"Does Norway not have vast quantities of high quality oil to export?"
Sure they do. And this oil-fuelled economy is why the wages are so high. This is also why the Norwegian government will not invest more than a certain percentage of the oil money domestically, basically fearing over-heating the Norwegian economy. The danger being that most export industry in Norway will eventually fail because the high wages will kill demand from abroad.
I, however, believe Norway's economy is already over-heating and it can be seen from the total anonymity of Norwegian industry abroad, compared to our neighbours, Sweden, Denmark and Finland.
"If you can't tell the difference between CD/SACD, it doesn't matter to me."
I haven't even heard a SACD being played. This is utterly irrelevant though. What I was attempting to convey to you, is that mentioning a couple of buzzwords is not an argument. It is obvious that SACD has more resolution, it is not obvious, however, that this resolution actually provides any noticeable improvement. And as I pointed out to you with the Denon cables, providing an actual improvement is not the only reason corporations will create a product.
I understand you can hear the difference. That's fine, I'm not calling you a liar, but when it comes to your buzzwords, you don't really appear to know what you are talking about and you'd be better off not mentioning them.
Any new major features which allows the execution of code off the Internet is potentially dangerous. Its direct connection to hardware is also another cause for concern, especially with immature technology. However, there is also massive demand for hardware acceleration of downloaded code.
The reality is that if the browser vendors do this right, this is no more of a problem than the potential for users to download executables off the Internet and running them. Users can always screw things up and it is the browser vendors responsibility to put up massive safeguards to stop the browser from executing WebGL from untrusted sites and providing enough barriers to stop the user from enabling this on web sites without knowing the risks. I.e. requiring the user to open a dialog and selecting "I trust this website with my hardware".
I'm utterly convinced that Microsoft will implement this in some form or another, probably their own proprietary format using DirectX. Bashing WebGL in particular is just a ploy from them to avoid losing control in the field of gaming and graphics.
"I used to live somewhere where there was a lot of drug dealing. So if I told you where that was do I get arrested for 'facilitating' the drug trade?"
Places like The Pirate Bay and TV Shack not only tell people where to go, they provide direct links to exactly what you want so that no more user input are required to download the material. So the analogy is more like if you drove them to the place, and introduced them to the people to buy crack from and the guy to get heroin from. In this case you may well get arrested for facilitating. You may not have sold them any crack, but you DID act as a middle man and facilitator.
I'm not sure what I think about link-sites, but we really ought to get our analogies straight before discussing it.
"Any article that has the phrase "who illegally download music" as part of it's mantra is a FAIL. Downloading music is not illegal. Distributing copyrighted material without permission/license or ownership of said material is illegal. "
Apple is a global company and Slashdot is a globally used (albeit US-centric) website, so comments that assume that everyone live in their jurisdiction is a FAIL. There are plenty of places around the globe where downloading music IS illegal and have been for at least a few years.
"there's a reason they started working on the Super Audio CD"
As I said to you above. There is also a reason that Denon supplies a $999 ethernet cable for their stereo systems.
"there's fidelity and dynamic range and all sorts of other stuff that KILO hertz can't keep up with. Sorry to burst your bubble...single static sounds might be reproduced just fine on a CD, but buddy it ain't perfect!"
You may well be right, but you haven't burst anyone's bubble. You're just mentioning a couple of buzzwords and pretending that it is an argument.
Keep in mind that in Norway the wage level is probably at least 20% higher than in the US or Western Europe. Wages are better balanced than in other countries (the multiplier from a cleaner to a CEO is less), but I still struggle to see how Norwegian companies can compete internationally with wages being at least 20% higher than the average in Western Europe.
"What you are referring to is when you want the resource to be cleaned up."
And you _very_ often want to clean up that resource straight away. Otherwise your applications resource use becomes incredibly unpredictable. This may be ok for memory (if you have enough of it), but it is NOT ok for things like file pointers and sockets.
There is a reason why the IDisposable interface exists in C# and its use being so incredibly pervasive. And I have to say that I don't find IDisposable any easier than manual C++ resource management.
"What does hypocrisy have to do with whether someone is right or wrong? Nothing."
What you fail to realise is that there are 6 billion people on this planet with something to say. Nobody has the time to listen to all these voices, and certainly nobody has the time to test whether they are right or wrong. In many cases "being right or wrong" is subjective anyway and certainly most political questions of our time belong to this category, if only due to lack of data.
What all this means is that you HAVE to make decisions about whether to listen to someone based on more than just their argument and thus your argument of pointing out the GP's basic logic flaw is a fatally flawed argument in itself.
In the case of Ayn Rand, nobody knows for sure whether her arguments have merit or not, they have simply never been tested scientifically and testing them scientifically may well be construed as morally wrong. So we look for "supporting evidence", and using hypocrisy as supporting evidence may well be completely logical, because her hypocrisy may well expose a logical fallacy in her argument.
Now I realise that I may be constructing a straw man here, since I simply have not decided that Ayn Rand is someone worth spending much of my time and attention on, but I believe Rand argued that it was wrong of society to impose charity through welfare. If Ayn Rand is correct in her argument, and thus gave a valuable contribution to society despite receiving government assistance, then her argument is flawed. Because at least in her case, government assistance may have been the right thing to do and without government assistance, we may miss out on other such valuable contributions to society.
"Really, sometimes people are down, and you don't have to kick them. It won't destroy society if you help them out a bit."
Indeed. Some people thrive from help when the are down and go on to do good things with their lives. Also some people turn into leeches when they are helped. Most of the arguments regarding welfare states, unemployment benefits and the like comes down to disagreement about what the ratio between the two groups are and what ratio leads to a better society and is morally acceptable (*).
There are plenty of examples of societies both currently and through history where little or no charity is afforded those in need, and they don't appear to be very healthy societies. Certainly far worse societies than what I see around me, despite the rhetoric about a "Broken Society" being created by welfare. If today's society is "broken" then I shudder to think what the society was like a few hundred years ago.
(*) I know people have wildly different opinions about morals. Some would argue that if no charity led to a better society, charity would be morally wrong. But this is besides the point.
"exposing such a breach means that pron.com *has* to notify their subscribers in addition to patching the vulnerability,"
Actually, this hacker group has access to a few hacked servers and they have all the personal details of these subscribers. They could just notify the users themselves by means of a mass email. And failing that, they could easily expose the breach without revealing the customers actual passwords.
These people are simply doing this for kicks, not for some noble goal of exposing evil and insecure companies.
"Customers need to be hurt A LOT in order to get conscious about security and start demanding it, or start avoiding companies like Sony"
This does in no shape or form excuse actually hurting them. Just because someone has to be the first, doesn't mean the first is any less despicable than the second.
To use the standard lock analogy: just because some unscrupulous lock company sold their customers locks that could be defeated by someone sticking a pin into the lock, doesn't excuse someone breaking into houses in this way.
To be fair, PatheticLosersSec doesn't steal anything from the house it would seem, but it would be like breaking into all these houses and just leaving the door wide open. It would massively increase the chances of someone exploiting the situation.
If they actually had noble goals, they would notify all the users and publish information to embarrass the company in a way which wouldn't compromise all their users personal data.
After they exposed loads of username/password combinations off some Sony service, I thought to myself; who are they actually hurting? It seemed to me they just made it loads easier for criminals without the skills to do this sort of thing themselves.
Yes, it is possible that some more sinister hackers already had this data without telling anyone, just secretly exploiting them, but actually publishing the combinations makes it many times more likely that someone will exploit your personal data.
I consider this hacking group no more than simple vandals and criminals at this stage. There is no "honour" in it, and exposing porn clients are extremely likely to be hypocritical. I don't believe for a second that all members of this hacker group has a "clean conscience" about porn.
I know opinion is exceptionally polarised on this subject, but my personal favourite was always the global menu bar.
However, there are many reasons why it was never properly implemented on Linux desktop systems and it was available for years in KDE, but hardly ever used by anyone. Why?
1. It can not be used in conjunction with focus-follows-mouse, a favourite of some UNIX oldies. These are, however, becoming relatively fewer as Linux desktop usage has spread among people that have never seen a system using focus-follows-mouse. 2. Not a single existing Linux application was ever designed for the global menu bar. In most cases this just means they seem a bit awkward with the menu, even after patches to enable the menu have been applied. For other cases (i.e. LibreOffice) it is very hard to make it work at all with a global menu. 3. Linux users just aren't familiar with it, the way Mac users have always been.
Now, if Canonical had introduced the global menu bar 6 years ago, it may have been worth it (arguable), but it most definitely isn't now. The reason is that the menu bar is going away anyway. Hardly any Windows application these days show the menu bar by default, and some new applications have started getting rid of it altogether. I.e. Chrome, which just has the one menu from its wrench button. Introducing the global menu bar now was simply a waste of time and effort for something which will be gone in the next two or three years.
"I noticed that this website is in English, German, Spanish, French, and Italian--meaning it is mostly directed to the west. The fact that it doesn't even have Mandarin or Cantonese despite China's 1.3 Billion tells you that he is more interested in extracting money from guilt-laden westerners than solving any problems. French! Less than 2% of the earth speak French as their native language. Heck, more people speak Bengali or Telugu or even Marathi than the entire population of France!
Most of the western countries are stable or have declining populations."
This is largely irrelevant. The world could easily support 10 billion people if we all on average consumed as much as the Nigerians. You thus have it completely backwards. The western world consists of over 1.5 billion people that consumes many times more than the other 5-6 billion people on this planet. And our consumption is not going down.
It is shameful to tell the third world to stop having children so that we can buy more iPads, eat more beef and drink more beer. I personally need to have a look at myself in the mirror here.
Can I just point out that you in no way actually answer the argument. The argument is SUSTAINABLE capacity of the earth. As have been seen on local scales around the world thousands of times before, we can easily go beyond this capacity if we just don't care about sustainability. The results are dead areas with no resources and little life taking decades to recover. And the only reason they CAN recover is due to eventual migration from surrounding areas. With regards to the earth. If we fuck that one up, there ARE NO surrounding areas.
There is considerable scientific consensus that we are currently living beyond the sustainable capacity of the earth. Exactly how fucked we are have been subject to debate and alterations.
"The problem with allowing people give up some of their rights is that it not only effects them, but it will be passed down to their kids."
This isn't the only problem with allowing people to give up their rights. People need to eat and need to have a place to live. If they can not find employment (or for instance find a food retailer) to satisfy these needs without sacrificing their own rights, they may feel forced to do so. Allowing people to give up their rights for services/money/whatever only works when they have real choice. This is often not the case and this is certainly why many European countries (and the EU) will not permit work contracts that makes the employee give up certain rights.
My favourite is the insistence in the UK (regardless of company it seems) on just giving the parcel to the neighbours, regardless of whether signature is required or the delivery instructions has an explicit "DO NOT LEAVE WITH NEIGHBOURS" note on it.
Not every neighbour-relationship is friendly. Plenty of people have neighbours which would just take the parcel for themselves, regardless of whether they actually want it or not.
In my case it wasn't like that. I had left such an instruction with the company because my (nice) neighbours had been woken up at 07:30 in the morning by a delivery man (I sometimes leave before this time) and had kindly asked me if this could be avoided. But despite my instructions, they were again woken up by the delivery and it was embarrassing to apologise to them over this.
Allowing such instructions are absolutely pointless if drivers don't acknowledge them and it can be a real struggle trying to get it all sorted afterwards.
"49% of the comments will be from people who would not use this service and cannot understand why anyone else would want to ever act differently than they do. 49% of the comments will be from people who would love to use this service and cannot understand why anyone else would want to ever act differently than they do."
The difference is that the first 49% are irrelevant. The second 49% are not. Why? Because the last 49% would make the system commercially viable, and the first 49% does not have to pay for it if they don't want to.
Slashdot is full of cynical naysayers with opinions that the world does not care about one bit. Out of this large group, there is a small group of naysayers which the world really should have listened to. Separating the two is much more difficult than what one might think.
"Well... it kinda feels like the new Gnome and Unity interfaces, which everybody hates.."
Not true. As for GNOME Shell, there are some vocal dissident and there are a fair number of quiet approvals. Up until now, I've belonged in the quiet approval part, but I find it hard to just sit around and accept people writing that "everybody hates" it.
My opinion is that it isn't perfect but it is a bloody good platform to build from. IMO the first truly exciting, design-driven, user interface changes in a free desktop environment ever, whereas previous attempts have been more "this is cool technology, lets use it", GNOME Shell has been "What user experience do we want to offer, and how can we achieve it?".
.. with all the different compositing effects going on. And you would certainly hope that this will cause the drivers to improve in the long run.
However, there is a question why any desktop shell / window manager should have any noticeable effect on running OpenGL games in FULL SCREEN. Surely, the desktop compositor and all that jazz should be suspended while the whole screen is being controlled by a game?
"Couldn't it be argued that app developers are in effect employees of Apple and already indemnified?"
Eh.. in which case all the copyright for the apps would belong to Apple, the employer. You can hardly have it both ways, "oh, we're only employees of Apple in terms of patent disputes....", so I doubt this is a path app developers would like to pursue.
Slashdot Mirror
"Does Norway not have vast quantities of high quality oil to export?"
Sure they do. And this oil-fuelled economy is why the wages are so high. This is also why the Norwegian government will not invest more than a certain percentage of the oil money domestically, basically fearing over-heating the Norwegian economy. The danger being that most export industry in Norway will eventually fail because the high wages will kill demand from abroad.
I, however, believe Norway's economy is already over-heating and it can be seen from the total anonymity of Norwegian industry abroad, compared to our neighbours, Sweden, Denmark and Finland.
"If you can't tell the difference between CD/SACD, it doesn't matter to me."
I haven't even heard a SACD being played. This is utterly irrelevant though. What I was attempting to convey to you, is that mentioning a couple of buzzwords is not an argument. It is obvious that SACD has more resolution, it is not obvious, however, that this resolution actually provides any noticeable improvement. And as I pointed out to you with the Denon cables, providing an actual improvement is not the only reason corporations will create a product.
I understand you can hear the difference. That's fine, I'm not calling you a liar, but when it comes to your buzzwords, you don't really appear to know what you are talking about and you'd be better off not mentioning them.
Any new major features which allows the execution of code off the Internet is potentially dangerous. Its direct connection to hardware is also another cause for concern, especially with immature technology. However, there is also massive demand for hardware acceleration of downloaded code.
The reality is that if the browser vendors do this right, this is no more of a problem than the potential for users to download executables off the Internet and running them. Users can always screw things up and it is the browser vendors responsibility to put up massive safeguards to stop the browser from executing WebGL from untrusted sites and providing enough barriers to stop the user from enabling this on web sites without knowing the risks. I.e. requiring the user to open a dialog and selecting "I trust this website with my hardware".
I'm utterly convinced that Microsoft will implement this in some form or another, probably their own proprietary format using DirectX. Bashing WebGL in particular is just a ploy from them to avoid losing control in the field of gaming and graphics.
"I used to live somewhere where there was a lot of drug dealing. So if I told you where that was do I get arrested for 'facilitating' the drug trade?"
Places like The Pirate Bay and TV Shack not only tell people where to go, they provide direct links to exactly what you want so that no more user input are required to download the material. So the analogy is more like if you drove them to the place, and introduced them to the people to buy crack from and the guy to get heroin from. In this case you may well get arrested for facilitating. You may not have sold them any crack, but you DID act as a middle man and facilitator.
I'm not sure what I think about link-sites, but we really ought to get our analogies straight before discussing it.
"Any article that has the phrase "who illegally download music" as part of it's mantra is a FAIL. Downloading music is not illegal. Distributing copyrighted material without permission/license or ownership of said material is illegal. "
Apple is a global company and Slashdot is a globally used (albeit US-centric) website, so comments that assume that everyone live in their jurisdiction is a FAIL. There are plenty of places around the globe where downloading music IS illegal and have been for at least a few years.
"there's a reason they started working on the Super Audio CD"
As I said to you above. There is also a reason that Denon supplies a $999 ethernet cable for their stereo systems.
"there's fidelity and dynamic range and all sorts of other stuff that KILO hertz can't keep up with. Sorry to burst your bubble...single static sounds might be reproduced just fine on a CD, but buddy it ain't perfect!"
You may well be right, but you haven't burst anyone's bubble. You're just mentioning a couple of buzzwords and pretending that it is an argument.
"There's a reason Sony produced the SCAD [wikipedia.org] and theres a reason it's popular among audiophiles."
There is a reason Denon supplies a $999 ethernet cable for their stereo systems and the reason is not that it sounds better.
Keep in mind that in Norway the wage level is probably at least 20% higher than in the US or Western Europe. Wages are better balanced than in other countries (the multiplier from a cleaner to a CEO is less), but I still struggle to see how Norwegian companies can compete internationally with wages being at least 20% higher than the average in Western Europe.
"What you are referring to is when you want the resource to be cleaned up."
And you _very_ often want to clean up that resource straight away. Otherwise your applications resource use becomes incredibly unpredictable. This may be ok for memory (if you have enough of it), but it is NOT ok for things like file pointers and sockets.
There is a reason why the IDisposable interface exists in C# and its use being so incredibly pervasive. And I have to say that I don't find IDisposable any easier than manual C++ resource management.
"What does hypocrisy have to do with whether someone is right or wrong? Nothing."
What you fail to realise is that there are 6 billion people on this planet with something to say. Nobody has the time to listen to all these voices, and certainly nobody has the time to test whether they are right or wrong. In many cases "being right or wrong" is subjective anyway and certainly most political questions of our time belong to this category, if only due to lack of data.
What all this means is that you HAVE to make decisions about whether to listen to someone based on more than just their argument and thus your argument of pointing out the GP's basic logic flaw is a fatally flawed argument in itself.
In the case of Ayn Rand, nobody knows for sure whether her arguments have merit or not, they have simply never been tested scientifically and testing them scientifically may well be construed as morally wrong. So we look for "supporting evidence", and using hypocrisy as supporting evidence may well be completely logical, because her hypocrisy may well expose a logical fallacy in her argument.
Now I realise that I may be constructing a straw man here, since I simply have not decided that Ayn Rand is someone worth spending much of my time and attention on, but I believe Rand argued that it was wrong of society to impose charity through welfare. If Ayn Rand is correct in her argument, and thus gave a valuable contribution to society despite receiving government assistance, then her argument is flawed. Because at least in her case, government assistance may have been the right thing to do and without government assistance, we may miss out on other such valuable contributions to society.
"Really, sometimes people are down, and you don't have to kick them. It won't destroy society if you help them out a bit."
Indeed. Some people thrive from help when the are down and go on to do good things with their lives. Also some people turn into leeches when they are helped. Most of the arguments regarding welfare states, unemployment benefits and the like comes down to disagreement about what the ratio between the two groups are and what ratio leads to a better society and is morally acceptable (*).
There are plenty of examples of societies both currently and through history where little or no charity is afforded those in need, and they don't appear to be very healthy societies. Certainly far worse societies than what I see around me, despite the rhetoric about a "Broken Society" being created by welfare. If today's society is "broken" then I shudder to think what the society was like a few hundred years ago.
(*) I know people have wildly different opinions about morals. Some would argue that if no charity led to a better society, charity would be morally wrong. But this is besides the point.
"exposing such a breach means that pron.com *has* to notify their subscribers in addition to patching the vulnerability,"
Actually, this hacker group has access to a few hacked servers and they have all the personal details of these subscribers. They could just notify the users themselves by means of a mass email. And failing that, they could easily expose the breach without revealing the customers actual passwords.
These people are simply doing this for kicks, not for some noble goal of exposing evil and insecure companies.
"Customers need to be hurt A LOT in order to get conscious about security and start demanding it, or start avoiding companies like Sony"
This does in no shape or form excuse actually hurting them. Just because someone has to be the first, doesn't mean the first is any less despicable than the second.
To use the standard lock analogy: just because some unscrupulous lock company sold their customers locks that could be defeated by someone sticking a pin into the lock, doesn't excuse someone breaking into houses in this way.
To be fair, PatheticLosersSec doesn't steal anything from the house it would seem, but it would be like breaking into all these houses and just leaving the door wide open. It would massively increase the chances of someone exploiting the situation.
If they actually had noble goals, they would notify all the users and publish information to embarrass the company in a way which wouldn't compromise all their users personal data.
After they exposed loads of username/password combinations off some Sony service, I thought to myself; who are they actually hurting? It seemed to me they just made it loads easier for criminals without the skills to do this sort of thing themselves.
Yes, it is possible that some more sinister hackers already had this data without telling anyone, just secretly exploiting them, but actually publishing the combinations makes it many times more likely that someone will exploit your personal data.
I consider this hacking group no more than simple vandals and criminals at this stage. There is no "honour" in it, and exposing porn clients are extremely likely to be hypocritical. I don't believe for a second that all members of this hacker group has a "clean conscience" about porn.
I know opinion is exceptionally polarised on this subject, but my personal favourite was always the global menu bar.
However, there are many reasons why it was never properly implemented on Linux desktop systems and it was available for years in KDE, but hardly ever used by anyone. Why?
1. It can not be used in conjunction with focus-follows-mouse, a favourite of some UNIX oldies. These are, however, becoming relatively fewer as Linux desktop usage has spread among people that have never seen a system using focus-follows-mouse.
2. Not a single existing Linux application was ever designed for the global menu bar. In most cases this just means they seem a bit awkward with the menu, even after patches to enable the menu have been applied. For other cases (i.e. LibreOffice) it is very hard to make it work at all with a global menu.
3. Linux users just aren't familiar with it, the way Mac users have always been.
Now, if Canonical had introduced the global menu bar 6 years ago, it may have been worth it (arguable), but it most definitely isn't now. The reason is that the menu bar is going away anyway. Hardly any Windows application these days show the menu bar by default, and some new applications have started getting rid of it altogether. I.e. Chrome, which just has the one menu from its wrench button. Introducing the global menu bar now was simply a waste of time and effort for something which will be gone in the next two or three years.
"I noticed that this website is in English, German, Spanish, French, and Italian--meaning it is mostly directed to the west. The fact that it doesn't even have Mandarin or Cantonese despite China's 1.3 Billion tells you that he is more interested in extracting money from guilt-laden westerners than solving any problems. French! Less than 2% of the earth speak French as their native language. Heck, more people speak Bengali or Telugu or even Marathi than the entire population of France!
Most of the western countries are stable or have declining populations."
This is largely irrelevant. The world could easily support 10 billion people if we all on average consumed as much as the Nigerians. You thus have it completely backwards. The western world consists of over 1.5 billion people that consumes many times more than the other 5-6 billion people on this planet. And our consumption is not going down.
It is shameful to tell the third world to stop having children so that we can buy more iPads, eat more beef and drink more beer. I personally need to have a look at myself in the mirror here.
Can I just point out that you in no way actually answer the argument. The argument is SUSTAINABLE capacity of the earth. As have been seen on local scales around the world thousands of times before, we can easily go beyond this capacity if we just don't care about sustainability. The results are dead areas with no resources and little life taking decades to recover. And the only reason they CAN recover is due to eventual migration from surrounding areas. With regards to the earth. If we fuck that one up, there ARE NO surrounding areas.
There is considerable scientific consensus that we are currently living beyond the sustainable capacity of the earth. Exactly how fucked we are have been subject to debate and alterations.
"The problem with allowing people give up some of their rights is that it not only effects them, but it will be passed down to their kids."
This isn't the only problem with allowing people to give up their rights. People need to eat and need to have a place to live. If they can not find employment (or for instance find a food retailer) to satisfy these needs without sacrificing their own rights, they may feel forced to do so. Allowing people to give up their rights for services/money/whatever only works when they have real choice. This is often not the case and this is certainly why many European countries (and the EU) will not permit work contracts that makes the employee give up certain rights.
My favourite is the insistence in the UK (regardless of company it seems) on just giving the parcel to the neighbours, regardless of whether signature is required or the delivery instructions has an explicit "DO NOT LEAVE WITH NEIGHBOURS" note on it.
Not every neighbour-relationship is friendly. Plenty of people have neighbours which would just take the parcel for themselves, regardless of whether they actually want it or not.
In my case it wasn't like that. I had left such an instruction with the company because my (nice) neighbours had been woken up at 07:30 in the morning by a delivery man (I sometimes leave before this time) and had kindly asked me if this could be avoided. But despite my instructions, they were again woken up by the delivery and it was embarrassing to apologise to them over this.
Allowing such instructions are absolutely pointless if drivers don't acknowledge them and it can be a real struggle trying to get it all sorted afterwards.
"49% of the comments will be from people who would not use this service and cannot understand why anyone else would want to ever act differently than they do.
49% of the comments will be from people who would love to use this service and cannot understand why anyone else would want to ever act differently than they do."
The difference is that the first 49% are irrelevant. The second 49% are not. Why? Because the last 49% would make the system commercially viable, and the first 49% does not have to pay for it if they don't want to.
Slashdot is full of cynical naysayers with opinions that the world does not care about one bit. Out of this large group, there is a small group of naysayers which the world really should have listened to. Separating the two is much more difficult than what one might think.
"Call it OpenSkype or LibreSkype."
An open Skype-compatible alternative would be brilliant. But if you want to avoid getting sued, I suggest calling it something entirely different.
... what??
"Well... it kinda feels like the new Gnome and Unity interfaces, which everybody hates.."
Not true. As for GNOME Shell, there are some vocal dissident and there are a fair number of quiet approvals. Up until now, I've belonged in the quiet approval part, but I find it hard to just sit around and accept people writing that "everybody hates" it.
My opinion is that it isn't perfect but it is a bloody good platform to build from. IMO the first truly exciting, design-driven, user interface changes in a free desktop environment ever, whereas previous attempts have been more "this is cool technology, lets use it", GNOME Shell has been "What user experience do we want to offer, and how can we achieve it?".
.. with all the different compositing effects going on. And you would certainly hope that this will cause the drivers to improve in the long run.
However, there is a question why any desktop shell / window manager should have any noticeable effect on running OpenGL games in FULL SCREEN. Surely, the desktop compositor and all that jazz should be suspended while the whole screen is being controlled by a game?
"Couldn't it be argued that app developers are in effect employees of Apple and already indemnified?"
Eh.. in which case all the copyright for the apps would belong to Apple, the employer. You can hardly have it both ways, "oh, we're only employees of Apple in terms of patent disputes....", so I doubt this is a path app developers would like to pursue.