If you look up Psystar and the open computer, you'll find that they also modify and redistribute Apple security updates.
They can't rely on software updates directly from Apple always working on the computers, so they distribute updates themselves.
Since they are very, very unlikely to have permission for this, it is a straightforward case of copyright infringement.
Also, what do you expect? You all know that Apple does not allow "clone makers", so when one happens, do you just accept them to leave them alone, because they are "small time"?
Wouldn't you then be even more outraged if they waited until Psystar was big before they sued?
Psystar must have known this would happen, and I suspect they just used the OS X machines as publicity for their other machines.
"None of us know all the facts of the situation, but I think it's pretty obvious that this guy was just trying to maintain his livelyhood through a misguided attempt at job security."
No, he performed sabotage, then attempted to blackmail the City of San Francisco.
I do not feel the need to unite with arseholes, I have one already, thank you very much.
Sorry, GPL advocates have use the "copy into RAM" argument, although usually referencing laws in some other country. This comes up in arguments about plugins or proprietary drivers.
I would expect to start hearing references to this case this quite frequently in future GPL Virus flamewars.
This is a straw man argument. The GPL explicitely states that "usage" is not covered by the license.
From the GPL: "Activities other than copying, distribution and modification are not covered by this License; they are outside its scope. The act of running the Program is not restricted,[...]"
You are in fact entitled to use GPL software in any way and shape or form you wish and the restrictions only come in when you distribute software based on the program.
Thus you are perfectly entitled to USE proprietary plugins or drivers and neither Linux Torvalds nor any serious "GPL advocates" has AFAIK ever argued that this is not the case.
The discussion about proprietary drivers is whether NVIDIA/ATI/etc are legally allowed to distribute their proprietary drivers as they depend on compiling against the Linux kernel and there is thus an argument that they may be considered "derivative works" of the Linux kernel.
This question obviously also applies to Linux distributors that ship proprietary kernel modules.
One thing is clear, however, this never had anything to do with "copy into RAM", but everything to do with whether a proprietary module is "derivative works".
From the bill: "[...] promotes critical thinking skills, logical analysis, and open and objective discussion of scientific theories being studied, including, but not limited to, evolution, the origins of life, global warming, and human cloning."
I really can't see what is so wrong with "objective discussion of scientific theories".
ID is not a scientific theory and thus has no place in such a discussion. Also if the discussion was really "objective" then the sheer merit of the theory of evolution should shine through.
If a teacher teaches ID side by side with evolution, then parents can still sue or press charges.
"Sue a company because I don't like the pricing on its voluntary plan?"
No, sue them all because they are in breach of competition laws by clearly using price fixing as a method of hiking profits above what fair competition would yield.
"The carriers can do this simply because the majority of people don't shop for their cell phone plans based on the text messaging costs. All the major carrier's text messaging packages are pretty much the same across the board"
Or... people don't shop for their cell phone plans based on the text messaging costs BECAUSE the carriers charge pretty much the same.
There is no point to shop around because the crooks in the cell phone companies have fixed the price between themselves.
"Every very single statistic since the handgun ban went into effect has shown violent crime on the rise"
1. We are supposed to just take your word for this? If "every single statistic" shows this, then why can't you cite any sources? 2. You still haven't addressed AT ALL whether this supposed rise is any higher than countries that do not have gun control.
As others have noted (with citations to back them up, unlike you), the gun crime rate in the US is almost an order of magnitude higher than in Britain per citizen.
"But, since the handgun ban, all violent crime has gone up, most especially home invasion while the dwelling is occupied. Why? Because the criminals have NOTHING to fear."
Do you have any sort of proof whatsoever to back up your statements?
Even if we assume that violent crime has gone up, how has the violent crime in Britain since 1934 (when gun control came in) compared to other countries? More specifically, how does it compare to the US?
Without "The Great Equalizer (tm)" criminals are less likely to bother with guns, because they don't expect to encounter armed opposition. For this reason, any home invasion is less likely to end up with someone being dead.
If the criminals expect to meet armed opposition, they will shoot first and ask questions later and so the chances of someone ending up dead is considerably higher.
"The Great Equalizer" can thus be seen as an arms race between the criminals and the family/owner, which the criminal is always likely to win.
"Except that the lead developer went on the site and explicitly claimed that that was their intention."
I don't care what his intentions were. They are distributing ExtJS under the GPL license and if I decide to use the ExtJS I will follow the license, nothing more.
And yes, he is either misinformed or intentionally misleading people.
And not only that.. if they decide to accept any GPL contributions from outsiders and keep on this charade, they will be in BREACH of the GPL license for putting extra restrictions on other people's code than what the GPL says.
If they wanted you to release source for developing a web application, they should have chosen the Affero GPL license
The standard GPL license only covers redistribution, and if you create a web application in PHP using ExtJS for the front end, your web application never gets distributed to the user.
What Open Source software is currently doing, is making 'generic software' into the commodity it always has been if it wasn't for artificial limitation in software distribution imposed by law.
It is happening whether people like it or not.
The reason this matters so little on the world scale is that despite the enormously high profile very few of the world's software developers are developing 'generic software' for the mass market.
Instead most people are developing bespoke systems for particular tasks either within their organisation or as a development company (business systems, user services, web pages, etc).
The availability of so much open source software makes this job a lot easier because there is so much to build on.
So what open source does, is to move the generation of wealth away from the high profile, generic software providers (such as Microsoft, Oracle, etc) on to the integrators that can provide the same cheaper than with proprietary components or they can provide a lot more by using the savings of effort to provide extra bespoke solutions on top of them.
Obviously Microsoft is going to be unhappy about this, but for society I see a net gain in that our foundations will be so much better through building on other people's work.
Ah.. the fallacy of using Norway as an example of Scandinavia...
In fact, Norway is the odd one out in Scandinavia. The one country that has consistently done far worse than any of it's neighbours if you disregard oil money. Denmark, Sweden and Finland all have very high standards of living without enormous quantities of oil. This is despite years upon years of Social Democratic government, socialised medicine (that nobody in their right mind ever suggests getting rid of), high taxes and a strong welfare system.
So you are in fact BZZZZZZZZ... wrong!!!!
Denmark has a net export of ~150.000 barrels of oil per day, compared to Norway's 3 million barrels per day. Sweden and Finland are both net importers.
(Sources for the oil export/import are the CIA factbook).
Next, the middle class does not have more money than the top 5%. You are falsely stating this as fact. In fact, the top 1% holds 33% of all wealth and, the top 20% holds 51% of all wealth. The middle and lower class - the 80% of the country - hold just 16% of the wealth. I want to preempt anyone complaining about your maths. What you mean is that the "rest of the top 20%, apart from the top 1%" holds 51% of all wealth. Oherwise you'd be very wrong in adding the 33% to the 51% to get 84%.
But the figures I assume you cite (*), does indeed support that the bottom 80% owns only 16%.
But, Microsoft is generally very permissive with software made with their SDKs - "Developers developers developers!" You think I send Microsoft a check every time I.... No I don't think you do, but the Microsoft licenses are not "very permissive", they are proprietary even though they are gratis to use (on Windows systems). Using them may be perfectly okay for many things, but if you can't reimplement them, you are always at the mercy of the vendor.
And discontinuing the SDK won't keep anyone from using the old version; it'll only hurt if ISO comes out with "OOXML 2." This is simply not true. There will be bugs in the OOXML SDK like in any software and unless that is maintained, you will have to work around them constantly in the office suite using them. And then you may run into situations were you simply can't work around them without seriously impairing your product and you need help from the vendor.
This is particularly true if the bugs arise because you are on a new version of the operating system. I fully agree that Microsoft has a good track record of backwards compatibility, but even the best have plenty of exceptions.
If the vendor is still supporting the product when a new version of Windows comes out, great.. they can fix the bugs, but if your vendor happen to produce their own Office suite, and have a track record of multiple anti trust violations, then you may be SOL.
"I think the BBC also pushes up the competition, I find C4 much better, but if it wasnt for the BBC they would slump as ITV & FIVE just cant put on anything other than reality TV."
Note that C4 is also publicly owned, it is just advertisement funded instead of using license fees.
Channel 4 has a more entertainment focus than the BBC, but they both have some very good stuff.
ITV and Five are the two privately owned, advertisement funded channels on the analogue over-air network and as you say, they are both shite.
"If they decide to quit supporting OOXML, the OOXML SDK, or fuzzykittens32.lib, guess what? All your code's still going to work."
Only on the same hardware platform and guaranteed only on the exact same version of Windows.
If Microsoft decides to discontinue OOXML and releases a new version of Windows that is incompatible with the OOXML SDK, you will have to re-implement the SDK yourself to allow its use on the new version of Windows. Or even worse, Microsoft just decides to discontinue the SDK without notice while still keeping OOXML within MS Office.
Using the SDK means that your application is completely on Microsoft's terms, complying fully with their licensing requirements for this SDK and you are fully at their mercy when it comes to releases of the SDK.
If you are releasing a competing software package to MS Office, you will not want to leave this much power with your competition.
A. Attack them for not being "free and open" B. Steal the software anyway I agree with a) but I really object to b).
Professional Linux users abide by copyrights as much as professional Windows users do and hobbyist Linux users abide by copyrights as much as hobbyist Windows users do.
My organisation has plenty of licensed commercial Linux software including LSF, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Matlab, etc.
The only difference is that there are very few professional Linux users in the Multimedia editing business because there is little good software available. While companies are reluctant to port multimedia software to Linux because there is no users. Classic chicken/egg.
Personally I believe that if you release the software the customers will come and Adobe could do with being less reliant on Microsoft. Since Adobe has started to use Qt for some products there is a decent chance we will soon see products for Linux as well.
"now the average house costs around $300,000 and for a good programming job you can get about $85k"
If you think that is a lot, you definitely haven't done your home work.
The average UK house price is.... wait for it... 222,256 pounds or approximately $440,000. If you want a detached house, the average price is approximately $675,000.
In the south of England the average prices are approximately $600,000 for any house and close to a million USD for a detached house.
And salary wise you are probably looking at similar figures to Miami. But granted you probably get more holiday and spare time.
When I have looked at jobs in different countries I have found that jobs in the US are typically better paid, especially compared with living costs.
However, the work hours are also much, much longer. 37.5 hours is a standard UK work week (also in many other European countries) and you typically get paid overtime for working any longer. Even so, more than 45-50 hours per week in one job is very uncommon and is typically only done by people with very high paid jobs. Also, the statutory minimum holiday is 24 days a year. In my current job this year I got 25 days + 5 days special wedding leave and 2 study days.
It depends on what you're after really. If I wanted to go somewhere to build up a nice bit of cash over a short period, no question I'd go to the US. However, I'd rather have a nice comfortable life with an interesting job and plenty of spare time to enjoy myself and so I'd much rather stay in Europe.
Why wasn't it a "reasonable standard" when it was submitted? It is a perfectly reasonable standard: 1. It works for many, many purposes 2. It is implementable 3. It has several competing implementations
Just because it is a reasonable standard doesn't mean it works for absolutely everything.
So what should happen when someone points out shortcoming in the standard? No problem! ODF is a perfectly good base to build on, so lets create ODF 2.0 and resolve those issues.
Standards are not fixed, standards evolve. Replacing a perfectly good base with something monstrous just to fit in a feature request is not a good idea.
I am a user and I don't want a single window model. What I want is the multiple window model to work properly and it looks like they are taking steps to make this happen. (i.e. toolbox should be a utility window that always comes to the front when selecting a gimp window).
I haven't tried it, since I'm not in the retail business, but Stoq is an open source Point of Sale system supported by a brazilian company called Async.
It is GTK based and uses PostgreSQL for database storage (so extracting data should be a breeze). It also comes with a LiveCD so you can try it out yourself.
[q]If you look at how Zimbra [...] works, it really is a miracle that you get a first-grade email server with CalDav, Jabber, [...] in an interface of commercial quality and usability, you will find that this is open-source wedded with commercial enterprise done right.[/q]
Astroturfing/slashvertisement alert!
"When you look at how quickly Aunt Mabel's ready made chips cooks in your oven it really is a miracle how deliciously fluffy they are on the inside and how crisp and golden they are on the outside. This is home cooked food from a super market done right!"
"Here are up-to-date numbers for a single country, Turkey:"
Those statistics being "single country" also makes them less valid on the world scale.
I thought I smelled a fish when your statistics seemed to indicate that 1/3 of all Turks are "MSN users". This also means that if this and this is correct, there are more MSN users than Internet users in Turkey. So let us just assume that EVERY single Internet user in Turkey is also an MSN user.
Could this possibly be representative for the world?
The answer is pretty obviously "no". If all your statistics are correct, Turkey accounts for approximately 8.3 % of the MSN users in the world, but less than 1.3% of the worlds internet users (based on 1.32 billion Internet users from here).
Either your numbers are completely wrong, or MSN is over 6 times as popular in Turkey as the average for Internet users. Either way, they are completely useless as proof of total MSN usage in the world.
Po-tay-to, po-ta-to. This is completely irrelevant semantics.
"He or she did. I listed several, YOU just came up with another (the leaf is a different shape)."
The leaf has a miniscule difference in shape, and to give you another ridiculous argument; the angle at which it extends (non-attached) from the leaf is probably 2-3 grades different. Neither of these make any bit of difference. If the artist had actually copied the shape and angle of the leaf so it was exactly the same, this would have been an open and shut case.
The other differences you list are clearly enough to stop it being identical but that was never the argument.
When you are saying "they are nothing alike" and pushing this argument, what you are essentially doing is acting like a dictator about what other people are to think about this logo. There is plenty of similarity in the logo for many people to get associations with Apple computers and there isn't a damn thing you can do about it. If they were nothing alike, we wouldn't even be having this discussion.
Slashdot Mirror
No, this is not just about the EULA.
If you look up Psystar and the open computer, you'll find that they also modify and redistribute Apple security updates.
They can't rely on software updates directly from Apple always working on the computers, so they distribute updates themselves.
Since they are very, very unlikely to have permission for this, it is a straightforward case of copyright infringement.
Also, what do you expect? You all know that Apple does not allow "clone makers", so when one happens, do you just accept them to leave them alone, because they are "small time"?
Wouldn't you then be even more outraged if they waited until Psystar was big before they sued?
Psystar must have known this would happen, and I suspect they just used the OS X machines as publicity for their other machines.
"None of us know all the facts of the situation, but I think it's pretty obvious that this guy was just trying to maintain his livelyhood through a misguided attempt at job security."
No, he performed sabotage, then attempted to blackmail the City of San Francisco.
I do not feel the need to unite with arseholes, I have one already, thank you very much.
Sorry, GPL advocates have use the "copy into RAM" argument, although usually referencing laws in some other country. This comes up in arguments about plugins or proprietary drivers.
I would expect to start hearing references to this case this quite frequently in future GPL Virus flamewars.
This is a straw man argument. The GPL explicitely states that "usage" is not covered by the license.
From the GPL:
"Activities other than copying, distribution and modification are not covered by this License; they are outside its scope. The act of running the Program is not restricted,[...]"
You are in fact entitled to use GPL software in any way and shape or form you wish and the restrictions only come in when you distribute software based on the program.
Thus you are perfectly entitled to USE proprietary plugins or drivers and neither Linux Torvalds nor any serious "GPL advocates" has AFAIK ever argued that this is not the case.
The discussion about proprietary drivers is whether NVIDIA/ATI/etc are legally allowed to distribute their proprietary drivers as they depend on compiling against the Linux kernel and there is thus an argument that they may be considered "derivative works" of the Linux kernel.
This question obviously also applies to Linux distributors that ship proprietary kernel modules.
One thing is clear, however, this never had anything to do with "copy into RAM", but everything to do with whether a proprietary module is "derivative works".
From the bill:
"[...] promotes critical thinking skills, logical analysis, and open and objective discussion of scientific theories being studied, including, but not limited to, evolution, the origins of life, global warming, and human cloning."
I really can't see what is so wrong with "objective discussion of scientific theories".
ID is not a scientific theory and thus has no place in such a discussion. Also if the discussion was really "objective" then the sheer merit of the theory of evolution should shine through.
If a teacher teaches ID side by side with evolution, then parents can still sue or press charges.
"Sue a company because I don't like the pricing on its voluntary plan?"
No, sue them all because they are in breach of competition laws by clearly using price fixing as a method of hiking profits above what fair competition would yield.
"The carriers can do this simply because the majority of people don't shop for their cell phone plans based on the text messaging costs. All the major carrier's text messaging packages are pretty much the same across the board"
Or... people don't shop for their cell phone plans based on the text messaging costs BECAUSE the carriers charge pretty much the same.
There is no point to shop around because the crooks in the cell phone companies have fixed the price between themselves.
"Every very single statistic since the handgun ban went into effect has shown violent crime on the rise"
1. We are supposed to just take your word for this? If "every single statistic" shows this, then why can't you cite any sources?
2. You still haven't addressed AT ALL whether this supposed rise is any higher than countries that do not have gun control.
As others have noted (with citations to back them up, unlike you), the gun crime rate in the US is almost an order of magnitude higher than in Britain per citizen.
"But, since the handgun ban, all violent crime has gone up, most especially home invasion while the dwelling is occupied. Why? Because the criminals have NOTHING to fear."
Do you have any sort of proof whatsoever to back up your statements?
Even if we assume that violent crime has gone up, how has the violent crime in Britain since 1934 (when gun control came in) compared to other countries? More specifically, how does it compare to the US?
Without "The Great Equalizer (tm)" criminals are less likely to bother with guns, because they don't expect to encounter armed opposition. For this reason, any home invasion is less likely to end up with someone being dead.
If the criminals expect to meet armed opposition, they will shoot first and ask questions later and so the chances of someone ending up dead is considerably higher.
"The Great Equalizer" can thus be seen as an arms race between the criminals and the family/owner, which the criminal is always likely to win.
"Except that the lead developer went on the site and explicitly claimed that that was their intention."
I don't care what his intentions were. They are distributing ExtJS under the GPL license and if I decide to use the ExtJS I will follow the license, nothing more.
And yes, he is either misinformed or intentionally misleading people.
And not only that.. if they decide to accept any GPL contributions from outsiders and keep on this charade, they will be in BREACH of the GPL license for putting extra restrictions on other people's code than what the GPL says.
If they wanted you to release source for developing a web application, they should have chosen the Affero GPL license
The standard GPL license only covers redistribution, and if you create a web application in PHP using ExtJS for the front end, your web application never gets distributed to the user.
What Open Source software is currently doing, is making 'generic software' into the commodity it always has been if it wasn't for artificial limitation in software distribution imposed by law.
It is happening whether people like it or not.
The reason this matters so little on the world scale is that despite the enormously high profile very few of the world's software developers are developing 'generic software' for the mass market.
Instead most people are developing bespoke systems for particular tasks either within their organisation or as a development company (business systems, user services, web pages, etc).
The availability of so much open source software makes this job a lot easier because there is so much to build on.
So what open source does, is to move the generation of wealth away from the high profile, generic software providers (such as Microsoft, Oracle, etc) on to the integrators that can provide the same cheaper than with proprietary components or they can provide a lot more by using the savings of effort to provide extra bespoke solutions on top of them.
Obviously Microsoft is going to be unhappy about this, but for society I see a net gain in that our foundations will be so much better through building on other people's work.
Ah.. the fallacy of using Norway as an example of Scandinavia...
In fact, Norway is the odd one out in Scandinavia. The one country that has consistently done far worse than any of it's neighbours if you disregard oil money.
Denmark, Sweden and Finland all have very high standards of living without enormous quantities of oil. This is despite years upon years of Social Democratic government, socialised medicine (that nobody in their right mind ever suggests getting rid of), high taxes and a strong welfare system.
So you are in fact BZZZZZZZZ... wrong!!!!
Denmark has a net export of ~150.000 barrels of oil per day, compared to Norway's 3 million barrels per day. Sweden and Finland are both net importers.
(Sources for the oil export/import are the CIA factbook).
And yes, I am Norwegian.
But the figures I assume you cite (*), does indeed support that the bottom 80% owns only 16%.
(*) Edward N. Wolff at New York University (2004).
In my opinion democracy is an illusion as long as 20% of the people own 84% of the wealth.
The bottom 80% simply have no way of making informed opinions based on sources that aren't owned by the top 20%.
This is particularly true if the bugs arise because you are on a new version of the operating system. I fully agree that Microsoft has a good track record of backwards compatibility, but even the best have plenty of exceptions.
If the vendor is still supporting the product when a new version of Windows comes out, great.. they can fix the bugs, but if your vendor happen to produce their own Office suite, and have a track record of multiple anti trust violations, then you may be SOL.
"I think the BBC also pushes up the competition, I find C4 much better, but if it wasnt for the BBC they would slump as ITV & FIVE just cant put on anything other than reality TV."
Note that C4 is also publicly owned, it is just advertisement funded instead of using license fees.
Channel 4 has a more entertainment focus than the BBC, but they both have some very good stuff.
ITV and Five are the two privately owned, advertisement funded channels on the analogue over-air network and as you say, they are both shite.
"If they decide to quit supporting OOXML, the OOXML SDK, or fuzzykittens32.lib, guess what? All your code's still going to work."
Only on the same hardware platform and guaranteed only on the exact same version of Windows.
If Microsoft decides to discontinue OOXML and releases a new version of Windows that is incompatible with the OOXML SDK, you will have to re-implement the SDK yourself to allow its use on the new version of Windows. Or even worse, Microsoft just decides to discontinue the SDK without notice while still keeping OOXML within MS Office.
Using the SDK means that your application is completely on Microsoft's terms, complying fully with their licensing requirements for this SDK and you are fully at their mercy when it comes to releases of the SDK.
If you are releasing a competing software package to MS Office, you will not want to leave this much power with your competition.
B. Steal the software anyway I agree with a) but I really object to b).
Professional Linux users abide by copyrights as much as professional Windows users do and hobbyist Linux users abide by copyrights as much as hobbyist Windows users do.
My organisation has plenty of licensed commercial Linux software including LSF, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Matlab, etc.
The only difference is that there are very few professional Linux users in the Multimedia editing business because there is little good software available. While companies are reluctant to port multimedia software to Linux because there is no users. Classic chicken/egg.
Personally I believe that if you release the software the customers will come and Adobe could do with being less reliant on Microsoft. Since Adobe has started to use Qt for some products there is a decent chance we will soon see products for Linux as well.
"now the average house costs around $300,000 and for a good programming job you can get about $85k"
.... wait for it ... 222,256 pounds or approximately $440,000. If you want a detached house, the average price is approximately $675,000.
If you think that is a lot, you definitely haven't done your home work.
The average UK house price is
In the south of England the average prices are approximately $600,000 for any house and close to a million USD for a detached house.
And salary wise you are probably looking at similar figures to Miami. But granted you probably get more holiday and spare time.
When I have looked at jobs in different countries I have found that jobs in the US are typically better paid, especially compared with living costs.
However, the work hours are also much, much longer. 37.5 hours is a standard UK work week (also in many other European countries) and you typically get paid overtime for working any longer. Even so, more than 45-50 hours per week in one job is very uncommon and is typically only done by people with very high paid jobs. Also, the statutory minimum holiday is 24 days a year. In my current job this year I got 25 days + 5 days special wedding leave and 2 study days.
It depends on what you're after really. If I wanted to go somewhere to build up a nice bit of cash over a short period, no question I'd go to the US. However, I'd rather have a nice comfortable life with an interesting job and plenty of spare time to enjoy myself and so I'd much rather stay in Europe.
1. It works for many, many purposes
2. It is implementable
3. It has several competing implementations
Just because it is a reasonable standard doesn't mean it works for absolutely everything.
So what should happen when someone points out shortcoming in the standard? No problem! ODF is a perfectly good base to build on, so lets create ODF 2.0 and resolve those issues.
Standards are not fixed, standards evolve. Replacing a perfectly good base with something monstrous just to fit in a feature request is not a good idea.
I am a user and I don't want a single window model. What I want is the multiple window model to work properly and it looks like they are taking steps to make this happen.
(i.e. toolbox should be a utility window that always comes to the front when selecting a gimp window).
I haven't tried it, since I'm not in the retail business, but Stoq is an open source Point of Sale system supported by a brazilian company called Async.
It is GTK based and uses PostgreSQL for database storage (so extracting data should be a breeze). It also comes with a LiveCD so you can try it out yourself.
[q]If you look at how Zimbra [...] works, it really is a miracle that you get a first-grade email server with CalDav, Jabber, [...] in an interface of commercial quality and usability, you will find that this is open-source wedded with commercial enterprise done right.[/q]
Astroturfing/slashvertisement alert!
"When you look at how quickly Aunt Mabel's ready made chips cooks in your oven it really is a miracle how deliciously fluffy they are on the inside and how crisp and golden they are on the outside. This is home cooked food from a super market done right!"
"Here are up-to-date numbers for a single country, Turkey:"
Those statistics being "single country" also makes them less valid on the world scale.
I thought I smelled a fish when your statistics seemed to indicate that 1/3 of all Turks are "MSN users". This also means that if this and this is correct, there are more MSN users than Internet users in Turkey. So let us just assume that EVERY single Internet user in Turkey is also an MSN user.
Could this possibly be representative for the world?
The answer is pretty obviously "no".
If all your statistics are correct, Turkey accounts for approximately 8.3 % of the MSN users in the world, but less than 1.3% of the worlds internet users (based on 1.32 billion Internet users from here).
Either your numbers are completely wrong, or MSN is over 6 times as popular in Turkey as the average for Internet users. Either way, they are completely useless as proof of total MSN usage in the world.
"Apple's leaf isn't drop-shaped, it's lentil-shaped."
Po-tay-to, po-ta-to. This is completely irrelevant semantics.
"He or she did. I listed several, YOU just came up with another (the leaf is a different shape)."
The leaf has a miniscule difference in shape, and to give you another ridiculous argument; the angle at which it extends (non-attached) from the leaf is probably 2-3 grades different. Neither of these make any bit of difference. If the artist had actually copied the shape and angle of the leaf so it was exactly the same, this would have been an open and shut case.
The other differences you list are clearly enough to stop it being identical but that was never the argument.
When you are saying "they are nothing alike" and pushing this argument, what you are essentially doing is acting like a dictator about what other people are to think about this logo. There is plenty of similarity in the logo for many people to get associations with Apple computers and there isn't a damn thing you can do about it. If they were nothing alike, we wouldn't even be having this discussion.