"And if Xerox had taken the same view, we wouldn't be using mice or GUIs at all"
If anyone had the right to patent mice and GUIs, it was Doug Englebart, who demonstrated working examples of both (together with hypertext and video conferencing) at MIT in the 1960s. It's rather sad that Xerox PARC seems to get credit for something they didn't invent, while the likes of Englebart and Ivan Sutherland are largely forgotten.
The only reliable thing about The Sun is the fact that every issue will have some pictures of topless women. This is also the only thing that makes it remotely worth looking at for anyone with an IQ that can't be expressed on the fingers of one hand.
You have the same CPU and graphics card, which are part of the hardware, not all of it. You won't for example have the same motherboard, hence the fact that the machine won't run an unmodified OS X, and motherboards are hardware.
"The point is the Apple doesn't create this mystery hardware out of magic purple elephant poop. It's pretty standard stuff."
It's always been pretty standard stuff. The original Mac used a 68000, and other 68000-based computers such as the Atari ST and Amiga equipped with a little box with sockets for Apple ROMs could run MacOS and any software written for it. PowerPC is made by IBM and Freescale, not Apple, and various companies make PPC-based motherboards that use standard PC cases and components, e.g. PagasosPC and Terra Soft, while IBM manufacture a wide variety of complete PPC systems. However, as is the case with the Intel-based computer you're talking about, these are not Macs, and cannot therefore run OS X and software written for it.
"True, but is the hardware of any higher or lower quality? That is debatable. Most of the hardware used by all of these folks are obtained from the same or similar vendors. One may get a headstart on the other here or there, but for the most part it's all the same"
Some things are the same, others differ, most notably motherboards and the sorts of chips / firmware they have. It's difficult to say whether one obtains a better system by building it or buying one from a name vendor, because hardware can fail or perform badly no matter where one gets it from, even when one avoids the cheap crap end of the price spectrum.
"Take that unwashed masses of Linux users! I spit on your NextStep-like window managers! Posers!"
You seem to have some notable bitterness issues, because my entirely factual statement about Linux not being able to run software that's written for OS X, ergo a PC running Linux isn't a Mac, did not either state or imply that this means Linux is an inferior OS.
"Quite a bit of Linux stuff doesn't run on the Mac either, so I guess it's pretty much a wash."
It's not a wash for somebody wants to run software written for OS X, just like it isn't a wash for people who want or need to run Windows software that doesn't work properly (or at all) under Wine, Crossover Office, etc. There are far more of both categories than people who want to run something which is Linux-specific on another OS, especially with Macs, which have UNIX underpinnings, ship with XWindows on their installation disks, and use GNU compilers and base libraries.
"Mac hardware as some kind of machine that is superior to all others simply because it has the pixie dust to run a specific OS is somewhat specious reasoning to me."
It's specious to me as well, hence the fact that I didn't say anything of the sort. Incompatible != inferior; Amigas were incompatible with Sinclair Spectrum and Apple-II software, but most would agree that they significantly better than either of those 8 bit machines.
"Seriously, the differences in what you are able to do between the different OS's, IMHO, are getting slimmer as time goes on."
The differences in capabilities of computer operating systems have been dictated by the realities of the hardware they must run on, and what people want to do with it, for nearly half a century. Just about everything we expect from a modern OS had been implemented in the 1960s, but things like mice, GUIs, hypertext, and video conferencing had no real application in a world where most computers spent their time batch-processing punched cards containing financial and scientific data. Personal computers have consistently been a couple of decades behind top dollar "big iron" used by large companies and well-funded research facilities, so it tends to take a little over a decade for those concepts to appear on high-end business PCs, and another decade or so for it to become common on home PCs. A current example is virtualisation, which has been around in th
"From this article he seems to have ditched his newly found OSX for Ubuntu, and thus the whole hypocrisy of not supporting his preferred system crops up again."
He's still using OS X at home on a MacBook Pro as before, but was previously running Windows on a Dell sub-notebook because Apple don't make one anymore (which is IMO strange given the popularity of the 12" PowerBook), and the MBP is too heavy. The sub-notebook now runs Unbuntu instead of Windows, so this is a gain for Ubuntu rather than a loss for OS X.
"Want a high-end Mac Pro? Get a couple of Xeon's (the speed of your choice), throw a somewhat dated 7300GT graphics card in there, a couple gigs of ECC Memory, and the Sata Hard Drive of your choosing.
There, you have a Mac Pro."
What you actually have is a no-name box with the same CPU and graphics card as a Mac Pro, which, as a subsequent comment of your own proves, isn't a Mac Pro:
"What I cannot get is the OS to run on said machine because of some proprietary things thrown into the Macs that would not allow it to run."
The distinguishing feature of a (modern) Mac is its ability to run a non-hacked version of MacOS X, and software written for MacOS X, so any system that can''t do this isn't a Mac, irrespective of what its owner may say. It isn't a HP or Dell either, so it won't run one of their special registration-free versions of Windows that ship with their systems, and use proprietary BIOS ID information to ensure that they can't be installed on computers made by someone else.
"But I suppose all of this is what Linux is for..."
Linux is not OS X, or even a reasonable facsimile thereof, because it cannot run software written specifically for OS X. An arbitrary white box with Linux is not therefore a Mac, irrespective of whether its has the same CPU and graphics card some Macs.
"even now, in a position of strength, it still would not make sense for Apple to license the OS"
Agreed, especially as they aren't in a position of strength compared to Microsoft in computer operating systems. What makes OS X special is the synergy with Apple's hardware: take away OS X, and their machines are now nothing more than a pricey of Wintel computers; sell the OS without a Mac, and they lose one of the key things that distinguishes them from every other PC vendor. Either situation would result in Apple losing their currently almost unique ability to sell significant numbers of desktop and laptop computers for a price that includes a decent profit margin, without which there would be no reason for them to carry on making Macs when they can get better margins from consumer electronics.
I think you missed the sarcasm in my post, which should have been evident from the phrase "just like other successful operating systems such as OS/2 and BeOS", because neither of them was at all successful at gaining any notable share of the commodity desktop OS market (although OS/2 had a niche corporate desktop market, and was also used as an embedded OS for ATMs and EPOS systems for several years).
"When Apple licensed the OS last time, it nearly took the company under."
While I agree that Apple would be silly to sell OS X for machines other than Macs, I think that their many other problems at the time they did licence MacOS were what was destroying the company, and the legal clones merely served to highlight these existing problems rather than being the cause of new ones. In the mid 1990s Apple had a confusing product line, an OS that was starting to look very old and limited compared with Windows, and a growing history of ambitious software projects that ended up being abandoned before they were completed, often after various third party developers had spent considerable amounts of time and effort designing products around them. This resulted in a contracting market where new Macs were only selling to people who were already committed to Macs, while the rest of the world (including some Apple users) went with Windows, which was now a 32-bit OS with pre-emptive multitasking that, despite stability problems in its consumer versions, actually crashed less than Apple's offering, so even some of the Mac faithful started to balk at paying a lot more money for something that was actually worse in practice than a cheap commodity PC.
If one's overall market is static or contracting, then it's obvious that any company's gains will be another company's losses, and this is the situation Apple found themselves in when they licensed MacOS to others during a period when their market was shrinking rather than growing. Things would however have been very different if they'd licensed MacOS to others during the early 1980s, when it effectively had no competition, and would therefore have stood an excellent chance of putting Apple where MS are today (even Bill Gates believed that this would happen at that time).
Every geek knows they could make piles of money taking Microsoft on in the commodity x86 OS space by being more stable, and having compelling features, just like other successful operating systems such as OS/2 and BeOS.
"I wonder if those same people would have reacted the same if the same decision had fallen in another case - Eolas vs. Microsoft."
I was completely against the Eolas vs. MS decision, because it showed Microsoft and other big companies with armies of lawyers and effectively limitless war chests that patenting anything they can think of, even if they have no plans to use it, is an excellent way of stifling potential competitors. Big companies armed with a portfolio of even the most dubious software patents can thus keep smaller companies locked in litigation for years, which is not only expensive, but also means that time and effort which could have been spent on making and marketing products is being effectively wasted.
People who are celebrating this decision because it pulls the teeth of some patent trolls are therefore missing the fact that by doing so, it's actually making the life of giant corporate trolls easier, because they don't have to worry about being stung by patent-only companies who have nothing to lose. Few judges would argue if the likes of Microsoft _claimed_ they were developing a product which incorporated whatever patents they wanted to use against Smallguy Software Inc., and Smallguy's lawyers have no effective way of showing that they aren't, so their system of using quantum entanglement to transmit vast volumes of information between computers instantaneously without a network ends up effectively being squashed by BigCorp's patent on "a method of using stored instructions to make computers do the same stuff lots of times".
"With Apple you'll have to buy a new version every 1 or 2 releases. If you don't you can't run the newer versions of the software that come out. They used to come out every 6 months or so, but now they are at 1 ones a year."
The only Apple major upgrade that came out six months after another release was 10.0 to 10.1, which was free for people who already had 10.0. The others were released at increasing intervals:
10.2 came out in August 2002, 11 months after 10.1. 10.3 went to retail October 2003, 14 months after 10.2. 10.4 was launched in April 2005, 18 months after 10.3. 10.5 is expected to appear in October 2007, 30 months after 10.4.
This averages out at one release per 12.25 months if we don't include 10.5, which hasn't been released yet. Let's compare this with Microsoft's consumer OS offerings between 1998 and 2001, when XP came out (i.e. before Vista missed its announced release dates by five years):
Windows 98: June 1998. Windows 98 SE: May 5 1999. Paid upgrade to 98, 11 months after 98. Windows ME: June 2000, paid upgrade, 13 months after 98 SE. Windows XP: October 2001, paid upgrade 16 months after ME.
This averages out at once per 13.3 month, i.e. only one month more than OS X. Note also that MS originally planned to release what's now Vista in late 2002 / early 2003, which would have been in line with their policy of 1 major (i.e. charged for) consumer release per year.
"With the other OS's you don't need to pay for updates/upgrades (think service packs ?) that often."
You don't pay for service packs with Apple either. OS X 10.4 is now in version 10.4.10, which is not the same as the 10.4.0 that I installed in July 2005. Note also that _any_ major (paid) versions of OS X adds significantly more to the previous version than Windows 98 SE did to Windows 98, os ME did to 98 SE, both of which MS had no problems with charging people for. It could also be argued that they've added at least as much as Vista does to XP.
"But then again an official full version of Windows is more expensive."
All Apple's major OS releases are however sold as upgrades, and upgrades to a Microsoft OS are a lot cheaper than full versions, although the non-crippled ones still cost rather more than Apple charge. Vista Ultimate upgrade for example costs as much as I will finally spend on upgrading my rev. 1 PPC iMac G5 from 10.3 (which came with it) to 10.4, and then 10.4 to 10.5 when that ships. I'll have got more added functionality (and indeed enhanced performance) from the two upgrades to OS X than would be the case if I upgraded my XP Pro laptop (which is of a similar age to the Mac) to Vista for the same amount of money, especially given the fact that Vista with its eye candy turned on would require rather more power than that particular machine has available.
"The BB politicians are a prime example. A generation of ego driven, self-serving, money grubbing thieves, who will sell this country and their mothers out to make a dime."
Unfortunately, history demonstrates that BB politicians are no worse than those from previous generations, and are actually a lot better than some of them. Pork barrel politics for example goes back to the early 19th century, and both it and other forms of political patronage became rife in the post civil war period (the so called "Gilded Age), when incredible levels of corruption including obvious vote rigging were endemic at all levels of government, and in all branches. The worst of the BB politicos is an angel compared with the average ones of the 19th century, and also rather better than most from the early 20th century.
"Not to worry then, all these old guys will be dead in the next 10-20 years, if all goes well. Everyone seems to forget that all of us, the younger generation (which is obviously a huge span of years) is next on the list for power."
And the people who are in their teens and 20s today that eventually opt for a career in politics will be technological ignoramuses who will be passing legislation which is every bit as out of touch with the social issues surrounding emergent technologies from 40 years in the future as our lot are with what's happening now, and the equivalent of Internet forums from that era will contain the same claims about how it will all change when the old sods die off. Check out what things were like when Richard Stallman, Tim Berners-Lee, and Steve Wozniac were teenagers, and you'll see a period of notable political upheaval when youth activists could count on vast numbers of like-minded people to attend rallies and demonstrations, organise mass sit-ins, publish "subversive" magazines and newsletters, and generally stick it to "the man" despite heavy-handed and often brutal attempts by the police and government to stop them. They make today's youth look like a bunch of disorganised, cowardly whiners, yet their conviction that things would definitely change when the old guard died off turned out to be completely unfounded, and the same will happen again, and again, and again.
The reason for this situation is a simple one: those who tend to choose careers in politics mostly come from backgrounds in law, political science, business, and / or extremely wealthy and influential families (and increasingly, film and TV actors), none of which are renowned for their high level of technological awareness. Very few of today's young people in these categories have any real idea how venerable technologies such as steam engines, "land-line" telephones, radio and TV, or suspension bridges work, let alone complicated modern things like computers, cellular telephones, or the Internet, and it is they who will be governing in 30 years, not the sort of people who read Slashdot.
"Not quite -- it's all relative. Sure you can hear anything above 0dB, and you are unlikely to suffer permanent damage from anything less than 140dB. But that isn't the same as having 140dB of dynamic range."
It is exactly the same, because the dynamic range of a system is defined as the difference between the smallest and largest signals that it can represent (not the same as signal to noise ratio). There are plenty of sources on the web, so I suggest you do a Google search for "dynamic range definition" (it isn't only used in reference to audio).
"If you are hearing a sound at a certain volume, you won't hear be able to anything else that is more than 20dB quieter than the louder sound."
What you're describing is the auditory masking threshold (AMT), not dynamic range.
"Seeing as your ears cannot hear more than 20dB of dynamic range"
The dynamic range of a healthy human ear is at least 130db, and can be as high as 140db, depending on various personal factors such as age and genetics.
"When I was in London a couple of years ago, I wanted to throw away a kleenex; only to find no trash bins. When I asked a passerby, I was informed that it was because of the IRA attacks and the police took them away."
A lot of bins were removed during the 1990s, but they've been steadily replacing them again due to (justified) complaints about filthy streets. It's therefore entirely possible that the part of London you visited had no bins when you were there, so you may well have been correctly informed (although it was councils who removed them, not the police). Note though that removing the majority of them was a typical case of over-reaction, because while there were several IRA bombs on trains and the London Underground, AFAIK only one of them was in a bin, and that happened in 1991.
"There's a very good reason why it's a good thing to limit power of those on the government payroll. It's because this power corrupts. And absolute power corrupts absolutely."
And also because there are plenty of stupid fuckwits on government payrolls who shouldn't be trusted with a shopping list, let alone potentially sensitive information about someone else. Britain for example has a particular breed of high-ranking idiot with a penchant for having laptops full of confidential and even classified information stolen, so the standard of the people on lower rungs of the ladder than them doesn't bear thinking about.
"As far as folks in the UK are concerned, I guess you never heard of the IRA."
I was born in the UK, lived there throughout the major IRA bombing campaigns, and nobody I met was intimidated by them, let alone living in terror.
"That's the reason that to this day, you will not find any trash cans on most London streets."
There are plenty of them on London streets. Bins were taken out of (London) railway stations after the Victoria bin bomb, but even at Victoria, the bus station at the front has bins, as do the streets that run around the sides and back, and railway stations outside London still have bins despite the fact the the IRA by no means restricted its attacks to the capital.
A large body of research cited here shows that CO2 is a more fundamental necessity for life in general than oxygen because many organisms and indeed human mechanisms are anaerobic, and also that increased concentrations (sometimes to the level of completely replacing oxygen with it) are used to treat certain medical conditions. CO2 is also the trigger for the breathing reflex, without which people simply forget to breathe (this has been proven experimentally).
"attacking the statement based on the source alone? No finer example of a logical fallacy than that."
A logical fallacy is a flawed line of reasoning. I'm surprised that you consider a simple statement about the validity of Wikipedia to be a line of reasoning, because few others would dignify it in that way.
Note also that attacking sources is perfectly valid if one considers them to be unreliable, incorrect, or incomplete, and Wikipedia is frequently all of these, despite the strange faith that Internauts seem to have in what's actually little more than a bunch of editable blog entries with an index. I didn't attack you (ad hominem) or set up any straw men, so I fail to see what it is that you're objecting to.
"My point was that the license appears to relinquish the right to pursue such a renewal."
I'm not sure whether he actually relinquished such a right specifically, although it wouldn't have been in Guthrie's nature to renew, and even if he had, he wouldn't have prosecuted anyone for infringement. What's unfortunate of course is that while the original song is in the public domain, Guthrie's later versions (which often have some very interesting lyrics) didn't expire until after 1978, so they've now entered the twilight realm of perpetual corporate copyright.
"Not only is this license permissive, but it appears to relinquish any claim to exclusive rights after 28 years, much like Founders' Copyright."
US copyrights lasted 28 years until the law was changed in 1978. The copyright holder could optionally extend the term by another 28 years if they renewed it in the last year of the previous copyright, but that was the limit, so all works would become part of the public domain after at most 56 years.
What you say is true, but the main topic is about patents within the EU, and the ECJ has ultimate jurisdiction over EU member states. They've already ruled against EPO patents having any cross-border validity within the EU unless the ECJ says otherwise for specific cases (these must have some effect on acquis communautaire for the ECJ to accept such a case, however), so they must be defended separately in each country's national courts, who are not obliged to accept any EPO patent that conflicts with their own patent laws.
Slashdot Mirror
http://www.page3.com/
"And if Xerox had taken the same view, we wouldn't be using mice or GUIs at all"
If anyone had the right to patent mice and GUIs, it was Doug Englebart, who demonstrated working examples of both (together with hypertext and video conferencing) at MIT in the 1960s. It's rather sad that Xerox PARC seems to get credit for something they didn't invent, while the likes of Englebart and Ivan Sutherland are largely forgotten.
"Did you just sneak in Godwin's Rule?"
Storm troopers originated in the First World War, so the term can safely be used in Godwin-sensitive environments.
"I don't know how reliable the SUN is."
The only reliable thing about The Sun is the fact that every issue will have some pictures of topless women. This is also the only thing that makes it remotely worth looking at for anyone with an IQ that can't be expressed on the fingers of one hand.
"But you have the same hardware."
You have the same CPU and graphics card, which are part of the hardware, not all of it. You won't for example have the same motherboard, hence the fact that the machine won't run an unmodified OS X, and motherboards are hardware.
"The point is the Apple doesn't create this mystery hardware out of magic purple elephant poop. It's pretty standard stuff."
It's always been pretty standard stuff. The original Mac used a 68000, and other 68000-based computers such as the Atari ST and Amiga equipped with a little box with sockets for Apple ROMs could run MacOS and any software written for it. PowerPC is made by IBM and Freescale, not Apple, and various companies make PPC-based motherboards that use standard PC cases and components, e.g. PagasosPC and Terra Soft, while IBM manufacture a wide variety of complete PPC systems. However, as is the case with the Intel-based computer you're talking about, these are not Macs, and cannot therefore run OS X and software written for it.
"True, but is the hardware of any higher or lower quality? That is debatable. Most of the hardware used by all of these folks are obtained from the same or similar vendors. One may get a headstart on the other here or there, but for the most part it's all the same"
Some things are the same, others differ, most notably motherboards and the sorts of chips / firmware they have. It's difficult to say whether one obtains a better system by building it or buying one from a name vendor, because hardware can fail or perform badly no matter where one gets it from, even when one avoids the cheap crap end of the price spectrum.
"Take that unwashed masses of Linux users! I spit on your NextStep-like window managers! Posers!"
You seem to have some notable bitterness issues, because my entirely factual statement about Linux not being able to run software that's written for OS X, ergo a PC running Linux isn't a Mac, did not either state or imply that this means Linux is an inferior OS.
"Quite a bit of Linux stuff doesn't run on the Mac either, so I guess it's pretty much a wash."
It's not a wash for somebody wants to run software written for OS X, just like it isn't a wash for people who want or need to run Windows software that doesn't work properly (or at all) under Wine, Crossover Office, etc. There are far more of both categories than people who want to run something which is Linux-specific on another OS, especially with Macs, which have UNIX underpinnings, ship with XWindows on their installation disks, and use GNU compilers and base libraries.
"Mac hardware as some kind of machine that is superior to all others simply because it has the pixie dust to run a specific OS is somewhat specious reasoning to me."
It's specious to me as well, hence the fact that I didn't say anything of the sort. Incompatible != inferior; Amigas were incompatible with Sinclair Spectrum and Apple-II software, but most would agree that they significantly better than either of those 8 bit machines.
"Seriously, the differences in what you are able to do between the different OS's, IMHO, are getting slimmer as time goes on."
The differences in capabilities of computer operating systems have been dictated by the realities of the hardware they must run on, and what people want to do with it, for nearly half a century. Just about everything we expect from a modern OS had been implemented in the 1960s, but things like mice, GUIs, hypertext, and video conferencing had no real application in a world where most computers spent their time batch-processing punched cards containing financial and scientific data. Personal computers have consistently been a couple of decades behind top dollar "big iron" used by large companies and well-funded research facilities, so it tends to take a little over a decade for those concepts to appear on high-end business PCs, and another decade or so for it to become common on home PCs. A current example is virtualisation, which has been around in th
"From this article he seems to have ditched his newly found OSX for Ubuntu, and thus the whole hypocrisy of not supporting his preferred system crops up again."
He's still using OS X at home on a MacBook Pro as before, but was previously running Windows on a Dell sub-notebook because Apple don't make one anymore (which is IMO strange given the popularity of the 12" PowerBook), and the MBP is too heavy. The sub-notebook now runs Unbuntu instead of Windows, so this is a gain for Ubuntu rather than a loss for OS X.
"Want a high-end Mac Pro? Get a couple of Xeon's (the speed of your choice), throw a somewhat dated 7300GT graphics card in there, a couple gigs of ECC Memory, and the Sata Hard Drive of your choosing.
..."
There, you have a Mac Pro."
What you actually have is a no-name box with the same CPU and graphics card as a Mac Pro, which, as a subsequent comment of your own proves, isn't a Mac Pro:
"What I cannot get is the OS to run on said machine because of some proprietary things thrown into the Macs that would not allow it to run."
The distinguishing feature of a (modern) Mac is its ability to run a non-hacked version of MacOS X, and software written for MacOS X, so any system that can''t do this isn't a Mac, irrespective of what its owner may say. It isn't a HP or Dell either, so it won't run one of their special registration-free versions of Windows that ship with their systems, and use proprietary BIOS ID information to ensure that they can't be installed on computers made by someone else.
"But I suppose all of this is what Linux is for
Linux is not OS X, or even a reasonable facsimile thereof, because it cannot run software written specifically for OS X. An arbitrary white box with Linux is not therefore a Mac, irrespective of whether its has the same CPU and graphics card some Macs.
"even now, in a position of strength, it still would not make sense for Apple to license the OS"
Agreed, especially as they aren't in a position of strength compared to Microsoft in computer operating systems. What makes OS X special is the synergy with Apple's hardware: take away OS X, and their machines are now nothing more than a pricey of Wintel computers; sell the OS without a Mac, and they lose one of the key things that distinguishes them from every other PC vendor. Either situation would result in Apple losing their currently almost unique ability to sell significant numbers of desktop and laptop computers for a price that includes a decent profit margin, without which there would be no reason for them to carry on making Macs when they can get better margins from consumer electronics.
I think you missed the sarcasm in my post, which should have been evident from the phrase "just like other successful operating systems such as OS/2 and BeOS", because neither of them was at all successful at gaining any notable share of the commodity desktop OS market (although OS/2 had a niche corporate desktop market, and was also used as an embedded OS for ATMs and EPOS systems for several years).
"When Apple licensed the OS last time, it nearly took the company under."
While I agree that Apple would be silly to sell OS X for machines other than Macs, I think that their many other problems at the time they did licence MacOS were what was destroying the company, and the legal clones merely served to highlight these existing problems rather than being the cause of new ones. In the mid 1990s Apple had a confusing product line, an OS that was starting to look very old and limited compared with Windows, and a growing history of ambitious software projects that ended up being abandoned before they were completed, often after various third party developers had spent considerable amounts of time and effort designing products around them. This resulted in a contracting market where new Macs were only selling to people who were already committed to Macs, while the rest of the world (including some Apple users) went with Windows, which was now a 32-bit OS with pre-emptive multitasking that, despite stability problems in its consumer versions, actually crashed less than Apple's offering, so even some of the Mac faithful started to balk at paying a lot more money for something that was actually worse in practice than a cheap commodity PC.
If one's overall market is static or contracting, then it's obvious that any company's gains will be another company's losses, and this is the situation Apple found themselves in when they licensed MacOS to others during a period when their market was shrinking rather than growing. Things would however have been very different if they'd licensed MacOS to others during the early 1980s, when it effectively had no competition, and would therefore have stood an excellent chance of putting Apple where MS are today (even Bill Gates believed that this would happen at that time).
Every geek knows they could make piles of money taking Microsoft on in the commodity x86 OS space by being more stable, and having compelling features, just like other successful operating systems such as OS/2 and BeOS.
"I wonder if those same people would have reacted the same if the same decision had fallen in another case - Eolas vs. Microsoft."
I was completely against the Eolas vs. MS decision, because it showed Microsoft and other big companies with armies of lawyers and effectively limitless war chests that patenting anything they can think of, even if they have no plans to use it, is an excellent way of stifling potential competitors. Big companies armed with a portfolio of even the most dubious software patents can thus keep smaller companies locked in litigation for years, which is not only expensive, but also means that time and effort which could have been spent on making and marketing products is being effectively wasted.
People who are celebrating this decision because it pulls the teeth of some patent trolls are therefore missing the fact that by doing so, it's actually making the life of giant corporate trolls easier, because they don't have to worry about being stung by patent-only companies who have nothing to lose. Few judges would argue if the likes of Microsoft _claimed_ they were developing a product which incorporated whatever patents they wanted to use against Smallguy Software Inc., and Smallguy's lawyers have no effective way of showing that they aren't, so their system of using quantum entanglement to transmit vast volumes of information between computers instantaneously without a network ends up effectively being squashed by BigCorp's patent on "a method of using stored instructions to make computers do the same stuff lots of times".
"With Apple you'll have to buy a new version every 1 or 2 releases. If you don't you can't run the newer versions of the software that come out. They used to come out every 6 months or so, but now they are at 1 ones a year."
The only Apple major upgrade that came out six months after another release was 10.0 to 10.1, which was free for people who already had 10.0. The others were released at increasing intervals:
10.2 came out in August 2002, 11 months after 10.1.
10.3 went to retail October 2003, 14 months after 10.2.
10.4 was launched in April 2005, 18 months after 10.3.
10.5 is expected to appear in October 2007, 30 months after 10.4.
This averages out at one release per 12.25 months if we don't include 10.5, which hasn't been released yet. Let's compare this with Microsoft's consumer OS offerings between 1998 and 2001, when XP came out (i.e. before Vista missed its announced release dates by five years):
Windows 98: June 1998.
Windows 98 SE: May 5 1999. Paid upgrade to 98, 11 months after 98.
Windows ME: June 2000, paid upgrade, 13 months after 98 SE.
Windows XP: October 2001, paid upgrade 16 months after ME.
This averages out at once per 13.3 month, i.e. only one month more than OS X. Note also that MS originally planned to release what's now Vista in late 2002 / early 2003, which would have been in line with their policy of 1 major (i.e. charged for) consumer release per year.
"With the other OS's you don't need to pay for updates/upgrades (think service packs ?) that often."
You don't pay for service packs with Apple either. OS X 10.4 is now in version 10.4.10, which is not the same as the 10.4.0 that I installed in July 2005. Note also that _any_ major (paid) versions of OS X adds significantly more to the previous version than Windows 98 SE did to Windows 98, os ME did to 98 SE, both of which MS had no problems with charging people for. It could also be argued that they've added at least as much as Vista does to XP.
"But then again an official full version of Windows is more expensive."
All Apple's major OS releases are however sold as upgrades, and upgrades to a Microsoft OS are a lot cheaper than full versions, although the non-crippled ones still cost rather more than Apple charge. Vista Ultimate upgrade for example costs as much as I will finally spend on upgrading my rev. 1 PPC iMac G5 from 10.3 (which came with it) to 10.4, and then 10.4 to 10.5 when that ships. I'll have got more added functionality (and indeed enhanced performance) from the two upgrades to OS X than would be the case if I upgraded my XP Pro laptop (which is of a similar age to the Mac) to Vista for the same amount of money, especially given the fact that Vista with its eye candy turned on would require rather more power than that particular machine has available.
"The BB politicians are a prime example. A generation of ego driven, self-serving, money grubbing thieves, who will sell this country and their mothers out to make a dime."
Unfortunately, history demonstrates that BB politicians are no worse than those from previous generations, and are actually a lot better than some of them. Pork barrel politics for example goes back to the early 19th century, and both it and other forms of political patronage became rife in the post civil war period (the so called "Gilded Age), when incredible levels of corruption including obvious vote rigging were endemic at all levels of government, and in all branches. The worst of the BB politicos is an angel compared with the average ones of the 19th century, and also rather better than most from the early 20th century.
"Not to worry then, all these old guys will be dead in the next 10-20 years, if all goes well. Everyone seems to forget that all of us, the younger generation (which is obviously a huge span of years) is next on the list for power."
And the people who are in their teens and 20s today that eventually opt for a career in politics will be technological ignoramuses who will be passing legislation which is every bit as out of touch with the social issues surrounding emergent technologies from 40 years in the future as our lot are with what's happening now, and the equivalent of Internet forums from that era will contain the same claims about how it will all change when the old sods die off. Check out what things were like when Richard Stallman, Tim Berners-Lee, and Steve Wozniac were teenagers, and you'll see a period of notable political upheaval when youth activists could count on vast numbers of like-minded people to attend rallies and demonstrations, organise mass sit-ins, publish "subversive" magazines and newsletters, and generally stick it to "the man" despite heavy-handed and often brutal attempts by the police and government to stop them. They make today's youth look like a bunch of disorganised, cowardly whiners, yet their conviction that things would definitely change when the old guard died off turned out to be completely unfounded, and the same will happen again, and again, and again.
The reason for this situation is a simple one: those who tend to choose careers in politics mostly come from backgrounds in law, political science, business, and / or extremely wealthy and influential families (and increasingly, film and TV actors), none of which are renowned for their high level of technological awareness. Very few of today's young people in these categories have any real idea how venerable technologies such as steam engines, "land-line" telephones, radio and TV, or suspension bridges work, let alone complicated modern things like computers, cellular telephones, or the Internet, and it is they who will be governing in 30 years, not the sort of people who read Slashdot.
"Not quite -- it's all relative. Sure you can hear anything above 0dB, and you are unlikely to suffer permanent damage from anything less than 140dB. But that isn't the same as having 140dB of dynamic range."
It is exactly the same, because the dynamic range of a system is defined as the difference between the smallest and largest signals that it can represent (not the same as signal to noise ratio). There are plenty of sources on the web, so I suggest you do a Google search for "dynamic range definition" (it isn't only used in reference to audio).
"If you are hearing a sound at a certain volume, you won't hear be able to anything else that is more than 20dB quieter than the louder sound."
What you're describing is the auditory masking threshold (AMT), not dynamic range.
"Seeing as your ears cannot hear more than 20dB of dynamic range"
The dynamic range of a healthy human ear is at least 130db, and can be as high as 140db, depending on various personal factors such as age and genetics.
"When I was in London a couple of years ago, I wanted to throw away a kleenex; only to find no trash bins. When I asked a passerby, I was informed that it was because of the IRA attacks and the police took them away."
A lot of bins were removed during the 1990s, but they've been steadily replacing them again due to (justified) complaints about filthy streets. It's therefore entirely possible that the part of London you visited had no bins when you were there, so you may well have been correctly informed (although it was councils who removed them, not the police). Note though that removing the majority of them was a typical case of over-reaction, because while there were several IRA bombs on trains and the London Underground, AFAIK only one of them was in a bin, and that happened in 1991.
"There's a very good reason why it's a good thing to limit power of those on the government payroll. It's because this power corrupts. And absolute power corrupts absolutely."
And also because there are plenty of stupid fuckwits on government payrolls who shouldn't be trusted with a shopping list, let alone potentially sensitive information about someone else. Britain for example has a particular breed of high-ranking idiot with a penchant for having laptops full of confidential and even classified information stolen, so the standard of the people on lower rungs of the ladder than them doesn't bear thinking about.
"As far as folks in the UK are concerned, I guess you never heard of the IRA."
I was born in the UK, lived there throughout the major IRA bombing campaigns, and nobody I met was intimidated by them, let alone living in terror.
"That's the reason that to this day, you will not find any trash cans on most London streets."
There are plenty of them on London streets. Bins were taken out of (London) railway stations after the Victoria bin bomb, but even at Victoria, the bus station at the front has bins, as do the streets that run around the sides and back, and railway stations outside London still have bins despite the fact the the IRA by no means restricted its attacks to the capital.
"Why not prove me wrong by finding a more reputable source"
A decent text about the effects CO2 has on the body is at:
http://members.westnet.com.au/pkolb/henders.htm
A large body of research cited here shows that CO2 is a more fundamental necessity for life in general than oxygen because many organisms and indeed human mechanisms are anaerobic, and also that increased concentrations (sometimes to the level of completely replacing oxygen with it) are used to treat certain medical conditions. CO2 is also the trigger for the breathing reflex, without which people simply forget to breathe (this has been proven experimentally).
"attacking the statement based on the source alone? No finer example of a logical fallacy than that."
A logical fallacy is a flawed line of reasoning. I'm surprised that you consider a simple statement about the validity of Wikipedia to be a line of reasoning, because few others would dignify it in that way.
Note also that attacking sources is perfectly valid if one considers them to be unreliable, incorrect, or incomplete, and Wikipedia is frequently all of these, despite the strange faith that Internauts seem to have in what's actually little more than a bunch of editable blog entries with an index. I didn't attack you (ad hominem) or set up any straw men, so I fail to see what it is that you're objecting to.
"My point was that the license appears to relinquish the right to pursue such a renewal."
I'm not sure whether he actually relinquished such a right specifically, although it wouldn't have been in Guthrie's nature to renew, and even if he had, he wouldn't have prosecuted anyone for infringement. What's unfortunate of course is that while the original song is in the public domain, Guthrie's later versions (which often have some very interesting lyrics) didn't expire until after 1978, so they've now entered the twilight realm of perpetual corporate copyright.
"Not only is this license permissive, but it appears to relinquish any claim to exclusive rights after 28 years, much like Founders' Copyright."
US copyrights lasted 28 years until the law was changed in 1978. The copyright holder could optionally extend the term by another 28 years if they renewed it in the last year of the previous copyright, but that was the limit, so all works would become part of the public domain after at most 56 years.
"I remember the tales about eh Jobs vs. RMS interactions regarding this, you can imagine the sparks :)"
It doesn't bear thinking about!
You are indeed correct, which means I wasn't (apart from the bit about licensing Objective-C from StepStone).
What you say is true, but the main topic is about patents within the EU, and the ECJ has ultimate jurisdiction over EU member states. They've already ruled against EPO patents having any cross-border validity within the EU unless the ECJ says otherwise for specific cases (these must have some effect on acquis communautaire for the ECJ to accept such a case, however), so they must be defended separately in each country's national courts, who are not obliged to accept any EPO patent that conflicts with their own patent laws.