The House *did* pass the Senate bill verbatim. And that bill is now law.
However, there were things in the Senate bill that both the House and the Senate had come to agree after the Senate's passage were a bad idea (such as the Cornhusker kickback). They couldn't be (successfully) renegotiated, because the composition of the Senate changed in the meantime, and any attempt to fix those points would have been fillibustered. So they are passing a much smaller bill of budget-related fixes to particular provisions of the Senate bill under different, budget-specific Senate procedures.
In the very unlikely event that the reconciliation bill does not pass, though, the Senate bill as it has already been passed by the Senate and the House and signed by the President stands unmodified as the law of the land.
the only thing you have going for your clinging to pluto is adherence to tradition.
If this is addressed to me, I think you misunderstand me. I fully agree that there's no more reason to call Pluto a planet than Quaoar, Sedna, Ceres, and lots of other stuff. Tradition (of the last 75 years) would call Pluto a planet but not Sedna, and I agree that makes no sense. I think, though, that the thing to aim for in a definition of "planet" (if it needs to be defined at all) is "the sort of thing that planetary scientists study", and that category definitely includes asteroids and TNOs and comets, and is starting to include extrasolar planets. I also believe that a definition that includes them would be less arbitrary and ambiguous than the IAU's current one.
Ultimately, it's just semantics. However, if the categories we use slow down discovery by making it harder to take seriously, fund, and disseminate the work of people studying TNOs and asteroids than to take seriously the work of (much better understood, by and large) classical terrestrial planets, then I don't think the categories are well chosen.
Now, I don't think planetary scientists, for the most part, make their decisions based on arbitrary terminology. But to take a concrete example, given how precarious its funding seemed from time to time, I suspect New Horizons would not have gotten funded if Pluto had never been considered a planet. And that would have been a shame. It will similarly be a shame if in 2035 a probe to Haumea doesn't get funded because Congress or the Duma or the National People's Congress thinks it doesn't make sense to spend that kind of money on something that isn't even a planet. Planetary scientists know the IAU definition is just one arbitrary place to draw the line, and that Pluto (and Eris and Makemake and Haumea) are probably going to be just as rewarding to study as Mercury, but to the extent that the terminology stands in the way of the wider culture understanding that, it's kind of unfortunate.
I have to say, I'm kind of fond of the "four planets and some rubble" definition, though.:-)
your choice, but the third graders of 2080 who have to memorize 80 planets might not be too happy with you
Once upon a time, students had to memorize only four elements (earth, air, fire, and water). Nowadays we recognize over a hundred, and there are a bunch of theoretical ones we can predict but have a hard time detecting. I don’t think “but people will have a hard time remembering them all, so we have to add arbitrary limit so that we don’t have so many” is a very good way of defining terms.
I can see a good argument for saying that the solar system contains four planets and some rubble. I can see an argument for saying that it contains over a dozen planets, probably way over. I can see a good argument for saying that it consists tens of thousands of planets. I can see a good argument for saying that “planet” is not a piece of scientific terminology and letting lay usage define it.
I can see an argument, although not a great one, for coming up with a definition that keeps the number down to a dozen, but I think the definition the IAU came up with is pretty ambiguous, since “cleared the neighbourhood around its orbit” is clearly relative, and you could define “cleared”, “neighbourhood”, and “around” in such a way that Ceres has done it (admittedly a stretch), or that Jupiter hasn’t. (There’s also the matter of “has” — do things that weren’t planets early in the history of the solar system become planets as time passes and they collect impacts?) And the IAU definition explicitly excludes anything that orbits around any star other than our sun, which to my mind makes it just silly, and means that a sizable fraction of the astronomical community is concerned with studying planets (and publishing papers calling them planets) that do not meet the IAU definition.
Incidentally, once upon a time, any new thing discovered in orbit in the solar system other than the sun was considered a planet, so the moon, the moons of Jupiter, and the asteroids (the few then known) would all have been considered planets. If you exclude dust particles and the like, that’s still a reasonable definition for the sorts of things that “planetary scientists” study, and personally I kind of like that approach.
First of all you're going to need a stable tripod, probably costing as much as the telescope itself.
It's designed to work with a camera tripod, which works well since it's so light. But the other night I was able to get a pretty good (if very small) view of Jupiter and a couple of its larger moons just bracing my elbows on a porch railing. When Saturn's inclination with respect to the earth is such that its rings are easy to see (not the case right now), I'm sure you'll be able to see them (meaning see that they exist, not necessarily get a good clear view) without a tripod.
(I got one for myself and one for my girlfriend, and I think it was a great purchase. The instructions that came with the kit were ambiguous and incomplete, but there's a good thorough PDF with photos on the web site.)
One-sixth g would multiply the positions you could use with the hookers. (Wouldn't do anything for blackjack odds, but might make roulette a lot trickier.)
Yeah, but the phrasing of the grandparent suggested that "pro se" could only ever be translated as "for himself" in any context ("because" Latin was a dead language). Otherwise I don't know what the point it was making was supposed to be.
No, it means "for himself, herself, itself, or oneself. In Latin, the reflexive pronoun "se" does not vary for gender, so it's every bit as accurate to translate it as "for herself" as "for himself". Completely off-topic, but the language geek in me couldnt let it go.:-)
Actually, I had a subnotebook with a 640x480 screen a while back, and I found I did a lot more horizontal scrolling in web pages on that than I do on the 770 (and reading PDFs was often impractical). It's just that by then web designers had assumed that everybody had more than a VGA display. Now, I think they assume you have at least 1024x768, but since people often don't have their browser windows full-screen (and browsers often have sidebars), 800 pixels across is fine for most sites. As desktop monitors get more and more screen real estate, that will probably change, but for now, I feel a lot less constrained on the 770 than I did on the VGA subnotebook (despite its much larger screen in terms of actual physical dimensions).
You're certainly right that VGA resolution would be fine for ebooks (unless they're PDFs), and it would be fine for web browsing in terms of actual ability to comfortably read the content if web designers weren't assuming bigger screens.
PS -- Just followed your link. Oh, my, that's a phone? Wow, that's seriously cool. If it had an alphabetic keyboard (the main appeal of my current phone, a Nokia 6820, which has a teeny-tiny screen), I'd seriously consider switching.
The Nokia 770 has a screen resolution of something like 225 dpi. I find reading text on my 770 really, really comfortable, and I was surprised to find that I was happy to read even PDFs (which aren't normally formatted for a small screen) on it. With FBReader on it, I have access to a reasonable amount of content, and it's smaller in all dimensions than a paperback book. (Well, it's only thinner than most paperback books.)
I think Nokia has hit the form-factor and screen-size sweet spot for this particular market niche (mainly surfing the web), in the way the Palm's (originally Pilot's) creators did for an electronic organizer. It's a little bigger than a typical PDA (at least in the widest dimension), but that way it has an 800-pixel-wide (landscape) screen, which means you can read most content on the web without any trouble. (And FBReader lets me rotate the screen, so I can hold it in a more typical book orientation.)
I just got one, and I've gotten much more than three hours out of the battery. I spent four hours on the bus with one (no Bluetooth or WiFi running, but with the backlight up pretty high) and the on-screen battery indicator showed about 50% charge when I was done (although I'm not sure that's linear).
I'd say 3 hours is about what I'd expect with WiFi on, and maybe playing music. For reading an ebook or browsing off-line, I get a lot more.
If you kill a gay man because you hate gays how is that anything other than a murder?
Well, what follows is my opinion rather than actually the way it works under the US legal system, but: If you kill a gay man because you hate gays, and nobody but you and maybe your buddy who lent you the shotgun knows that, that's just a murder. If you kill a gay man because you hate gays, make it extremely clear that that's why you did it, and string him up on a fence, then that's a murder, but it's also a threat to other gays. It's a public act, and it targets the murder victim, but it also targets everybody else who is supposed to learn of the murder. (If you kill a gay man because you hate gays in a crowded bar while yelling slurs that make it clear that you hate gays, that's probably somewhere in the middle.)
By and large, things that are considered hate crimes in the US have this characteristic: they are public acts, and they are directed at more than the individual victim. Burning a cross on somebody's lawn is an obvious example; it's not just an act of trespassing and vandalism; it's supposed to frighten an entire community, and change the tenor of an entire society. The 9/11 attacks were mass murder on a very large scale, but they were also public acts intended to frighten all Americans. (And yes, in my mind the thing that makes "hate crimes" different from ordinary crimes is the same thing that makes terrorism different from ordinary crimes, by and large.
By the way, I'm bi, so the notion of somebody being murdered for their sexual orientation has a certain delightful rhetorical frisson for me.:-)
hile I'm one of those people who sees a lot of value in the UN, I have to point out that the US is on the UN Security Council, and can thus veto practically any UN proposal. So I really wouldn't say that they're bound to anything the UN says...
Well, not entirely. The US can veto anything voted on at the Security Council, but the Security Council isn't the only bit of the UN with teeth. To take a concrete example, when the UN was set up, the Republic of China (controlled by the Kuomintang/Guomindang party) was given a permanent seat on the UN Security Council with a veto just like the US. In relatively short order, it was defeated on the Chinese mainland and forced to retreat to Taiwan, but it retained its seat as China on the Security Council. After a couple decades or so, though, it was stripped of its recognition as the legitimate government of (all) China, and its seat in the Security Council was given to the People's Republic of China, controlled by the Chinese Communist Party. You can bet the ROC government would have vetoed that if it could, but since it was a credentialling issue rather than a Security Council resolution it never came before the Security Council.
Less unusual examples would involve the day-to-day workings of various UN administrative bodies. Once the IAEA has a mandate to look for nukes in Canada, for instance, the US (or Russia) would not be able to stop the IAEA if we didn't like how they were going about it. Even though the US has a veto on the Security Council, that doesn't let it micromanage day-to-day activities of UN agencies.
I didn't know there was a Russian system.
(I'm not sure why you thought my post was FUD, though -- did you think I was arguing against Galileo or something? As far as I'm concerned, the more, the merrier.)
Well, if there are two independently-controlled GPS-like systems in the world, it drastically decreases the incentive for the people controlling one of them to turn it off, because it would do very little good to turn it off if there were an alternative available. Also, the US is one country (albeit a very large one), and the EU is lots of countries, so it would be harder for the EU to make the decision to turn Galileo off (or more likely, severely degrade the accuracy) than for the US. So yes, having an alternative to GPS makes a big difference in the reliablility of navigation systems. (For that matter, it probably makes a difference in the reliability of GPS itself, since the US would no longer get much advantage from restricting it.)
Emusic has worked to maintain a Linux client, but its been getting pretty rough.
It used to be, they let you download the MP3s via the browser. (That meant I could use them on my i386 Linux box, my SPARC BSD box, my StrongARM Linux box, or my SPARC Solaris box at work.) Then they started requiring you to download their MP3s with their proprietary app, which they distributed in binary for Mac, x86 Windows, and x86 Linux (so let's hope it continues to work across a Linux upgrade, and forget using it on Solaris or BSD). I cancelled my subscription at that point. I was still in a position where I could make it work, but I no longer trusted the company and I didn't like their attitude. (If I remember correctly, they made some sort of policy change around the same time that also annoyed their customers, but I don't remember what it was.) I'd go back in a heartbeat if they started letting me just download MP3s through the browser again (or get them in some similarly ubiquitous, non-OS-dependent and non-architecture-dependent way).
I've heard of this too, although by "ring" is meant "slightly more dust than in the surrounding interplanetary vacuum". If I remember correctly, the theory is that it's fed by dust kicked up by meteors on the moon. (The formation of the moon was a long time ago; back then, the Earth must have had a fairly impressive and visible ring -- and the young moon was a lot closer, for that matter --, but I don't think any traces would have lasted this long.)
Um, not quite. Chaucer wrote in Middle English; Shakespeare wrote in Early Modern English. (That's why Shakespeare is an awful lot easier to follow without special training than Chaucer.)
Ignoring the troll, if I might be so bold, the original point was that no one ever gives up power voluntarily.
No, but some read the tea leaves and decide it's in their own best interest to give up some power sooner than absolutely forced to, in the hope of a better long-term outcome. The National Party in South Africa is an example of this; they could have held onto power a little longer, but at the expense of the inevitable majority-rule government that replaced them being a lot more vengeful and a lot less willing to negotiate. They chose instead to relinquish power while they were still able to negotiate a peaceful transition.
(In lots of places, the fall of Communism was similar.)
I don't mean to imply that the DMCA is comparable to communism and apartheid, but the music industry is in a situation where its power is likely to decrease over the next five or ten years rather than increase, and it might be in its own interests to manage that shift now, while it still has a fair amount of power, rather than waiting to see what gets imposed on it by a populist backlash some years down the road.
I know this was a joke, but just to pretend I don't get the joke: Actually, on an embedded platform (at least one without a lot of storage), a Linux system is probably going to have very little GNU code. An embedded Linux system is likely to use BusyBox for basic Unix-compatible commands like ls and rm, and something like uClibc or dietlibc for its C library, and won't have things like Emacs or a compiler actually on the system. So it's unlikely to have much actual GNU-project code on it, if any.
Beyond that, one of the advantages of them controlling hardware and software is the fact that they can do more rigorous quality control, because they KNOW the configuration your machine will be running. This leads to the disadvantage of having a limited and more costly hardware base, but that is why Apple products "just work".
One alternative for them would be to license MacOS X to other hardware vendors, rather than selling it to end users. So Dell or HP has to put the effort in to make OS X work smoothly on their machines, and if the end user has a problem, they get to talk to Dell or HP about it, not Apple. (And probably OS X works a bit more reliably on Apple hardware, since Apple's hardware engineers and software engineers have a better communications path than Apple's software engineers and HP's or Dell's hardware engineers. But again, that's HP's or Dell's problem, not Apple's.) Apple could charge what they liked for OS X, and if the other hardware vendor didn't like it, they could keep selling Windows boxes (and users could keep buying Apple boxes to run OS X on).
I'm sure it's a lot more complex than that in real life, but it seems like it ought to be a net win for Apple
However, Apple actually did that for a few years once (licensing MacOS 6 or 7 or so to beige-box PowerPC vendors), and then they changed their mind and pulled (well, failed to renew) the licenses. So it's not something Apple hasn't considered before.
...they can't kick you out for sticking to what your contract says.
That depends on the jurisdiction. In some US states, they can't, and in some US states, they can.
(Also, I think it's unusual for a salaried employee's contract in the IT industry in the US to specify a specific number of hours of work per week. But they do often say that you must complete assigned tasks, so if you're coming in nine hours a week, your boss can just assign you more tasks. For that matter, if you're coming in only forty hours per week, your boss can assign you more tasks. There's all sorts of complicated federal and state law -- over my head, anyway -- that affects this, as well as individual contracts and employer policy, but it's often not as simple as a certain number of hours per week for salaried employees.)
My introduction to computers as a communication medium was on the PLATO system. When my girlfriend transferred to another school I conducted a long-distance relationship online around 1983. (I don't know when BBSes started to be popular; they might already have been by then, but I certainly wasn't plugged into them.)
PLATO Notesfiles were very closely analogous to Usenet — in fact, I think I've read that Notesfiles were part of the inspiration for Usenet.
PLATO was developed mainly for online courseware, and there was lots of really useful teaching material on it, but lots of people also used it for games and communication.
It was a major letdown when I went to Yale for college and they didn't have anything remotely as sophisticated as PLATO.:-) Then I had to content myself with BITNET for a while, until I got an account on the Unix machines (which had Usenet and talk(1) access).
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The House *did* pass the Senate bill verbatim. And that bill is now law. However, there were things in the Senate bill that both the House and the Senate had come to agree after the Senate's passage were a bad idea (such as the Cornhusker kickback). They couldn't be (successfully) renegotiated, because the composition of the Senate changed in the meantime, and any attempt to fix those points would have been fillibustered. So they are passing a much smaller bill of budget-related fixes to particular provisions of the Senate bill under different, budget-specific Senate procedures. In the very unlikely event that the reconciliation bill does not pass, though, the Senate bill as it has already been passed by the Senate and the House and signed by the President stands unmodified as the law of the land.
* Multitasking
* FreeDOS
* Android
* *BSD
* OpenSolaris
* Doom
* Quake (well, original Quake with software rendering)
* Apache
and on and on, but I really wanted to get "Multitasking" in there.
If this is addressed to me, I think you misunderstand me. I fully agree that there's no more reason to call Pluto a planet than Quaoar, Sedna, Ceres, and lots of other stuff. Tradition (of the last 75 years) would call Pluto a planet but not Sedna, and I agree that makes no sense. I think, though, that the thing to aim for in a definition of "planet" (if it needs to be defined at all) is "the sort of thing that planetary scientists study", and that category definitely includes asteroids and TNOs and comets, and is starting to include extrasolar planets. I also believe that a definition that includes them would be less arbitrary and ambiguous than the IAU's current one.
Ultimately, it's just semantics. However, if the categories we use slow down discovery by making it harder to take seriously, fund, and disseminate the work of people studying TNOs and asteroids than to take seriously the work of (much better understood, by and large) classical terrestrial planets, then I don't think the categories are well chosen.
Now, I don't think planetary scientists, for the most part, make their decisions based on arbitrary terminology. But to take a concrete example, given how precarious its funding seemed from time to time, I suspect New Horizons would not have gotten funded if Pluto had never been considered a planet. And that would have been a shame. It will similarly be a shame if in 2035 a probe to Haumea doesn't get funded because Congress or the Duma or the National People's Congress thinks it doesn't make sense to spend that kind of money on something that isn't even a planet. Planetary scientists know the IAU definition is just one arbitrary place to draw the line, and that Pluto (and Eris and Makemake and Haumea) are probably going to be just as rewarding to study as Mercury, but to the extent that the terminology stands in the way of the wider culture understanding that, it's kind of unfortunate.
I have to say, I'm kind of fond of the "four planets and some rubble" definition, though. :-)
Once upon a time, students had to memorize only four elements (earth, air, fire, and water). Nowadays we recognize over a hundred, and there are a bunch of theoretical ones we can predict but have a hard time detecting. I don’t think “but people will have a hard time remembering them all, so we have to add arbitrary limit so that we don’t have so many” is a very good way of defining terms.
I can see a good argument for saying that the solar system contains four planets and some rubble. I can see an argument for saying that it contains over a dozen planets, probably way over. I can see a good argument for saying that it consists tens of thousands of planets. I can see a good argument for saying that “planet” is not a piece of scientific terminology and letting lay usage define it.
I can see an argument, although not a great one, for coming up with a definition that keeps the number down to a dozen, but I think the definition the IAU came up with is pretty ambiguous, since “cleared the neighbourhood around its orbit” is clearly relative, and you could define “cleared”, “neighbourhood”, and “around” in such a way that Ceres has done it (admittedly a stretch), or that Jupiter hasn’t. (There’s also the matter of “has” — do things that weren’t planets early in the history of the solar system become planets as time passes and they collect impacts?) And the IAU definition explicitly excludes anything that orbits around any star other than our sun, which to my mind makes it just silly, and means that a sizable fraction of the astronomical community is concerned with studying planets (and publishing papers calling them planets) that do not meet the IAU definition.
Incidentally, once upon a time, any new thing discovered in orbit in the solar system other than the sun was considered a planet, so the moon, the moons of Jupiter, and the asteroids (the few then known) would all have been considered planets. If you exclude dust particles and the like, that’s still a reasonable definition for the sorts of things that “planetary scientists” study, and personally I kind of like that approach.
It's designed to work with a camera tripod, which works well since it's so light. But the other night I was able to get a pretty good (if very small) view of Jupiter and a couple of its larger moons just bracing my elbows on a porch railing. When Saturn's inclination with respect to the earth is such that its rings are easy to see (not the case right now), I'm sure you'll be able to see them (meaning see that they exist, not necessarily get a good clear view) without a tripod.
(I got one for myself and one for my girlfriend, and I think it was a great purchase. The instructions that came with the kit were ambiguous and incomplete, but there's a good thorough PDF with photos on the web site.)
One-sixth g would multiply the positions you could use with the hookers. (Wouldn't do anything for blackjack odds, but might make roulette a lot trickier.)
(You've got to know these things when you're King.)
Yeah, but the phrasing of the grandparent suggested that "pro se" could only ever be translated as "for himself" in any context ("because" Latin was a dead language). Otherwise I don't know what the point it was making was supposed to be.
No, it means "for himself, herself, itself, or oneself. In Latin, the reflexive pronoun "se" does not vary for gender, so it's every bit as accurate to translate it as "for herself" as "for himself". Completely off-topic, but the language geek in me couldnt let it go. :-)
Actually, I had a subnotebook with a 640x480 screen a while back, and I found I did a lot more horizontal scrolling in web pages on that than I do on the 770 (and reading PDFs was often impractical). It's just that by then web designers had assumed that everybody had more than a VGA display. Now, I think they assume you have at least 1024x768, but since people often don't have their browser windows full-screen (and browsers often have sidebars), 800 pixels across is fine for most sites. As desktop monitors get more and more screen real estate, that will probably change, but for now, I feel a lot less constrained on the 770 than I did on the VGA subnotebook (despite its much larger screen in terms of actual physical dimensions).
You're certainly right that VGA resolution would be fine for ebooks (unless they're PDFs), and it would be fine for web browsing in terms of actual ability to comfortably read the content if web designers weren't assuming bigger screens.
PS -- Just followed your link. Oh, my, that's a phone? Wow, that's seriously cool. If it had an alphabetic keyboard (the main appeal of my current phone, a Nokia 6820, which has a teeny-tiny screen), I'd seriously consider switching.
The Nokia 770 has a screen resolution of something like 225 dpi. I find reading text on my 770 really, really comfortable, and I was surprised to find that I was happy to read even PDFs (which aren't normally formatted for a small screen) on it. With FBReader on it, I have access to a reasonable amount of content, and it's smaller in all dimensions than a paperback book. (Well, it's only thinner than most paperback books.)
I think Nokia has hit the form-factor and screen-size sweet spot for this particular market niche (mainly surfing the web), in the way the Palm's (originally Pilot's) creators did for an electronic organizer. It's a little bigger than a typical PDA (at least in the widest dimension), but that way it has an 800-pixel-wide (landscape) screen, which means you can read most content on the web without any trouble. (And FBReader lets me rotate the screen, so I can hold it in a more typical book orientation.)
I'd say 3 hours is about what I'd expect with WiFi on, and maybe playing music. For reading an ebook or browsing off-line, I get a lot more.
There are lots of third-party apps available (cf http://maemo.org/maemowiki/ApplicationCatalog). However, it's a bit weak on standard PIM stuff like addressbooks and calendars. The choice I know about is , whose PIM apps have been ported to the N770. To my mind, it is a bit odd that Nokia shipped the thing without a full-featured addressbook and calendar pre-installed; they seem to really want to distinguish this product from traditional PDAs. (To my mind, the gorgeous if small 800x480 landscape-orientation screen does that quite well enough. :-)
By and large, things that are considered hate crimes in the US have this characteristic: they are public acts, and they are directed at more than the individual victim. Burning a cross on somebody's lawn is an obvious example; it's not just an act of trespassing and vandalism; it's supposed to frighten an entire community, and change the tenor of an entire society. The 9/11 attacks were mass murder on a very large scale, but they were also public acts intended to frighten all Americans. (And yes, in my mind the thing that makes "hate crimes" different from ordinary crimes is the same thing that makes terrorism different from ordinary crimes, by and large.
By the way, I'm bi, so the notion of somebody being murdered for their sexual orientation has a certain delightful rhetorical frisson for me. :-)
Less unusual examples would involve the day-to-day workings of various UN administrative bodies. Once the IAEA has a mandate to look for nukes in Canada, for instance, the US (or Russia) would not be able to stop the IAEA if we didn't like how they were going about it. Even though the US has a veto on the Security Council, that doesn't let it micromanage day-to-day activities of UN agencies.
(-: Score:5, Offtopic :-)
I didn't know there was a Russian system. (I'm not sure why you thought my post was FUD, though -- did you think I was arguing against Galileo or something? As far as I'm concerned, the more, the merrier.)
Well, if there are two independently-controlled GPS-like systems in the world, it drastically decreases the incentive for the people controlling one of them to turn it off, because it would do very little good to turn it off if there were an alternative available. Also, the US is one country (albeit a very large one), and the EU is lots of countries, so it would be harder for the EU to make the decision to turn Galileo off (or more likely, severely degrade the accuracy) than for the US. So yes, having an alternative to GPS makes a big difference in the reliablility of navigation systems. (For that matter, it probably makes a difference in the reliability of GPS itself, since the US would no longer get much advantage from restricting it.)
I've heard of this too, although by "ring" is meant "slightly more dust than in the surrounding interplanetary vacuum". If I remember correctly, the theory is that it's fed by dust kicked up by meteors on the moon. (The formation of the moon was a long time ago; back then, the Earth must have had a fairly impressive and visible ring -- and the young moon was a lot closer, for that matter --, but I don't think any traces would have lasted this long.)
Never mind a famous composer!
Um, not quite. Chaucer wrote in Middle English; Shakespeare wrote in Early Modern English. (That's why Shakespeare is an awful lot easier to follow without special training than Chaucer.)
(In lots of places, the fall of Communism was similar.)
I don't mean to imply that the DMCA is comparable to communism and apartheid, but the music industry is in a situation where its power is likely to decrease over the next five or ten years rather than increase, and it might be in its own interests to manage that shift now, while it still has a fair amount of power, rather than waiting to see what gets imposed on it by a populist backlash some years down the road.
I'm not holding my breath, though.
I know this was a joke, but just to pretend I don't get the joke: Actually, on an embedded platform (at least one without a lot of storage), a Linux system is probably going to have very little GNU code. An embedded Linux system is likely to use BusyBox for basic Unix-compatible commands like ls and rm, and something like uClibc or dietlibc for its C library, and won't have things like Emacs or a compiler actually on the system. So it's unlikely to have much actual GNU-project code on it, if any.
I'm sure it's a lot more complex than that in real life, but it seems like it ought to be a net win for Apple
However, Apple actually did that for a few years once (licensing MacOS 6 or 7 or so to beige-box PowerPC vendors), and then they changed their mind and pulled (well, failed to renew) the licenses. So it's not something Apple hasn't considered before.
My introduction to computers as a communication medium was on the PLATO system. When my girlfriend transferred to another school I conducted a long-distance relationship online around 1983. (I don't know when BBSes started to be popular; they might already have been by then, but I certainly wasn't plugged into them.) PLATO Notesfiles were very closely analogous to Usenet — in fact, I think I've read that Notesfiles were part of the inspiration for Usenet. PLATO was developed mainly for online courseware, and there was lots of really useful teaching material on it, but lots of people also used it for games and communication. It was a major letdown when I went to Yale for college and they didn't have anything remotely as sophisticated as PLATO. :-) Then I had to content myself with BITNET for a while, until I got an account on the Unix machines (which had Usenet and talk(1) access).