating. Torvalds may be less abrasive than RMS or ESR, but he doesn't support the aims of the movement, and he's still exclusionary and alienating, just less so.
It really isn't a smartphone. I know Jobs said it was, but smartphones really fill a different niche. iPhone is exactly what it sounds like - what a consumer phone would look like if built by Apple. It's a multimedia communications device. It isn't a way to keep in touch with the office. It isn't something to use for data collection, or to solve engineering problems. It's emphatically not a pocket computer, or a "smartphone" with the integrated computer-phone features that implies. The competitors to the iPhone include the RAZR and the Sidekick. They do not include the Nokia N95 or the Treo.
Once you understand that Jobs used the wrong word, it's a lot easier to understand why the iPhone isn't programmable.
Yeah yeah, except for the small fact that ZFS support for Mac OS X benefits Mac users and Apple, not Sun. Sun is the developer of the technology, but they're giving it away for free. Jobs would be an idiot to reject ZFS simply because Sun "pre-announced" it.
The reality is more likely to be that the Mac OS X/XNU implementation of ZFS just wasn't ready yet. It's a powerful, complex, system. Even without UI work to abstract things like drive pools to the user in a friendly way, the basic implementation requires heavier testing than usual.
The current Leopard beta has a read-only ZFS implementation built-in. Looks like it's still under development to me.
You went to the effort to prove something that's explained by Maynor in the very video you're claiming to debunk? Wow, what a complete waste of time.
In order to "fake" something, you have to pretend that it's something it isn't. Maynor was, in fact, perfectly open from the beginning about the use of a third party Wifi device. There was no attempt to mislead - from him. There were, on the other hand, hoards of people who lied or repeated lies about what he did, claiming that he lied when he clearly didn't. Only a few, apparently not including yourself, have had the decency to withdraw the lie.
The guy was subject to a character assassination campaign orchestrated by Apple's PR department after the original Wifi bug revelation. I don't think, personally, he owes Apple anything.
I'm using it on my work PC, running a fairly standard Windows XP SP2 install, and tried both the version with Quicktime and the version without. Both versions crash on startup, with the problem being - according to Microsoft's Visual C++ debugger - an illegal instruction on COREGRAPHICS.DLL.
It might just be my PC, or it might be an AMDism (I'm using a 1GHz AMD Athlon.) Anyone getting similar results?
Yes, because Sun would be so upset if someone used their free software in another free software operating system. Or if someone put another free operating system's code in their free operating system.
I don't think so. That really doesn't make a lot of sense. Sun presumably wants the best operating system it can get, and if that's a frankenstein-like Linux/SunOS hybrid, then that's what they want.
The problem becomes, how many ways can you write a single piece of code?
Doesn't matter in the slightest. Copyright law isn't about creating the same solution to a problem, as patents are, it's about copying a solution.
If you and I both independently, without reference to one-another's (or someone else's) work, write identical code, neither of us are in breach of copyright law. Though, of course, the more unlikely the co-incidence, the more difficult it is to defend yourself in court against an allegation of copyright infringement.
Everyone claims this, yet I've entered the US about five times in the last ten years, and gone through the green card process (which is supposedly notorious), and in that time I've never met a single immigration officer who was in any way unhelpful, rude, or overly invasive in his or her questioning. (In fact, the guy who did the green card interview was positively pleasant, and I've kept the two letters I received from the INS, one from him, one their "standard form letter", which were absolutely beautiful.)
Am I just very lucky, or is the stereotype overblown?
I doubt it'll make that big a difference. Most phones outside of the US are GSM, with a small proportion of those being UMTS. Qualcomm makes some UMTS chips, but doesn't have the same kind of marketshare with them as it does with CDMA2000 chipsets. To the best of my knowledge, there are no basic 2G GSM phones with Qualcomm chipsets. And UMTS phones from outside the US generally don't support the frequencies used within the US for 3G, making bringing an expensive UMTS phone to the US more trouble than it's worth (you'll get basic GSM only, and then probably only on 1900MHz.)
Unless you're from one of the few places in the world that still uses CDMA2000, you're most likely to bring a phone into the US that is GSM only, and Qualcomm free.
AT&T is rolling out UMTS, including HSDPA, at the moment, and Jobs has promised a 3G version of the phone is coming, so I wouldn't worry too much about the lack of EV-DO support.
FWIW, depending on what you read, Apple has committed to offering the iPhone to AT&T for the next two-five years exclusively of any other US carrier. So if you're hoping that a Verizon version is in the works, well, it isn't.
AT&T's network is poor at the moment because it's a botch of old analog and D-AMPS towers all now running GSM which has significantly different tower requirements. They now have a great deal of 3G spectrum, and are likely to overcome most of the problems they've had over the next two years, so don't expect AT&T's current poor performance to last very long, or be relevent when the 3G version of the iPhone appears.
I see the target for the IPhone to be the Treo and Blackberry crowd. I really want to see one and the SDK.
I see it more aimed at the Sidekick crowd. Right now, it's unlikely Apple is going to offer more than "widget style" programming for the device, and it doesn't really connect to corporate mail systems. The type of people who want a Treo or Blackberry for that Organizer/business connectivity type environment are going to be put off by a device primarily aimed at multimedia and web browsing.
People (and I include myself) got too hung up on Jobs describing the thing as a "smartphone". It isn't really. It's a really, really, awesome multimedia phone. It's what the ROKR should have been. It's what you get if you take what the ROKR was supposed to be, marry it to what the Sidekick is supposed to be, and do it really, really, well. (Well, assuming it's as good as it's cracked up to be.)
Re:The first computer I owned
on
The Apple II At 30
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Could have sworn TOS/GEM was largely written in PL/M, though obviously there was plenty of support for C programming. That said, the criticisms of the OS have to do with its sparse set of features (it was ultimately an updated version of CP/M, with features added from MSDOS, and with the Mac-like GEM front-end added), rather than how well documented it was.
The Apple lawsuits had no effect on Atari's GEM, which was effectively a fork Atari was responsible for. Digital Research had to cripple the PC version. Both PC and ST versions had "overlapping windows", the fixes were more that the GEM2 file management Desktop (ie Finder replacement) had fixed windows for viewing files (but this only affected that one "application"), ordinary applications were allowed to overlap whatever windows they wanted.
Not trying to troll here, and maybe you don't even ascribe to the mindset you imply with the above line, but how can you "overtake" a project that's "in a continual state of catch-up"?
When you start off behind in some areas, but not in others, and in the "others" you can only ever be ahead of the rest. OpenOffice.org's Mac port is at an early stage at the moment, so it implements all of the latest version of OpenOffice.org (by definition) but not all of the Mac native subsystem. NeoOffice includes a complete Mac native subsystem, but not all of the features of the latest version of OpenOffice.org. As time goes by, because making OpenOffice.org native is a discrete, completable, task, OpenOffice.org will catch up with the part of NeoOffice it currently lags behind, but NeoOffice cannot catch up with OpenOffice.org (unless OpenOffice.org ceases to update.)
This is a genuine native port, NeoOffice uses a Java intermediate layer to present the UI to Mac OS X.
As I understand it, they're not working with the NeoOffice people, there's always been a little friction between the groups.
In time, this project is likely to overtake NeoOffice, simply because changes to OpenOffice.org will always be faster than those in NeoOffice, which is in a continual state of catch-up.
I'm bewildered by the number of Slashdot people who seriously believe that virtually everyone is "unhappy" with their cellphones. It gets even more laughable when you consider the common thread amongst those who criticise cellphones on Slashdot tends to be that they're too functional, a constituency that isn't going to be in any way satisfied by an expensive multifunctional touch-screen controlled cellphone.
FWIW, I love my Motorola V635. My wife loves her RIZR. My "friend I talk about phones to alot" loves his Nokia 3220. My wife's sister's MiL loves her Samsung something-or-other she was showing us this weekend.
Right now, amongst the flesh and blood people I talk to about such things, I don't know anyone who doesn't like their phone. And I can think of many reasons why they wouldn't like the iPhone.
The funny thing is that it's only ever been the Windows versions of RealPlayer and RealOne that have been crapware. The GNU/Linux and Mac OS X versions have always been beautifully minimalist.
I think the assumption has always been that people running Mac OS X and GNU/Linux are content creators/managers, and Windows users are consumers. You don't want to piss off the former two groups.
Others have pointed out the fact that System 6 based Macs (and possibly earlier) had TCP/IP support, albeit through an optional extension (and even without the extension, Macs were running AppleTalk network stacks from day #1 that would have put just as great a load on the machine as TCP/IP.) I'd also point out that computers of comparable power with far more advanced operating systems existed at the time, such as the Amiga. The Amiga had the same responsiveness and speed as the Mac, yet had to do a great deal more on a 15% slower CPU. And no, the blitter didn't make that much of a difference. I ran an A500+ from 1990 to 1996 as my "main" machine, with AmiTCP 2/3 providing networking services, print spoolers, etc, and the thing was more responsive much of the time.
Windows is unarguably far more bloated and far less efficient than what we've had before. Few people care because we've been told not to care.
That's not to argue that Windows doesn't do more, dynamically generated outline fonts would be an example, but it does more in areas that shouldn't mean that a 7-8MHz 68000 running AmigaOS 2 can kick a 1.6GHz Core Duo's ass when running GNU/Linux or Windows. For the most part, a great deal of the bloat seems to derive from the obsession with over-abstraction and building so many layers on top of layers we forget why the bottom-most layers are there.
Except when it isn't. The problem with freedom is it's an inane word with very little meaning. Ultimately we look to it as an ideal rather than as a goal, because it's very difficult to give everyone absolute freedom when one person can use their's to oppress another, removing the freedom from that second group. Perhaps in a hundred years, when we all have virtual reality, we can have "absolute freedom" within that, with everyone free to do whatever they want to their own words without impacting on anyone else's, but until then others have the right to consider curtailing your freedom the moment your actions involve anyone else.
And that's really the catch- people don't want to admit that linux would ever, ever infringe on Microsoft's patents.
You probably haven't been reading much from those criticizing the use of patents within the community. The reality is that we know full well that it's very, very, likely Linux and other GNU components violate numerous Microsoft patents. We know that it's unfair, because those violations for the most part cover independently invented methods, or code implemented for the purpose of interoperability. Which is why we're (the Free Software community) looking for ways to neutralize deals like Novell's. It's not the notion that Microsoft has patents covering GNU/Linux that bothers us, it's the idea that Microsoft should be allowed to enforce them.
OBL has been describing the US as "cowboys" for a very long time. That, too, is part of his rhetoric. It's improbable that he believed a direct attack on the US wouldn't be responded to disproportionately and without direction.
I think the entire aim of 9/11 was to have us undermine the governments of the region by building resentment against those supporting the US, and by toppling those in opposition to the US.
I'd say that saying "fundamental inequality and slavery is the cause of all terrorism" is as simplistic as saying "They hate us because of our freedom."
Let me go off on a minor tangent here, bear with me: The direct purpose of terrorism is to exact a response. The indirect purpose is to use the results of that response, where the results could be any number of things. In the case of 9/11, the clear purpose of the attacks was to cause America to react - nobody could possibly be so stupid as to think the most powerful country on Earth would just ignore thousands of its civilians being killed on its home turf. The only place America was likely to react was the Middle East. Therefore, very likely the purpose of 9/11 was to get the most powerful country on Earth to do a bull-in-a-china-shop act in the Middle East.
Why would OBL want that? OBL's direct aim is not to bring peace and prosperity to Palestine. It's not to ensure oppressed Muslims in Saudi Arabia worship on their own terms rather than the Saudi Royal Family's. It's not to make Afghanistan a modern, wealthy, state able to take care of its citizens. OBL's aim, as expressed repeatedly, is to create an Arab superstate, overthrowing the local governments there, and creating instead a single Islamic nation.
What does any of that have to do with inequality and slavery? Not a great deal. It's all about power, and it's a power struggle between the entrenched incumbent elite and a body that disagrees with them. But the disagreement isn't over the relatively lack of equality, it's a disagreement over an entirely different issue of religious and political significance. Insofar as equality is a factor, OBL feels obliged to use terrorism to achieve his aims because he doesn't have an army.
But if he had an army, he'd use that instead. Equality wouldn't prevent the war, it would just change how its fought. Which isn't really what, I think, you meant.
It's very tempting to look at terrorism as being purely a last resort of the oppressed, but it doesn't always work like that. Terrorism is frequently merely the first resort of those who want power over others, but do not have it yet.
Because Mac OS X is completely, 100%, secure. There are no bugs in it. Therefore, when Apple supposedly releases a patch for vulnerabilities within Mac OS X, they are, in fact, engaging in a giant FUD-wielding conspiracy against themselves. Which just goes to prove that Mac OS X is 100% secure.
At least, that's Apple fanatics keep telling me, alternately modding me down at the same time.
Slashdot Mirror
Rather than hearing gossip from AT&T reps who almost certainly know virtually nothing about the final details of iPhone marketing (the only information I'm aware of them being provided is a brochure that explains how the thing works), why don't we wait until we get official announcements from Apple and AT&T. Not only are these rumors almost certainly based upon speculation and technological ignorance, but even if both Apple and AT&T have provisionally decided to go with them, there's still a strong chance of them changing their minds in the next week or two.
It's not even 100% clear if the iPhone will need a contract at this stage. Apple hastily removed language implying such from the online version of their ads, and AT&T has internal codes set up for selling iPhones with GoPhone plans, according to some reportage. This week we've seen Apple at a high-level flip flopping on various issues, such as the pretense of ZFS in Leopard (initially ruled out, then changed to present in a stripped down form), and the ability of Leopard's bootcamp to be used as a switcher between suspended versions of Windows and Mac OS X.
The final decisions haven't been made yet.
I'm pretty sure RMS would qualify as your (patronizingly put) "few FSF/GNU folks who are militanty pedantic about this kind of thing" wouldn't he?
There are alternatives to all three you know. I've always thought Bruce Perens did a pretty good job of representing both the open-source and free-software communities.
Torvalds is influential because of his success at promoting a single piece of software (the Linux kernel), but he's not even a fan of open-source or free-software, making often pseudo-pragmatic decisions (such as the terrible BitKeeper fiasco) that go against the grain of what the communities want and need. His attitude to the GPLv3 process was singularly unconstructive and divisive.
I'd rather see someone who actually supports the aims of the FS/OSS communities be heralded as a good representative. For all their faults, RMS and ESR do at least try, and Perens seems to actually do a good job of it, getting the message out without being exclusionary and alienating. Torvalds may be less abrasive than RMS or ESR, but he doesn't support the aims of the movement, and he's still exclusionary and alienating, just less so.
It really isn't a smartphone. I know Jobs said it was, but smartphones really fill a different niche. iPhone is exactly what it sounds like - what a consumer phone would look like if built by Apple. It's a multimedia communications device. It isn't a way to keep in touch with the office. It isn't something to use for data collection, or to solve engineering problems. It's emphatically not a pocket computer, or a "smartphone" with the integrated computer-phone features that implies. The competitors to the iPhone include the RAZR and the Sidekick. They do not include the Nokia N95 or the Treo.
Once you understand that Jobs used the wrong word, it's a lot easier to understand why the iPhone isn't programmable.
Yeah yeah, except for the small fact that ZFS support for Mac OS X benefits Mac users and Apple, not Sun. Sun is the developer of the technology, but they're giving it away for free. Jobs would be an idiot to reject ZFS simply because Sun "pre-announced" it.
The reality is more likely to be that the Mac OS X/XNU implementation of ZFS just wasn't ready yet. It's a powerful, complex, system. Even without UI work to abstract things like drive pools to the user in a friendly way, the basic implementation requires heavier testing than usual.
The current Leopard beta has a read-only ZFS implementation built-in. Looks like it's still under development to me.
You went to the effort to prove something that's explained by Maynor in the very video you're claiming to debunk? Wow, what a complete waste of time.
In order to "fake" something, you have to pretend that it's something it isn't. Maynor was, in fact, perfectly open from the beginning about the use of a third party Wifi device. There was no attempt to mislead - from him. There were, on the other hand, hoards of people who lied or repeated lies about what he did, claiming that he lied when he clearly didn't. Only a few, apparently not including yourself, have had the decency to withdraw the lie.
The guy was subject to a character assassination campaign orchestrated by Apple's PR department after the original Wifi bug revelation. I don't think, personally, he owes Apple anything.
I'm using it on my work PC, running a fairly standard Windows XP SP2 install, and tried both the version with Quicktime and the version without. Both versions crash on startup, with the problem being - according to Microsoft's Visual C++ debugger - an illegal instruction on COREGRAPHICS.DLL.
It might just be my PC, or it might be an AMDism (I'm using a 1GHz AMD Athlon.) Anyone getting similar results?
Yes, because Sun would be so upset if someone used their free software in another free software operating system. Or if someone put another free operating system's code in their free operating system.
I don't think so. That really doesn't make a lot of sense. Sun presumably wants the best operating system it can get, and if that's a frankenstein-like Linux/SunOS hybrid, then that's what they want.
Doesn't matter in the slightest. Copyright law isn't about creating the same solution to a problem, as patents are, it's about copying a solution.
If you and I both independently, without reference to one-another's (or someone else's) work, write identical code, neither of us are in breach of copyright law. Though, of course, the more unlikely the co-incidence, the more difficult it is to defend yourself in court against an allegation of copyright infringement.
Everyone claims this, yet I've entered the US about five times in the last ten years, and gone through the green card process (which is supposedly notorious), and in that time I've never met a single immigration officer who was in any way unhelpful, rude, or overly invasive in his or her questioning. (In fact, the guy who did the green card interview was positively pleasant, and I've kept the two letters I received from the INS, one from him, one their "standard form letter", which were absolutely beautiful.)
Am I just very lucky, or is the stereotype overblown?
I doubt it'll make that big a difference. Most phones outside of the US are GSM, with a small proportion of those being UMTS. Qualcomm makes some UMTS chips, but doesn't have the same kind of marketshare with them as it does with CDMA2000 chipsets. To the best of my knowledge, there are no basic 2G GSM phones with Qualcomm chipsets. And UMTS phones from outside the US generally don't support the frequencies used within the US for 3G, making bringing an expensive UMTS phone to the US more trouble than it's worth (you'll get basic GSM only, and then probably only on 1900MHz.)
Unless you're from one of the few places in the world that still uses CDMA2000, you're most likely to bring a phone into the US that is GSM only, and Qualcomm free.
AT&T is rolling out UMTS, including HSDPA, at the moment, and Jobs has promised a 3G version of the phone is coming, so I wouldn't worry too much about the lack of EV-DO support.
FWIW, depending on what you read, Apple has committed to offering the iPhone to AT&T for the next two-five years exclusively of any other US carrier. So if you're hoping that a Verizon version is in the works, well, it isn't.
AT&T's network is poor at the moment because it's a botch of old analog and D-AMPS towers all now running GSM which has significantly different tower requirements. They now have a great deal of 3G spectrum, and are likely to overcome most of the problems they've had over the next two years, so don't expect AT&T's current poor performance to last very long, or be relevent when the 3G version of the iPhone appears.
I see it more aimed at the Sidekick crowd. Right now, it's unlikely Apple is going to offer more than "widget style" programming for the device, and it doesn't really connect to corporate mail systems. The type of people who want a Treo or Blackberry for that Organizer/business connectivity type environment are going to be put off by a device primarily aimed at multimedia and web browsing.
People (and I include myself) got too hung up on Jobs describing the thing as a "smartphone". It isn't really. It's a really, really, awesome multimedia phone. It's what the ROKR should have been. It's what you get if you take what the ROKR was supposed to be, marry it to what the Sidekick is supposed to be, and do it really, really, well. (Well, assuming it's as good as it's cracked up to be.)
Could have sworn TOS/GEM was largely written in PL/M, though obviously there was plenty of support for C programming. That said, the criticisms of the OS have to do with its sparse set of features (it was ultimately an updated version of CP/M, with features added from MSDOS, and with the Mac-like GEM front-end added), rather than how well documented it was.
The Apple lawsuits had no effect on Atari's GEM, which was effectively a fork Atari was responsible for. Digital Research had to cripple the PC version. Both PC and ST versions had "overlapping windows", the fixes were more that the GEM2 file management Desktop (ie Finder replacement) had fixed windows for viewing files (but this only affected that one "application"), ordinary applications were allowed to overlap whatever windows they wanted.
When you start off behind in some areas, but not in others, and in the "others" you can only ever be ahead of the rest. OpenOffice.org's Mac port is at an early stage at the moment, so it implements all of the latest version of OpenOffice.org (by definition) but not all of the Mac native subsystem. NeoOffice includes a complete Mac native subsystem, but not all of the features of the latest version of OpenOffice.org. As time goes by, because making OpenOffice.org native is a discrete, completable, task, OpenOffice.org will catch up with the part of NeoOffice it currently lags behind, but NeoOffice cannot catch up with OpenOffice.org (unless OpenOffice.org ceases to update.)
Does that make sense to you?
This is a genuine native port, NeoOffice uses a Java intermediate layer to present the UI to Mac OS X.
As I understand it, they're not working with the NeoOffice people, there's always been a little friction between the groups.
In time, this project is likely to overtake NeoOffice, simply because changes to OpenOffice.org will always be faster than those in NeoOffice, which is in a continual state of catch-up.
I'm bewildered by the number of Slashdot people who seriously believe that virtually everyone is "unhappy" with their cellphones. It gets even more laughable when you consider the common thread amongst those who criticise cellphones on Slashdot tends to be that they're too functional, a constituency that isn't going to be in any way satisfied by an expensive multifunctional touch-screen controlled cellphone.
FWIW, I love my Motorola V635. My wife loves her RIZR. My "friend I talk about phones to alot" loves his Nokia 3220. My wife's sister's MiL loves her Samsung something-or-other she was showing us this weekend.
Right now, amongst the flesh and blood people I talk to about such things, I don't know anyone who doesn't like their phone. And I can think of many reasons why they wouldn't like the iPhone.
The funny thing is that it's only ever been the Windows versions of RealPlayer and RealOne that have been crapware. The GNU/Linux and Mac OS X versions have always been beautifully minimalist.
I think the assumption has always been that people running Mac OS X and GNU/Linux are content creators/managers, and Windows users are consumers. You don't want to piss off the former two groups.
Yeah, because gay men never marry and have children to "fit in". There are no recorded cases in history of gay men with children.
More seriously, I'm wondering how stupid, or simply cut-off from the real world, you have to be to make that kind of comment.
Others have pointed out the fact that System 6 based Macs (and possibly earlier) had TCP/IP support, albeit through an optional extension (and even without the extension, Macs were running AppleTalk network stacks from day #1 that would have put just as great a load on the machine as TCP/IP.) I'd also point out that computers of comparable power with far more advanced operating systems existed at the time, such as the Amiga. The Amiga had the same responsiveness and speed as the Mac, yet had to do a great deal more on a 15% slower CPU. And no, the blitter didn't make that much of a difference. I ran an A500+ from 1990 to 1996 as my "main" machine, with AmiTCP 2/3 providing networking services, print spoolers, etc, and the thing was more responsive much of the time.
Windows is unarguably far more bloated and far less efficient than what we've had before. Few people care because we've been told not to care.
That's not to argue that Windows doesn't do more, dynamically generated outline fonts would be an example, but it does more in areas that shouldn't mean that a 7-8MHz 68000 running AmigaOS 2 can kick a 1.6GHz Core Duo's ass when running GNU/Linux or Windows. For the most part, a great deal of the bloat seems to derive from the obsession with over-abstraction and building so many layers on top of layers we forget why the bottom-most layers are there.
Except when it isn't. The problem with freedom is it's an inane word with very little meaning. Ultimately we look to it as an ideal rather than as a goal, because it's very difficult to give everyone absolute freedom when one person can use their's to oppress another, removing the freedom from that second group. Perhaps in a hundred years, when we all have virtual reality, we can have "absolute freedom" within that, with everyone free to do whatever they want to their own words without impacting on anyone else's, but until then others have the right to consider curtailing your freedom the moment your actions involve anyone else.
You probably haven't been reading much from those criticizing the use of patents within the community. The reality is that we know full well that it's very, very, likely Linux and other GNU components violate numerous Microsoft patents. We know that it's unfair, because those violations for the most part cover independently invented methods, or code implemented for the purpose of interoperability. Which is why we're (the Free Software community) looking for ways to neutralize deals like Novell's. It's not the notion that Microsoft has patents covering GNU/Linux that bothers us, it's the idea that Microsoft should be allowed to enforce them.
OBL has been describing the US as "cowboys" for a very long time. That, too, is part of his rhetoric. It's improbable that he believed a direct attack on the US wouldn't be responded to disproportionately and without direction.
I think the entire aim of 9/11 was to have us undermine the governments of the region by building resentment against those supporting the US, and by toppling those in opposition to the US.
I'd say that saying "fundamental inequality and slavery is the cause of all terrorism" is as simplistic as saying "They hate us because of our freedom."
Let me go off on a minor tangent here, bear with me: The direct purpose of terrorism is to exact a response. The indirect purpose is to use the results of that response, where the results could be any number of things. In the case of 9/11, the clear purpose of the attacks was to cause America to react - nobody could possibly be so stupid as to think the most powerful country on Earth would just ignore thousands of its civilians being killed on its home turf. The only place America was likely to react was the Middle East. Therefore, very likely the purpose of 9/11 was to get the most powerful country on Earth to do a bull-in-a-china-shop act in the Middle East.
Why would OBL want that? OBL's direct aim is not to bring peace and prosperity to Palestine. It's not to ensure oppressed Muslims in Saudi Arabia worship on their own terms rather than the Saudi Royal Family's. It's not to make Afghanistan a modern, wealthy, state able to take care of its citizens. OBL's aim, as expressed repeatedly, is to create an Arab superstate, overthrowing the local governments there, and creating instead a single Islamic nation.
What does any of that have to do with inequality and slavery? Not a great deal. It's all about power, and it's a power struggle between the entrenched incumbent elite and a body that disagrees with them. But the disagreement isn't over the relatively lack of equality, it's a disagreement over an entirely different issue of religious and political significance. Insofar as equality is a factor, OBL feels obliged to use terrorism to achieve his aims because he doesn't have an army.
But if he had an army, he'd use that instead. Equality wouldn't prevent the war, it would just change how its fought. Which isn't really what, I think, you meant.
It's very tempting to look at terrorism as being purely a last resort of the oppressed, but it doesn't always work like that. Terrorism is frequently merely the first resort of those who want power over others, but do not have it yet.
Because Mac OS X is completely, 100%, secure. There are no bugs in it. Therefore, when Apple supposedly releases a patch for vulnerabilities within Mac OS X, they are, in fact, engaging in a giant FUD-wielding conspiracy against themselves. Which just goes to prove that Mac OS X is 100% secure.
At least, that's Apple fanatics keep telling me, alternately modding me down at the same time.