Sorry, I used the wrong link before. I meant to link to the actual interview with bin Laden's son.
He says "My father believes American spies have joined the Taliban He talks in a code that even I can't understand".
It's not that he's speaking, it's that he's (likely) conveying another message besides the obvious one.
I've heard the book is excellent from several people, and it's certainly on my list of book's I'd like to make time to read.;-)
Actually, I don't think the movie makes a point at all, just some bloodthirsty entertainment with a weak thrust at commentary which, in typical hollywood style, misses.
I thought the "weak thrust at commentary" (the interesting take on a not-so-far-off future) was as intertaining as the blood and guts. Not that I didn't like the blood and guts, of course.
Interesting that they can air the unedited scenes of blood and violence, but they had to cut the nudity for last night's cable tv presentation. American moral values are a strange beast.
Forget looking for the cause of his actions. Let's just label him a "mad man", and state that his goal is "the end of the free world".
No, they've given us the reason. We're a "beacon of freedom"!
(and if you can swallow that, I've got a lollypop in my pants for you to try next.)
Overall, I enjoy being a U.S. citizen, but I am completely embarrassed, and even mortified by some of the actions that we (as a country) condone, and those that we perpetrate. (My feelings exactly.)
Who cares about the sheep-like consumers? I am a CITIZEN.
Same difference really, since few are one and not the other;-)
Reminds me of Starship Troopers (it was on fx lastnight)... where people take pride in be citizens instead of civilians. If you can get over the (intentional) comic-book style, it's really a great movie.
This whole thing was sort of crazy. I really don't think it ever could have worked. It would have been a clear violation of consumer's rights, and would have been dealt with as such on the first test case, if they could ever possibly pass it to begin with.
I like the Sienfeld technique with telemarketers. Say now isn't a good time, and could you have their home number so you can call them back about it later. When they refuse, ask why they can call YOUR home but you can't call THEIRS. It was funnier on sienfeld, but it's still a good technique.
I really don't get many telemarketer calls though. I'd esimate not more than one or two a month. I certainly couldn't see paying for service to stop it.
According to this, bin Laden is indeed using verbal codes to communicate with his people. What better way to get the message out than a public statement?
I'm still bitter it's not getting played on US tv stations; how can a video taped statement from public enemy number one not be "newsworthy"? They say it "might contain a message". Well one message I heard was "infidels out". Is that the message they don't want us to hear? That his main demand is for us to stop occupying his 'homeland' and whatnot?
Sure, there might be a hidden message too. But people waiting to get the hidden message will undoubtedly obtain it from some foriegn news source that DOES deem it "newsworthy".
Censorship will only hide the message from joe sixpack & friends, and I think thats exactly the goal.
Are you proposing that they STOP making decisions regarding the well-being of the population?
They are not making decisions regarding the well-being of the population! They are making decisions regarding their longstanding agenda's and using the "war on terrorism" as a cover.
The causes are neither light nor transient, and you took that quote WAY out of context. Here's a bigger chunk:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security. (you can read the whole document here)
The U.S. government was (according to the above) meant for securing unalienable rights.
It was not meant for intervening in foriegn military conflicts, or "fighting a war on evil", or monitoring common citizens' lives, or outlawing the sale of technology without approved encryption, or helping "american interests" by paying for McDonalds to advertise in Asia (yes your tax dollars really pay for that!).
If our founding fathers could see this country today they would be ashamed. I am ashamed, and you should be too.
If this (American Govt) is democracy, maybe we should give something else a try.
They won't be getting your vote, but they'll still be getting enough other moron's votes that it won't matter. And so what? If they didn't win, the other guy would be just as bad.
(now some god-loving america-is-great sheep can mod this "troll" or "flaimbait" because they can't accept that fact that their system isn't working. Eat my ass, I've got 50 karma and I'm not going away.)
For what it's worth, I've got all of my mp3s on a central NetBSD server. On the server I'm running Samba, netatalk, and NFS -- so any kind of computer can access the shares. I don't know what OS you're using for your server, but it shouldn't be too difficult to set the same thing up. And the protocols don't step on each other's toes at all.
My server's a RedHat box, and settng up netatalk is on my list of things to do on a rainy day. I've heard it's not hard to do, but I'm just real lazy (and my pc's already hooked up to the stero, so it's not a big priority). Eventually, I'd like to use the mac for the majority of my music listening because I prefer SoundJam over WinAmp (the ability to make psuedo-folders on the playlist from Artist and Album id3 tags is really cool).
I'm not usually one to lash out at Taco & Crew, but this is just a blatant plug for a product that their company is selling (VALinux/ThinkGeek/Slashdot/Whatever). He didn't even mention the connection between the companies, like he usually does!
I think this thing is a big waste of money. I keep all my mp3s on a samba share, so any computer in the house can get to it (well the macs can't, but I'm working on setting up some sort of mac compatible solution alongside samba). It's really pretty simple to run a cable from the back of a pc to the back of a receiver, and I don't see what this shiny box is going to give me that my current setup won't (except a $289 hole in my wallet).
The optical output seems cool, until you realize that your playing mp3s anyway so the fidelity loss is already there.
It seems like Taco, of all people, would adovcate building your own setup (using linux boxen, naturally) over using a buggy embedded system like this.
A CAD type app that had erector qualities would be neat.
Lego got a headstart on that with the Mindstorms product. It's computer is decently powerfull, considering that the 'toy' was originally aimed at young children. (It turns out more adults bought them than kids;-)
Unaltered data would be kind of useless because maps are intentionally made to be incorrect. So if you crossed a bridge and later overlayed the GPS track over a map, you'd be going over the middle of the river about a 1/4 mile away from where the bridge really is. It's not exactly informative as to where you actually were.
I've used the Hertz navigation system in a rental car before, and it did not behave as you describe. When I crossed a bridge, you showed our position on the river with dead-on accuracy. The second the little marker went off the river was the second the car was no longer over the river.
I was impressed. I hear performance can vary based on if you're area is well mapped though. I was in Chicago, at the time, and I'd imagine coverage in a city that size is as good as it gets.
While the OS supports something, it is not the case that software authors do (we/are/ arguing about appearences here). So, if 80 per cent of apps in popular use on Macs _don't_ support resizable dialogs, Macs effectively don't appear to support resizable dialogs 80 percent of the time. For example, Photoshop, Quark, PageMaker, and even Illustrator didn't use the new dialogs until this year's releases on any version of MacOS (MacOS 8.1 was released some years ago IIRC). Your figures are random speculation at best. Regardless of the past, as of current times almost ALL ( >95%, if you wanna make up stats to prove a point) programs support it, including all recent versions of IE (the program he (you?) was originaly speaking of).
While it is not new, it is non-obvious. The get info pane has no idications that the icon is selectable, let alone editable. Many features are not immediately obvious to firsttime users. It is a well documented feature though, and the alegation that macs can only change their icon's color tint was plainly wrong.
(Don't get me started about how 9.1's little desktop hiding adventure breaks even modern software). OK, but don't get me started about how the desktop hiding trick has been in place since sometime during 7.? (it was right there in the General Controls control panel).
Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaarrrrrrrrrrrrrrrgggggggggggghh hhhhhhhhh!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! This is one point we can agree on;-)
You can run Linux, [Open|Net|Free]BSD, BeOS, AtheOS, Solaris (yes, Solaris), Darwin and God-knows how many other OSen on an Intel box. Yet Microsoft are still the monopoly? Microsoft isn't a hardware company.
You originally argued Apple was monopolistic because they made hardware that only their OS would run on. That is not true; there are other software options for Apple hardware. Other options for x86 hardware arn't relevant to that line of argument, since Microsoft doesn't make hardware.
You can run Linux or NetBSD on a Mac. You can't run BeOS on it any more. Why? Because Apple stopped them. Isn't that monopolistic? This is the closest thing you have to a valid point. Yes, Apple witheld specs for the new motherboard design and prevented the Be engineers from releasing the BeOS for it. I don't know hardware well enough to know why some OS'es can run with the available specs and other's can't, but there ARE still other options and the BeOS is dead now anyway.
Apple controls everything from the number of buttons on the mice...
Apple only controls the number of buttons on mice that they make.
Other companies are free to make multi-button mac mice. And they do. You can even use a M$ InteliMouse with a mac. Even before the shift to USB for input devices, the old ADB (Apple Desktop Bus) supported multi-button mice.
...to the colour of the buttons on screen (Aqua Blue or Graphite - thats all folks!). You can install custom themes to change that, but the idea is to have a uniform look to the whole system. If you don't like that, you can change it.
They won't allow anyone else to manufacture compatible hardware, Thats misleading. There is lots of compatible hardware add-ons that work with macs; they just won't liscense their entire system to clone makers. I wish they would.
and (Linux and NetBSD notwithstanding, since they are open source) won't allow any operating system other than their own to run on said hardware. How does being open source make other OS'es 'notwithstanding'? Those are other OS'es. They run on Apple hardware. Has apple made some rule that other OS'es can't be closed source? No. You could write a propritery OS for the mac if you really see a problem with all the non-Apple OS'es being open source though.
They tried to trademark the GUI! They did trademark the colours of the iMac. Lots of companies try to trademark stupid things. It doesn't make them a monopoly.
They lie about performance [ihateapple.com]. Again, so does the competition. That doesn't make them a monopoly.
They make SMP machines without an SMP-capable OS (this was before OSX). They try to make pure java programs run only on OSX. Photoshop and other processor intensive programs had limited MP support, as did some of the alternative OS'es mentioned earlier, and they had multiprocessor support for the OS planned. If you don't like it, don't buy it. There was a demand for MP machines though, and they decided to sell them before the whole OS supported them. Does that make them a monopoly?
I don't even know what you're talking about with the Java thing. Can you elaborate?
They have learned a bit from Microsoft too. They include apps to do everything in their OS. Quicktime, iTunes, burning CDs from Finder, and so on. Before iTunes, people criticized the mac for not being able to play mp3's out-of-the-box. Now, they're microsoft-like because they do. Whatever. You can still use a different player, and a lot of people do. In-finder cd burning was around before Apple introduced it; it was DirectCD (for mac + windows) from Adaptec.
But, more than anything else, they copy ideas from elsewhere and convince their lusers that they invernted it. The most well-known example being the Wimp environment they stole/bought/begged from XeroX parc. Xerox wasn't bringing it to market. Well-read mac users realize Apple didn't invent a lot of this stuff, but they were the first to offer it to consumers.
DVD recording, Again, Apple never claimed to invent this. They we're the first to offer a pre-installed dvd recorder in a consumer affordable machine (if you're a consumer with a few grand;-) And they we're the first to offer DVD-burning software targeted at the home user.
USB (created by a working group headed by Intel) and Firewire (aka iLink, invented by Sony) were all allegedly invented by Apple. Apple never claimed to have invented USB. Firewire and iLink are both just iee1394 and is an industry standard. I don't know about it's origins, but if Apple didn't invent it then why didn't Sony protest when Apple won awards for it?
Does this sound monopolistic? No. Not one of your arguments makes Apple sound monopolistc. It sounds like someone grasping at straws so they can convince people that the company with a less than 10% market share has a monopoly. It's actually sort of comical.
I don't attack windows98 based on windows 3.1's shortcomings; please don't attack the macos based on it's ancestor.
It's been quite some time since the mac's open dialogs were not resizable, so I can only assume you are running an outdated version of the MacOS. Afaik, even MacOS 8.1 (which will non on old old non-ppc macs) had resizable open windows. Granted, some non-standard programs don't take advantage of them, but the program in question (Internet Explorer) does.
As for custom icons - you can change the colour. That's it. Wrong again. Get Info on any file, folder, drive, etc and click the icon (in the get info window). You can use the cut/copy/paste commands to change the icon to whatever you want (just copy a graphic to the clipboard and paste it in). The Cut or Clear functions (in the obvious place - the edit menu) will restore the original icon (the default for that item). If the graphic on the clipboard is larger than 32x32 (the mac icon size in pre-X macos'es) it will be scaled down. This functionality is not at all new; it's been there since I started using macs (which was around system 7.1 iirc).
Slashdot Mirror
You mean stuff like *gasp* SPEAKING? Oh my god!
Sorry, I used the wrong link before. I meant to link to the actual interview with bin Laden's son.
He says "My father believes American spies have joined the Taliban He talks in a code that even I can't understand".
It's not that he's speaking, it's that he's (likely) conveying another message besides the obvious one.
I've heard the book is excellent from several people, and it's certainly on my list of book's I'd like to make time to read. ;-)
Actually, I don't think the movie makes a point at all, just some bloodthirsty entertainment with a weak thrust at commentary which, in typical hollywood style, misses.
I thought the "weak thrust at commentary" (the interesting take on a not-so-far-off future) was as intertaining as the blood and guts. Not that I didn't like the blood and guts, of course.
Interesting that they can air the unedited scenes of blood and violence, but they had to cut the nudity for last night's cable tv presentation. American moral values are a strange beast.
Forget looking for the cause of his actions. Let's just label him a "mad man", and state that his goal is "the end of the free world".
No, they've given us the reason. We're a "beacon of freedom"!
(and if you can swallow that, I've got a lollypop in my pants for you to try next.)
Overall, I enjoy being a U.S. citizen, but I am completely embarrassed, and even mortified by some of the actions that we (as a country) condone, and those that we perpetrate.
(My feelings exactly.)
Who cares about the sheep-like consumers? I am a CITIZEN.
;-)
Same difference really, since few are one and not the other
Reminds me of Starship Troopers (it was on fx lastnight)... where people take pride in be citizens instead of civilians. If you can get over the (intentional) comic-book style, it's really a great movie.
That doesn't check if found mp3s are legal or not.
Theirs would have to do that, and really it never could.
I agree with an earlier poster that this was a red herring; a ploy to let them fall back on "softer" but still dangerous proposals.
This whole thing was sort of crazy. I really don't think it ever could have worked. It would have been a clear violation of consumer's rights, and would have been dealt with as such on the first test case, if they could ever possibly pass it to begin with.
They could hire a telemarketing service to sell these things!
..."
"You could have avoided this call if you
I like the Sienfeld technique with telemarketers. Say now isn't a good time, and could you have their home number so you can call them back about it later. When they refuse, ask why they can call YOUR home but you can't call THEIRS. It was funnier on sienfeld, but it's still a good technique.
I really don't get many telemarketer calls though. I'd esimate not more than one or two a month. I certainly couldn't see paying for service to stop it.
According to this, bin Laden is indeed using verbal codes to communicate with his people. What better way to get the message out than a public statement?
I'm still bitter it's not getting played on US tv stations; how can a video taped statement from public enemy number one not be "newsworthy"? They say it "might contain a message". Well one message I heard was "infidels out". Is that the message they don't want us to hear? That his main demand is for us to stop occupying his 'homeland' and whatnot?
Sure, there might be a hidden message too. But people waiting to get the hidden message will undoubtedly obtain it from some foriegn news source that DOES deem it "newsworthy".
Censorship will only hide the message from joe sixpack & friends, and I think thats exactly the goal.
If you view American consumers and American voters as seperate groups you must be very confused indeed.
Are you proposing that they STOP making decisions regarding the well-being of the population?
They are not making decisions regarding the well-being of the population! They are making decisions regarding their longstanding agenda's and using the "war on terrorism" as a cover.
Where the hell are my mod points when I need 'em. That was damn funny.
Maybe they've been given to people who know when to use their +1 bonus and when not to.
The causes are neither light nor transient, and you took that quote WAY out of context. Here's a bigger chunk:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.
(you can read the whole document here)
The U.S. government was (according to the above) meant for securing unalienable rights.
It was not meant for intervening in foriegn military conflicts, or "fighting a war on evil", or monitoring common citizens' lives, or outlawing the sale of technology without approved encryption, or helping "american interests" by paying for McDonalds to advertise in Asia (yes your tax dollars really pay for that!).
If our founding fathers could see this country today they would be ashamed. I am ashamed, and you should be too.
The govt didn't pass a law trashing democracy, it's trying to pass a law trashing personal freedoms. There is a huge difference.
If this (American Govt) is democracy, maybe we should give something else a try.
They won't be getting your vote, but they'll still be getting enough other moron's votes that it won't matter. And so what? If they didn't win, the other guy would be just as bad.
(now some god-loving america-is-great sheep can mod this "troll" or "flaimbait" because they can't accept that fact that their system isn't working. Eat my ass, I've got 50 karma and I'm not going away.)
For what it's worth, I've got all of my mp3s on a central NetBSD server. On the server I'm running Samba, netatalk, and NFS -- so any kind of computer can access the shares. I don't know what OS you're using for your server, but it shouldn't be too difficult to set the same thing up. And the protocols don't step on each other's toes at all.
My server's a RedHat box, and settng up netatalk is on my list of things to do on a rainy day. I've heard it's not hard to do, but I'm just real lazy (and my pc's already hooked up to the stero, so it's not a big priority). Eventually, I'd like to use the mac for the majority of my music listening because I prefer SoundJam over WinAmp (the ability to make psuedo-folders on the playlist from Artist and Album id3 tags is really cool).
What about people running BSD or Linux etc on Dreamcasts? Isn't the dreamcast powerfull enough to play mp3s?
What about ps2?
Once you get these things on your lan, a whole bunch of new options open up...
I'm not usually one to lash out at Taco & Crew, but this is just a blatant plug for a product that their company is selling (VALinux/ThinkGeek/Slashdot/Whatever). He didn't even mention the connection between the companies, like he usually does!
I think this thing is a big waste of money. I keep all my mp3s on a samba share, so any computer in the house can get to it (well the macs can't, but I'm working on setting up some sort of mac compatible solution alongside samba). It's really pretty simple to run a cable from the back of a pc to the back of a receiver, and I don't see what this shiny box is going to give me that my current setup won't (except a $289 hole in my wallet).
The optical output seems cool, until you realize that your playing mp3s anyway so the fidelity loss is already there.
It seems like Taco, of all people, would adovcate building your own setup (using linux boxen, naturally) over using a buggy embedded system like this.
A CAD type app that had erector qualities would be neat. ;-)
Lego got a headstart on that with the Mindstorms product. It's computer is decently powerfull, considering that the 'toy' was originally aimed at young children. (It turns out more adults bought them than kids
I highly doubt there is anywhere in the US where AOL has local numbers and there are NO other ISP's with local numbers.
Unaltered data would be kind of useless because maps are intentionally made to be incorrect. So if you crossed a bridge and later overlayed the GPS track over a map, you'd be going over the middle of the river about a 1/4 mile away from where the bridge really is. It's not exactly informative as to where you actually were.
I've used the Hertz navigation system in a rental car before, and it did not behave as you describe. When I crossed a bridge, you showed our position on the river with dead-on accuracy. The second the little marker went off the river was the second the car was no longer over the river.
I was impressed. I hear performance can vary based on if you're area is well mapped though. I was in Chicago, at the time, and I'd imagine coverage in a city that size is as good as it gets.
While the OS supports something, it is not the case that software authors do (we /are/ arguing about appearences here). So, if 80 per cent of apps in popular use on Macs _don't_ support resizable dialogs, Macs effectively don't appear to support resizable dialogs 80 percent of the time. For example, Photoshop, Quark, PageMaker, and even Illustrator didn't use the new dialogs until this year's releases on any version of MacOS (MacOS 8.1 was released some years ago IIRC).
Your figures are random speculation at best. Regardless of the past, as of current times almost ALL ( >95%, if you wanna make up stats to prove a point) programs support it, including all recent versions of IE (the program he (you?) was originaly speaking of).
While it is not new, it is non-obvious. The get info pane has no idications that the icon is selectable, let alone editable.
Many features are not immediately obvious to firsttime users. It is a well documented feature though, and the alegation that macs can only change their icon's color tint was plainly wrong.
(Don't get me started about how 9.1's little desktop hiding adventure breaks even modern software).
OK, but don't get me started about how the desktop hiding trick has been in place since sometime during 7.?
(it was right there in the General Controls control panel).
Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaarrrrrrrrrrrrrrrgggggggggggghh hhhhhhhhh!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
;-)
;-) And they we're the first to offer DVD-burning software targeted at the home user.
This is one point we can agree on
You can run Linux, [Open|Net|Free]BSD, BeOS, AtheOS, Solaris (yes, Solaris), Darwin and God-knows how many other OSen on an Intel box. Yet Microsoft are still the monopoly?
Microsoft isn't a hardware company.
You originally argued Apple was monopolistic because they made hardware that only their OS would run on. That is not true; there are other software options for Apple hardware. Other options for x86 hardware arn't relevant to that line of argument, since Microsoft doesn't make hardware.
You can run Linux or NetBSD on a Mac. You can't run BeOS on it any more. Why? Because Apple stopped them. Isn't that monopolistic?
This is the closest thing you have to a valid point. Yes, Apple witheld specs for the new motherboard design and prevented the Be engineers from releasing the BeOS for it. I don't know hardware well enough to know why some OS'es can run with the available specs and other's can't, but there ARE still other options and the BeOS is dead now anyway.
Apple controls everything from the number of buttons on the mice...
Apple only controls the number of buttons on mice that they make.
Other companies are free to make multi-button mac mice. And they do. You can even use a M$ InteliMouse with a mac. Even before the shift to USB for input devices, the old ADB (Apple Desktop Bus) supported multi-button mice.
...to the colour of the buttons on screen (Aqua Blue or Graphite - thats all folks!).
You can install custom themes to change that, but the idea is to have a uniform look to the whole system. If you don't like that, you can change it.
They won't allow anyone else to manufacture compatible hardware,
Thats misleading. There is lots of compatible hardware add-ons that work with macs; they just won't liscense their entire system to clone makers. I wish they would.
and (Linux and NetBSD notwithstanding, since they are open source) won't allow any operating system other than their own to run on said hardware.
How does being open source make other OS'es 'notwithstanding'? Those are other OS'es. They run on Apple hardware. Has apple made some rule that other OS'es can't be closed source? No. You could write a propritery OS for the mac if you really see a problem with all the non-Apple OS'es being open source though.
They tried to trademark the GUI! They did trademark the colours of the iMac.
Lots of companies try to trademark stupid things. It doesn't make them a monopoly.
They lie about performance [ihateapple.com].
Again, so does the competition. That doesn't make them a monopoly.
They make SMP machines without an SMP-capable OS (this was before OSX). They try to make pure java programs run only on OSX.
Photoshop and other processor intensive programs had limited MP support, as did some of the alternative OS'es mentioned earlier, and they had multiprocessor support for the OS planned. If you don't like it, don't buy it. There was a demand for MP machines though, and they decided to sell them before the whole OS supported them. Does that make them a monopoly?
I don't even know what you're talking about with the Java thing. Can you elaborate?
They have learned a bit from Microsoft too. They include apps to do everything in their OS. Quicktime, iTunes, burning CDs from Finder, and so on.
Before iTunes, people criticized the mac for not being able to play mp3's out-of-the-box. Now, they're microsoft-like because they do. Whatever. You can still use a different player, and a lot of people do. In-finder cd burning was around before Apple introduced it; it was DirectCD (for mac + windows) from Adaptec.
But, more than anything else, they copy ideas from elsewhere and convince their lusers that they invernted it. The most well-known example being the Wimp environment they stole/bought/begged from XeroX parc.
Xerox wasn't bringing it to market. Well-read mac users realize Apple didn't invent a lot of this stuff, but they were the first to offer it to consumers.
DVD recording,
Again, Apple never claimed to invent this. They we're the first to offer a pre-installed dvd recorder in a consumer affordable machine (if you're a consumer with a few grand
USB (created by a working group headed by Intel) and Firewire (aka iLink, invented by Sony) were all allegedly invented by Apple.
Apple never claimed to have invented USB. Firewire and iLink are both just iee1394 and is an industry standard. I don't know about it's origins, but if Apple didn't invent it then why didn't Sony protest when Apple won awards for it?
Does this sound monopolistic?
No. Not one of your arguments makes Apple sound monopolistc. It sounds like someone grasping at straws so they can convince people that the company with a less than 10% market share has a monopoly. It's actually sort of comical.
That post, as opposed to yours, raises some valid points for arguing that Apple is a monopoly.
I don't think they are (a monopoly), but at least binarybit's post had some decent arguments.
Your claim that "You can only run their software on their hardware" is still false.
(in that miniscule, non-resizable open dialog)
I don't attack windows98 based on windows 3.1's shortcomings; please don't attack the macos based on it's ancestor.
It's been quite some time since the mac's open dialogs were not resizable, so I can only assume you are running an outdated version of the MacOS. Afaik, even MacOS 8.1 (which will non on old old non-ppc macs) had resizable open windows. Granted, some non-standard programs don't take advantage of them, but the program in question (Internet Explorer) does.
As for custom icons - you can change the colour. That's it.
Wrong again. Get Info on any file, folder, drive, etc and click the icon (in the get info window). You can use the cut/copy/paste commands to change the icon to whatever you want (just copy a graphic to the clipboard and paste it in). The Cut or Clear functions (in the obvious place - the edit menu) will restore the original icon (the default for that item). If the graphic on the clipboard is larger than 32x32 (the mac icon size in pre-X macos'es) it will be scaled down. This functionality is not at all new; it's been there since I started using macs (which was around system 7.1 iirc).