I hate car analogies, but I think the parent (it's an AC post if you're reading at +1 with ACs at zero or below) is better than the grandparent.
I really don't understand the logic here. Yes, the kids did something wrong. They should be disciplined within the school's disciplinary system, and should have their access to the laptops removed. The school itself should also be working out why this happened, and doing something about it. But felony charges? That's completely unnecessary, it's overkill, and it's an utter waste of taxpayer's money.
One thing that baffles me is why the school returned the laptops, password changed or no password changed, after "previous offenses". Once it was proven the kids were abusing school equipment, wouldn't it have made more sense to require they stay in school under supervision when using replacement equipment? I'm not claiming the kids aren't in the wrong, it's just, well, dumb.
he 'base station' is registered with a GSM network because it uses GSM network components to support billing. Basically it terminates a GSM Gb interterface (which is another way of saying that it looks to a GSM network like a GPRS node), and voice (or other data) is carried as IP packets terminating at an SGSN.
I still don't really understand this. No GSM (that is, unencapsulated information, as opposed to data encapsulated in IP packets) information is terminated at the WAP, from what I can see. The WAP merely transfers IP packets to and from the handset, and to and from the Internet. The IP packets aren't decoded until they get to the network operator's network.
If this isn't the case, and the base station really is interpreting the IP packets, then that seems to be a waste as there doesn't appear to be any reason to do so.
No, in most juristictions, it's illegal to operate your own base station on any of the frequencies supported by GSM (850, 900, 1800, and 1900MHz, I think 450MHz is coming on stream in various places too. But that's also a problem.)
However, there's a new system called UMA that tunnels the GSM protocols through an IP connection provided by either an 802.11 base station or some form of bluetooth receiver. The system has some limitations in its present form, the major ones being:
Few carriers support it. In the US, practically none do.
Few phones are available that support it. In theory, most bluetooth supporting phones could be made to support it with a firmware update. But that's not likely to happen. I know the UK version of Motorola's RAZR V3 now supports the feature, but it's in a small class of phones and the US version doesn't yet.
Each "base station" has to be registered by the GSM operator, I have NO IDEA why. That means plain old open WAPs in malls wouldn't provide a solution to poor coverage inside them, for instance, and you (probably) couldn't use the system to defeat roaming charges by using a Starbucks WiFi connection in the UK with your Cingular phone.
It also isn't exactly what you've asked for. It's largely seen as a system to help phone users improve their reception and reduce their dependence on the capacity of the wide range GSM network. It's designed to be seamless, you can start a call on the 802.11 network, step "out of range", and the call will transfer to a nearby GSM tower just as it would if you were going out of range of any other GSM tower.
By comparison, it looks like you're just after a way to turn a GSM phone into a cordless handset.
I've covered the system in my journal. It'd be nice to see it better supported, and to see other standards also adopt it such as the CDMA ones. Much of the issues of capacity and poor reception would be dealt with if the system became a standard part of most people's mobile phones.
If it's because of major limiting factors, such as enormous amounts of energy being used, that would make it impractical to produce in high quantities, then we're limited in applications in the real world.
Gold is a great material. You can probably think of a million applications for this metal that almost never rusts and has great electrical conductivity. But the practical limitations imposed by its scarcity and, hence, high cost, means we have to use it sparingly and can't really build any major applications that rely upon the stuff.
The issue is maximum payload, not how many vehicles. The "best" designs so far, that is, the ones that envisage a "safe" elevator that, if cut at the top, will not cause the end of civilization as we know it, can only carry a few tens of pounds of weight. That's a total, not a per-vehicle value. And that small wieght has to travel a distance of over 50,000 miles. You can imagine the time that'll take. Realistically, we're looking at over a week for that small amount of mass to travel the entire length of the tether.
Now, that's not to say the GP is right. At the moment, the investment needed would be astronomic, but we don't know how much this will run long term, and a country that already has a space program and regularly launches satellites may find it works out cheaper in the long term to build such a thing, at least, once the price of mass producing materials strong enough to be used in one comes down.
The other response incidentally is largely wrong. One major advantage of an elevator is you can use it to trap the energy of something coming back down. For launching satellites, the elevator may be uneconomic, for more far sighted applications, such as returning materials mined from elsewhere, it will be more than economic. Of course, just as we're a long way from having a practical material to build an elevator from, we're also a long way from mining asteroids.
First, let me say that I think this entire debate is couched in too simplistic terms. If I cheat at poker, then it's certainly possible to envisage a situation where I'd be charged with fraud. That said, this is a computer game and the scope of the computer game is supposed to be the game itself, even if people do sell imaginary items from it on eBay.
On the subject of your analogy though: if you mug people in the real world, you end up jailed.
Perhaps the game would be fairer and work correctly if it happened that when your imaginary character imaginarily mugged another imaginary person, it was put in an imaginary jail.
As others have pointed out, DiDio didn't have anything to do with the attacks on PJ's privacy, that was Maureen O'Gara. However, she was criticised by the Noorda family (who at one point part owned SCO as part of Canopy, but by all accounts were not responsible for what was going on, ultimately causing a falling out that lead Ralph Yarrow to take over SCO and Canopy's interest in SCO) for sloppy and inaccurate speculation about the deaths of family members:
But the journalistic integrity of any publication is defeated when articles, such as those recently appearing in the Salt Lake Tribune, include quotes from "analysts" who are completely misleading and just plain wrong about nearly every fact and interpretation. When the information provided by analysts like Rob Enderle and Laura DiDio weren't incorrect, their statements represented speculation more fitting to a daytime soap opera than to the business section of a newspaper.
-- Brent Noorda
Some feel DiDio took her apparent anti-open source agenda too far with a series of snide pot-shots at the various enemies of SCO that hit below the belt. So while she may not have performed the same actions as O'Gara, she certainly seems to belong to the same club. There are journalists, and then there are advocates who masquerade as journalists. Once someone feels the need to travel down a path that leads only to slander and other personal attacks on individuals who happen to be "on the other side", whether you're a cheap technology journalist like DiDio or O'Gara, or a successful political hack like Robert Novak, your credibility is ruined.
DiDio would do well to ask herself if she wants to be a columnist or a journalist. And if the latter, she'd probably do well to move to a different industry.
I'm guessing that Apple would have had to give Xerox something in return for being able to use Xerox's technology. Maybe a crapload of stock, for instance.
Essentially, in other words, exactly what happened...
The rule in the US is not "first to publish" or "first to ship" but "First to invent". If Microsoft proved they "invented" the iPod UI before Apple did, then they get the patent.
If it were the opposite way around, then you couldn't have companies patent things and never publish anything other than the patent. Hmmm. That makes far too much sense.
They didn't. They ruled that Microsoft has the right to charge (anyone) a license fee for each (device that contains technology covered by the patent) sold (or even to prevent others from selling devices containing the technologies concerned at all.) They did this by saying the magic words "Patent granted!"
Sky's interpretation is a little more specific, but is nonetheless accurate. Your interpretation of Sky's interpretation, however, is flawed. The Patent Office has not said Apple needs to pay a license fee. They've merely said that Microsoft has the right to charge one. It's up to Microsoft, at this point, if Apple needs to pay a license fee.
As responses goes, that has to be the most useless I've seen. Do you seriously think I'd be asking if I hadn't tried them?
Google finds nothing authorative. The EFF site says nothing. Nor does the FSF's, or the OSI's. Nobody's responded to my JE asking for information either.
I assume you know this, otherwise you'd have actually put a link in rather than "try the EFF". It's just plain not out there. I'm beginning to wonder if this is actually all some elaborate hoax, and Moglen said nothing whatsoever.
In any case, responding to a lament that information isn't available by suggesting I personally talk to Eben Moglen, then asking me to look at a website that has nothing about the subject on it, is bizarre. Quite bizarre. What would you like me to check next? Oh! Oh! I know, Wikipedia, right? I mean, that's right up there after Google, huh?
Now you're beginning to understand. And we'll shut down that one. And the next one, and the next. Until he gives up.
Kind of like ISP accounts. Except there are a limited number of ISPs so sooner or later a spammer "ISP hopping" has to resort to underhand tactics to get an account.
Domains, on the other hand, these days are pretty much throw-away. Register.com, GoDaddy, etc, will happily sell you any domain for a few dollars.
So I don't think your response is really that helpful. I'm pretty sure that, in the great scheme of things, spammers don't care.
The idea of flooding spammers with purchase requests that are bogus strikes me as a rational idea though. In the end, that makes their websites useless. I like that, though as I've said before, there are actual anti-spam systems that work, or would if the antispam lunatics weren't so keen on banning them. (Like the old trick of setting up an incoming email address for every entity you do business with. Destroys the incentive to sell email addresses if the moment you do so, you can't do business with the person whose email address you sold. Unfortunately that generally requires control over your SMTP server to do that, and fuckwit idiot moron antispammers are trying to prevent people from doing that.)
First, the Mac OS X installer is, in some senses, a Live CD. It doesn't run the Finder, but it does run a significant amount of the rest of the OS, including the GUI. It's horrible. It's increadibly slow. OS X is heavily dependent on the underlying file system and uses such a large amount of it and RAM that it's hard to see what it could do in terms of RAM caching to run at an acceptable level.
Additionally, disabling the features you mention might seem like it makes sense because a user will be unable to make practical use of any of them, but at the same time, the whole "You burn CDs by inserting a blank" thing is part of the user experience. The address books, calenders, etc, are also supposed to be a part of that.
Finally, hardware support being what it is, users will find themselves unimpressed, in the majority of cases, with many of OS X's "strengths". Can you imagine the impact if the vast majority of people who use OS X see it on an unaccelerated graphics card (unaccelerated because, well, Apple doesn't support many cards.)
I used to run Jaguar on a Beige G3, which has an "ATI Rage Pro" inside with a whole 6 megs of graphics RAM. It crawled. It wasn't until I added a Radeon that the thing became a joy to use.
The alternative is probably for Apple to have the live CD refuse to boot on systems with unsupported graphics cards. But that will lock out probably the majority of users, and most of us, experiencing a "Your hardware is not good enough to run this program" type messages, usually end up getting pissed at the vendor.
Neither solution helps Apple in the majority of cases.
Apple is probably better off releasing a "Live CD" comprising of giant, full screen, AVI of OS X in use...
"Windows" was designed from the ground-up as a single user system, but Windows NT wasn't. Microsoft discontinued Windows some time ago. The current operating systems are versions of Windows NT which shares a name and an API but practically nothing else with Windows.
Talk to Eben Moglen - he laid it out at LinuxWorld.
Alas, I wasn't at LinuxWorld, and I've never met Eben Moglen and am highly unlikely to encounter him at any point soon. Nor, FWIW, would most Slashdot readers be in a better position than I on this matter. And I suspect if you were to post Eben's phone number so I can talk to him, he'd be a little pissed if he had to explain the same thing over and over again to all 800,000 registered readers of this fine website.
I'm kind of of the opinion a website or something similar would be a good idea. Your general outline is interesting but not exactly informative. It's fairly short on details. Who? What? How?
I think this is the story. If you "View Source" the Slashdot article, you see this link at the end (one of these <a href="blah"></a> things that doesn't result in a usable, or visible, link.)
Electricity isn't exactly expensive, even in California. Compare it to gasoline, which isn't utiliticized (is that a word? It is now!) - people who've done the car electric-conversion jobs talk about their vehicles costing pennies a day in electricity against dollars a day in gasoline. Some of that's better efficiency ("braking" by turning your engine into a generator), but it can't all be that.
Gas can't be that expensive either otherwise I'm sure people would be fueling their homes from propane tanks or avoiding piped gas altogether.
I personally doubt that just having a patent commons is going to be all that helpful once Microsoft starts suing OSS people
If you don't have any ideas of your own to bring to the table, why don't you just... (ahem)
Seriously, there's no problem with someone saying "Look, this isn't going to work, well intentioned though it might be." Perens, like Stallman, Raymond, et al, may be a bit of blowhard, but he still can say something and people will write about it in the press, so actually, if we're going in the wrong direction, I'd like people like him to speak up.
It'd be interesting to see someone actually link to this project though. Slashdot seems to have absolutely nothing on this supposedly great idea. Numerous people have suggested that Perens is only commenting on one small part of it, but where's the rest?
Yeah, but only if "I" happen to be Apple, or IBM, or Microsoft...
Er, yeah, well no, just Apple. Y'know, like we were talking about? I don't know where you and the other person who responded to me was when this subthread started, but the context of this is someone alleging Microsoft is going to sue Apple, the rejoiner being Microsoft's comment:
We have a long-standing practice of licensing things to Apple and licensing Apple's patents to use in our products," Kaefer said. "Our approach is to recognize that, frankly, we're both mutually dependent on the good ideas of one another.
The person I was responding to characterized that comment as:
That's like saying, well, just trust us to stand in your house with a gas can and a lighter after we got out prison for arson. We'll be good, we promise.
Perhaps you and Daniel Philips would like to learn a little about "context" next time? You may prefer the "gas can" analogy, but it remains utterly stupid in the context of how Microsoft is going to treat Apple.
It isn't. It's more like saying "You can trust us to keep our gun holsted, at least, while your gun's holstered too."
Both Apple and Microsoft have legions of patents they can use against one another. The last thing either wants to do is start a patent war. Neither is going to "fire first", neither has incentive to.
As others have pointed out, Xerox got a lot of Apple stock in exchange for the technology, so they weren't "ripped off" by any definition of the term.
Additionally, Apple deserves some of the credit for turning a bundle of ideas at Xerox which, while implemented and eventually released as a commercial product, were far from "production ready". Apple invented the Desktop metaphor, spacial browsing and the iconic file management environment, overlapping windows, the double-click (for better or worse;), dragging, and dragged drop-down menus (where you point at the menu, put the mouse button down, see the menu appear, move the mouse to point at the option, and release the mouse button)
Some of these would probably still have been invented had Apple not done so. But Xerox didn't do it, Apple did, and Microsoft (and Digital Research and Commodore, and the GEOS people, and I guess the later groups who implemented what they did) for the most part did look at Apple's ideas, say, "Hey, that's cool! Let's use that!" and implemented their own versions of the same stuff.
I refuse to use the words "ripped off" or "stole" or even "copied" for the most part when applied to independent implementations of the same idea because I feel it's inappropriate and liable to be confused with copy-infringment. Early versions of Windows used relatively few of Apple's concepts and were a serious attempt to create a GUI from the ground up. Those who saw the internals of AmigaOS and GEM know that there was little resemblance between those operating systems and Apple's beyond the superficial, particularly in the case of the former where, in many ways, AmigaOS was how MacOS should have worked but never did. Jay Miner et al and Metacomco built a GUI that integrated very well with an underlying multitasking OS, that included a "Desktop" because, well, Apple did a great job of showing the idea was the way forward, and overlapping windows etc because a multitasking OS ought to have them.
All of which said, Apple genuinely innovated. It didn't "rip off" Xerox, and wouldn't have done so even if Xerox hadn't received a cent for Apple's work. Xerox built some nice prototypes. The concepts of icons and windows and pointing at things came from there. Apple used those concepts to build something fairly special. To use an analogy, Xerox built a weather-proof box out of bricks, wood, shingles, and drywall. Apple invented doors and windows and built the first house. A lot of people saw these "houses", and wanted to build their own, ones that fit them. Like Apple's, they included windows, doors, bathrooms, etc, but that didn't make them copies.
I hope you're correct, but I'm reading more than you are, and I'm bothered by it:
...for the sole purpose of identifying and analyzing those elements of the program that are necessary to achieve interoperability of
an independently created computer program with other programs, and that have not previously been readily available to the person engaging in the circumvention, to the extent any such acts of identification and analysis do not constitute infringement under this title.
What other programs are we talking about? Are FairPlay files "programs" for these purposes, or am I reading the above incorrectly?
So Mises is essentially advocating that spectrum be parcelled out, provided on a first-come-first-served basis, like we have land?
I wonder how many people would support such a system. It's be difficult, for example, to see 802.11 working in a context where someone might actually have land-grabbed 2.4GHz in a particular area. Companies producing equipment would have to cater for an environment in which the most optimal frequency might be 88MHz in one area, and 5.8GHz in another. Costs would rocket. Broadcast services, as we know them, would probably disappear. The best scenario I can see arising from this is the government using eminent domain to evict operators from certain frequencies to allow other applications to work, and that's not exactly legally black and white, and probably something those advocating such an awful state of affairs would oppose anyway.
I think what they're advocating is wholly against the public interest. If this is the answer to the FCC, let the FCC continue.
Slashdot Mirror
I really don't understand the logic here. Yes, the kids did something wrong. They should be disciplined within the school's disciplinary system, and should have their access to the laptops removed. The school itself should also be working out why this happened, and doing something about it. But felony charges? That's completely unnecessary, it's overkill, and it's an utter waste of taxpayer's money.
One thing that baffles me is why the school returned the laptops, password changed or no password changed, after "previous offenses". Once it was proven the kids were abusing school equipment, wouldn't it have made more sense to require they stay in school under supervision when using replacement equipment? I'm not claiming the kids aren't in the wrong, it's just, well, dumb.
If this isn't the case, and the base station really is interpreting the IP packets, then that seems to be a waste as there doesn't appear to be any reason to do so.
No, in most juristictions, it's illegal to operate your own base station on any of the frequencies supported by GSM (850, 900, 1800, and 1900MHz, I think 450MHz is coming on stream in various places too. But that's also a problem.)
However, there's a new system called UMA that tunnels the GSM protocols through an IP connection provided by either an 802.11 base station or some form of bluetooth receiver. The system has some limitations in its present form, the major ones being:
- Few carriers support it. In the US, practically none do.
- Few phones are available that support it. In theory, most bluetooth supporting phones could be made to support it with a firmware update. But that's not likely to happen. I know the UK version of Motorola's RAZR V3 now supports the feature, but it's in a small class of phones and the US version doesn't yet.
- Each "base station" has to be registered by the GSM operator, I have NO IDEA why. That means plain old open WAPs in malls wouldn't provide a solution to poor coverage inside them, for instance, and you (probably) couldn't use the system to defeat roaming charges by using a Starbucks WiFi connection in the UK with your Cingular phone.
It also isn't exactly what you've asked for. It's largely seen as a system to help phone users improve their reception and reduce their dependence on the capacity of the wide range GSM network. It's designed to be seamless, you can start a call on the 802.11 network, step "out of range", and the call will transfer to a nearby GSM tower just as it would if you were going out of range of any other GSM tower.By comparison, it looks like you're just after a way to turn a GSM phone into a cordless handset.
I've covered the system in my journal. It'd be nice to see it better supported, and to see other standards also adopt it such as the CDMA ones. Much of the issues of capacity and poor reception would be dealt with if the system became a standard part of most people's mobile phones.
Not seeing where you're contradicting me, unless you meant the bit at the end about going back down that even you appear to disagree with.
If it's because of major limiting factors, such as enormous amounts of energy being used, that would make it impractical to produce in high quantities, then we're limited in applications in the real world.
Gold is a great material. You can probably think of a million applications for this metal that almost never rusts and has great electrical conductivity. But the practical limitations imposed by its scarcity and, hence, high cost, means we have to use it sparingly and can't really build any major applications that rely upon the stuff.
Now, that's not to say the GP is right. At the moment, the investment needed would be astronomic, but we don't know how much this will run long term, and a country that already has a space program and regularly launches satellites may find it works out cheaper in the long term to build such a thing, at least, once the price of mass producing materials strong enough to be used in one comes down.
The other response incidentally is largely wrong. One major advantage of an elevator is you can use it to trap the energy of something coming back down. For launching satellites, the elevator may be uneconomic, for more far sighted applications, such as returning materials mined from elsewhere, it will be more than economic. Of course, just as we're a long way from having a practical material to build an elevator from, we're also a long way from mining asteroids.
On the subject of your analogy though: if you mug people in the real world, you end up jailed.
Perhaps the game would be fairer and work correctly if it happened that when your imaginary character imaginarily mugged another imaginary person, it was put in an imaginary jail.
Some feel DiDio took her apparent anti-open source agenda too far with a series of snide pot-shots at the various enemies of SCO that hit below the belt. So while she may not have performed the same actions as O'Gara, she certainly seems to belong to the same club. There are journalists, and then there are advocates who masquerade as journalists. Once someone feels the need to travel down a path that leads only to slander and other personal attacks on individuals who happen to be "on the other side", whether you're a cheap technology journalist like DiDio or O'Gara, or a successful political hack like Robert Novak, your credibility is ruined.
DiDio would do well to ask herself if she wants to be a columnist or a journalist. And if the latter, she'd probably do well to move to a different industry.
Essentially, in other words, exactly what happened...
If it were the opposite way around, then you couldn't have companies patent things and never publish anything other than the patent. Hmmm. That makes far too much sense.
Sky's interpretation is a little more specific, but is nonetheless accurate. Your interpretation of Sky's interpretation, however, is flawed. The Patent Office has not said Apple needs to pay a license fee. They've merely said that Microsoft has the right to charge one. It's up to Microsoft, at this point, if Apple needs to pay a license fee.
Google finds nothing authorative. The EFF site says nothing. Nor does the FSF's, or the OSI's. Nobody's responded to my JE asking for information either.
I assume you know this, otherwise you'd have actually put a link in rather than "try the EFF". It's just plain not out there. I'm beginning to wonder if this is actually all some elaborate hoax, and Moglen said nothing whatsoever.
In any case, responding to a lament that information isn't available by suggesting I personally talk to Eben Moglen, then asking me to look at a website that has nothing about the subject on it, is bizarre. Quite bizarre. What would you like me to check next? Oh! Oh! I know, Wikipedia, right? I mean, that's right up there after Google, huh?
Domains, on the other hand, these days are pretty much throw-away. Register.com, GoDaddy, etc, will happily sell you any domain for a few dollars.
So I don't think your response is really that helpful. I'm pretty sure that, in the great scheme of things, spammers don't care.
The idea of flooding spammers with purchase requests that are bogus strikes me as a rational idea though. In the end, that makes their websites useless. I like that, though as I've said before, there are actual anti-spam systems that work, or would if the antispam lunatics weren't so keen on banning them. (Like the old trick of setting up an incoming email address for every entity you do business with. Destroys the incentive to sell email addresses if the moment you do so, you can't do business with the person whose email address you sold. Unfortunately that generally requires control over your SMTP server to do that, and fuckwit idiot moron antispammers are trying to prevent people from doing that.)
First, the Mac OS X installer is, in some senses, a Live CD. It doesn't run the Finder, but it does run a significant amount of the rest of the OS, including the GUI. It's horrible. It's increadibly slow. OS X is heavily dependent on the underlying file system and uses such a large amount of it and RAM that it's hard to see what it could do in terms of RAM caching to run at an acceptable level.
Additionally, disabling the features you mention might seem like it makes sense because a user will be unable to make practical use of any of them, but at the same time, the whole "You burn CDs by inserting a blank" thing is part of the user experience. The address books, calenders, etc, are also supposed to be a part of that.
Finally, hardware support being what it is, users will find themselves unimpressed, in the majority of cases, with many of OS X's "strengths". Can you imagine the impact if the vast majority of people who use OS X see it on an unaccelerated graphics card (unaccelerated because, well, Apple doesn't support many cards.)
I used to run Jaguar on a Beige G3, which has an "ATI Rage Pro" inside with a whole 6 megs of graphics RAM. It crawled. It wasn't until I added a Radeon that the thing became a joy to use.
The alternative is probably for Apple to have the live CD refuse to boot on systems with unsupported graphics cards. But that will lock out probably the majority of users, and most of us, experiencing a "Your hardware is not good enough to run this program" type messages, usually end up getting pissed at the vendor.
Neither solution helps Apple in the majority of cases.
Apple is probably better off releasing a "Live CD" comprising of giant, full screen, AVI of OS X in use...
"Windows" was designed from the ground-up as a single user system, but Windows NT wasn't. Microsoft discontinued Windows some time ago. The current operating systems are versions of Windows NT which shares a name and an API but practically nothing else with Windows.
I'm kind of of the opinion a website or something similar would be a good idea. Your general outline is interesting but not exactly informative. It's fairly short on details. Who? What? How?
I think this is the story. If you "View Source" the Slashdot article, you see this link at the end (one of these <a href="blah"></a> things that doesn't result in a usable, or visible, link.)
Gas can't be that expensive either otherwise I'm sure people would be fueling their homes from propane tanks or avoiding piped gas altogether.
Seriously, there's no problem with someone saying "Look, this isn't going to work, well intentioned though it might be." Perens, like Stallman, Raymond, et al, may be a bit of blowhard, but he still can say something and people will write about it in the press, so actually, if we're going in the wrong direction, I'd like people like him to speak up.
It'd be interesting to see someone actually link to this project though. Slashdot seems to have absolutely nothing on this supposedly great idea. Numerous people have suggested that Perens is only commenting on one small part of it, but where's the rest?
Both Apple and Microsoft have legions of patents they can use against one another. The last thing either wants to do is start a patent war. Neither is going to "fire first", neither has incentive to.
Additionally, Apple deserves some of the credit for turning a bundle of ideas at Xerox which, while implemented and eventually released as a commercial product, were far from "production ready". Apple invented the Desktop metaphor, spacial browsing and the iconic file management environment, overlapping windows, the double-click (for better or worse ;), dragging, and dragged drop-down menus (where you point at the menu, put the mouse button down, see the menu appear, move the mouse to point at the option, and release the mouse button)
Some of these would probably still have been invented had Apple not done so. But Xerox didn't do it, Apple did, and Microsoft (and Digital Research and Commodore, and the GEOS people, and I guess the later groups who implemented what they did) for the most part did look at Apple's ideas, say, "Hey, that's cool! Let's use that!" and implemented their own versions of the same stuff.
I refuse to use the words "ripped off" or "stole" or even "copied" for the most part when applied to independent implementations of the same idea because I feel it's inappropriate and liable to be confused with copy-infringment. Early versions of Windows used relatively few of Apple's concepts and were a serious attempt to create a GUI from the ground up. Those who saw the internals of AmigaOS and GEM know that there was little resemblance between those operating systems and Apple's beyond the superficial, particularly in the case of the former where, in many ways, AmigaOS was how MacOS should have worked but never did. Jay Miner et al and Metacomco built a GUI that integrated very well with an underlying multitasking OS, that included a "Desktop" because, well, Apple did a great job of showing the idea was the way forward, and overlapping windows etc because a multitasking OS ought to have them.
All of which said, Apple genuinely innovated. It didn't "rip off" Xerox, and wouldn't have done so even if Xerox hadn't received a cent for Apple's work. Xerox built some nice prototypes. The concepts of icons and windows and pointing at things came from there. Apple used those concepts to build something fairly special. To use an analogy, Xerox built a weather-proof box out of bricks, wood, shingles, and drywall. Apple invented doors and windows and built the first house. A lot of people saw these "houses", and wanted to build their own, ones that fit them. Like Apple's, they included windows, doors, bathrooms, etc, but that didn't make them copies.
How is running GNU/Linux or NetBSD on an XBox "morally wrong"?
I wonder how many people would support such a system. It's be difficult, for example, to see 802.11 working in a context where someone might actually have land-grabbed 2.4GHz in a particular area. Companies producing equipment would have to cater for an environment in which the most optimal frequency might be 88MHz in one area, and 5.8GHz in another. Costs would rocket. Broadcast services, as we know them, would probably disappear. The best scenario I can see arising from this is the government using eminent domain to evict operators from certain frequencies to allow other applications to work, and that's not exactly legally black and white, and probably something those advocating such an awful state of affairs would oppose anyway.
I think what they're advocating is wholly against the public interest. If this is the answer to the FCC, let the FCC continue.