Does anybody know where I can buy this stuff in Canada?
You can't, it is not legal for sale in Canada (contrary to what the other poster wrote). Canada regulates caffeine as a drug in "light-colored" beverages. This is why Canadian mountain dew has no caffeine, compared to the 55 mg contained in american Dew (see motion, the "citrus flavored drink refered to is Dew).
What I did was email the fine folks at www.red-bull.com, and they sent me a list of distributers in Washington State, which is only an hour from my house. I go down every few months and buy 3-4 cases, they cost $34 ($USD) each for 24 cans, and have never had problems with the customs officials.
Oh, and I mix it with alcohol all of the time, and it tastes really damn good with vodka.
As this poster has already mentioned, our own intelligence works in a similar way. There is nothing that makes human intelligence "special" except the level of complexity of the input and processing that we do in a unique way compared with the current crop of computer technology.
Personally, I would classify intelligence as a scale. At one end of the scale would be simple formulas such as the ones used in this poker-playing machine, and in a simple organic creatures such as a fly, which has pre-programmed responses to stimuli (if food, eat(food), else flyaway()). At the other end of the scale would be the human brain with a learning neural structure that accomplishes much more than its evolutionary programming could have hoped for. But in the end, it's all the same intelligence. Since it's lunchtime, I'm going to find food -- just like the fly would. =)
I don't see the relevance of this statement. He is still a physics professor. Even if he has a crazy belief about one thing - let's say, for the sake of argument - that doesn't mean that when he wrote that paper his arguments weren't sound.
You are partially correct -- the logical fallacy "argument against the person" springs to mind. But it does bear relavence that the "renowned physics professor" holds beliefs that may be considered crackpot. It is valuable information, because it leads me to suspect he may be just craving the media spotlight.
yeah, the "aimed at enticing perverts to spy on women." is mildly referenced in the article -- but what they do is say: "You can put this tiny camera anywhere" in big bold letters and list options including the bedroom. And of course there is a revealing pic of a busty woman leaning over. It's not outright -- but I have talked to several other people who have made the same connection, and apparently enough people agree for FoxNews.com to write an article focussed on them.
Anyone think these three CEOs might do better to spend their time fixing their companies
There's only so much that a CEO can do to "fix" a company in a collapsing tech market. Being on a committee such as that is a good thing for a tech CEO to do in their spare time. But I'm going to stop short of flaming you...
For the same reason that if I lived in a village without clean water, I would prefer clean water to a PS2,
The idea is for the PS2 to help educate about clean water -- they probably don't even know the water is unsafe.
Your question is at the crux of the advertising business. What marketers have learned is that recognition is everything.
Nope, it's not everything. Perhaps it's everything when making choices between two apparently similar products (Tide vs. ABC) or alerting the public the availability of a new product (which X10 is to many people I'm sure). But as for me, and legions of others, I will not buy from X10 because of their marketing. I personally got an free X10 kit 2 years ago when they were advertising on/. I was actually quite happy with it. But their marketing techniques made me buy supplemental products from a competitor, SmartHome, which for me was unknown.
Maybe I'm in the minority here, but I doubt it. I don't think X10.com will ever be a successful large corporation because people associate their products with sleazy advertising that is aimed at enticing perverts to spy on women. Infact I think their advertising has actually hurt the overall market for X10-based products. Maybe I'm wrong -- I hope not.
Nothing is more random or harder to produce than your thumb print or iris pattern - perfect, non-stealable, unique identifiers.
When is the last time you have ever heard of someone getting their thumbs or eyes stolen?? If all you need to get at someone's bank account is a thumbprint, muggers would start ripping off people's thumbs. Personally, I would prefer it if someone just mugs me and gets me to tell them my PIN.
And OSDN needs a lot of bandwidth. I guess all that bandwidth isn't provided for free.
Well... if they can't pay for bandwidth they could always shut down for a weekend and blame it on an incompetant female Cisco tech. I hear that works....
You have it backwards because I was being so terse. The quoted response of dawkins (and it does appear to be a response here) where he accuses some of cultural relativism.
Maybe I was too generous providing context around the Dawkins quote. My on-topic point was the bit about faith and science in the last two paragraphs. If you read my original post as me setting up the article as supporting cultural relativism you are right, that would be a good definition of a straw man logical fallacy (I did take a semester of logical reasoning after all). Apologies for that.
What I was trying to do was to provide some context to the quote from the last two paragraphs, as they would not make much sense without the first. I read the cultural relativsm bit as an example of faith-based reasoning, separate from the conclusion paragraph. The structure of the argument is:
1) tribal science (faiths) are not evidence based.
2) western science (real science) is supported by evidence and has predictive qualities
3) western science has more value becase "they get results"
(The cultural relativist anecdote is just context for the science vs faith bit, but the confusion arises from the parts that I cut out, which deal with tribal origin myths, which I figured as too off-topic for the post.)
I am sorry if I mislead the/. masses. 'Twas not my intention. Perhaps I posted too eagerly after just finishing a Dawkins book that dealt with the exact issues he was criticized for in the article. It's a good read: "River out of Eden"... fairly simple stuff, but a good primer on genetic natural selection.
Excuse me? The article stated that: "faith of Dawkins and others in biology seems even greater than the faith of the simple believer in God. " But Dawkins rightfully rejects the idea of his ideology as faith.
It's not a straw man, its a direct response to "what the author meant". The author "meant" that Dawkins had faith in Biology, and Dawkins had addressed this earlier and points out the obvious differences between faith and scientific beliefs.
[1] makes the obvious assumption that the universe is predictable. The problem here is that predictability is a subjective claim. It's a faith claim based on experience. What you don't get is that that's just fine.
No, science predicts that some things (ie some aspects of quantum physics) are unpredictable.
[2] Assume you have a model that accurately predicts all phenomena. What methodology do you use to prove that this is how the universe works? Simple. You believe that the model is accurate, even though there is no way to check it.
Of course not, that's the whole point. I don't know that gravity exists, I know that gravity is the best model for predicting the attraction of very large objects. The model of "gravity" is useful in my life and as a predictive tool. Thus gravity may not exist at all (it might be gremlins dragging us all down to the surface at 9.8 m/s/s) but it still has value and is better at predictions than "faith" or complete uncertainty. Now I have heard that the gravity model breaks down in some extreme cases, so a better model may have to be drawn up. That's the TRUE benefit to science... it is malleable to adapt to new evidence, unlike faith.
The notion that science alone holds all the secrets of our existence has become a religion of its own. The faith of Dawkins and others in biology seems even greater than the faith of the simple believer in God.
From Richard Dawkins' book: River out of Eden, pp.31-33
There is a fashionable salon philosophy called cultural relativism which hold, in its extreme forms, that science has no more claim to truth than tribal myth: science is just hte mythology favored by our modern western tribe. I once was provoked by an anthropologist colleague into putting the point starkly, as follows: suppose there is a tribe, I said, who believe that the moon is an oldl calabash tossed into the sky, hanging only just out of reach above the reetops. Do you really claim that our scientific truth--that the moon is about a quarter of a million miles away and a quarter the diameter of the earth--is no more true than the tribe's calabash? "Yes," the anthropologist said. "We are just brought up in a culture that sees the world in a scientific way. The are brought up to see the world in a nother way. Neither way is more true than the other." [...]
Western science, acting on good evidence that moon orbits the earth a quarter of a millions miles away, using western-designed computers and rockets, has succeeded in placing people on its surface. Tribal science, believing that the moon is just above the treetops, will never touch it outside of dreams. [...]
Science shares with religion the clain that it answers deep questions about origins, the nature of life, and the cosmos. But there is where the resemblece ends. Scientific beliefs are supported by evidence, and they get results. Myths and faiths are not and do not.
it is simple faith to assume that your senses give you an accurate picture of reality. The philosopher Hume (regarded as the father of modern atheism, btw) made that point in
NO NO NO. Science incurs prediction, and if the model fails the prediction that model is invalidated and we try again. If you think your senses are wrong, come up with a way to test it. If you can accurately predict your senses are fooling you, science will accommodate it (optical illusions, holograms, interference patterns). It does not require any sort of faith at all. If science uses faith at any step of the way, it is "bad" science.
We have a man who was informed on the contract that he signed that he would be fined $150 for each incident of speeding with their vehicle. He was informed that there was a tracking system installed on the van. What's his excuse? He glossed over the statements
I mostly agree with you: but I think that ACME could get burned for not making a new provision noticable enough on the contract. From what I remember of contract law back in university, a company has to make it very clear what you are agreeing to on a contract. That's why the most controversial clauses in a contract often require a separate initial to prove that you read that clause. Especially when am standard contract is altered, as seems to be in this case.
I support the move of rental agencies to track speeds via GPS (potentially it would save lives as well as reduce rental fees) -- but they need to make it clear in the contract. Contracts that are designed to trick people never stand up in court.
In my personal experience my Palm crashed more than my iPaq has.
do you have any suggestions on how to reduce iPaq crashes? both of my crashes so far have occurred during USB syncing -- and produced complete knockout of the iPaq device requiring re-flash. I suspect it may be a hardware issue as my dad's iPaq has yet to have any issues (yet). Or maybe it's because I have the thing loaded with software.... it gets much more use than my palm ever did.
I've personally owned a Palm Professional (Palm II), a Palm V, and now an iPaq, and I agree with the poster completely. I've also been blown away by how much more I enjoy the iPaq in comparison. What makes the iPaq superior:
1) Media Player. With a cheap compactflash card I have a portable MP3/WMA player.
2) RAM and CompactFlash: With 32 megs of RAM standard, and the extra CompactFlash, I can carry files with me.
3) Excel: okay pretty self explanitory, but for anyone who uses spreadsheets this alone is worth the purchase price. And yes I have tried the shareware palm spreadsheet apps, there is no comparison for actual use.
4) Character recognizer: I thought that I liked grafitti until I started with the iPaq, which is significantly more intuitive. For the uninitiated: The iPaq character recognizer has a seperate pane for lower and upper case characters instead of having to do the bloody "up" motion all the time.
4) Screen: the iPaq screen can be viewed in just about every condition: sun, shade, indoors, and everything in between. Tho I heard the m505 is just as good, but it easily beats the Palm II and V that I have previously owned.
What I don't like about the ipaq compared to the palm:
- OS crashes and requires resync to restore all data (it's happened twice in three weeks so far)
- MP3 playback chews battery life
- the calander and contacts functions are sometimes a tad counterintuitive
Overall: buy an iPaq -- it's worth the extra few hundred dollars for anyone who already uses Excel, or wants a portable media player on the same devices.
I bet that you will still be a target for tampon advertising (or other feminine products). I read once that sometimes they run ads at times they hope men will see them, in order to market to the men who will buy products for their significant others, but are completely brand-unaware (honey, while you're at the grocery store, can you pick me up some tampons?). It makes sense, even tho the market may be much smaller the advertising will work much better (from their perspective).
Oh yeah, I forgot that we were spending the trillions of tax dollars on more important things like appeasing OPEC, supporting/suing tobbaco corporations, and buying tear gas to break up peaceful demonstrations
Well, I remember a peaceful demonstration that took place at UBC in Vancouver about three yeras ago that was protesting an APEC conference, and they used excessive amounts of pepper spray (in some cases). So that takes care of two of your points. =)
As for supporting/suing tobbacco corporations, Canada taxes them at a much higher rate (think higher tax revenues for the government) but is still suing them. It's been in the news around here quite a but I doubt that you get it down south.
Oh I almost forgot. If Canada can do this, why can't the US?
You can get it in the US, go to Radio Shack.
-rt-
Re:Published on the web?
on
Just For Fun
·
· Score: 1
Wouldnt torvalds want to 'opensource' his autobigoraphy?
Maybe he wants to make a little bit of money off of his name/reputation... I am sure that his stock options are worth much less now and some cold hard cash would be nice I'm sure!
You cannot call the upgrades of a system forks, because they clearly are not. Most software written for Win95 will run on all of those systems, just as most software (open source or not) vendors do.
As one other posted has already replied, the NT series (NT 3.1 - 2000) could be considered a fork of the API, in some senses. But with WinXP they are closing the "fork-ness" by finally stopping the Win9X fork.
Forking is a problem mostly unique to open source, as Microsoft has claimed. However forking can be positive in some senses too, we all know that.
Remember a few years ago when the "Torah Codes" (aka "Bible Codes") came out, where people ran the text of the Torah through a computer program and came up with intersecting words? This link critiques that... a very similar argument to what you were just saying.
Because the contract expired in January... and many people guessed they would switch to Moz which would drastically decrease the percentage of microsoft user agents out there in the wild. This affects web developers, linux enthusiasts, and other people interested in the news!!! read the article (that applies to the moderators who modded that up too).
-rt-
Re:Call it what it really is.
on
Shared Source?
·
· Score: 1
Wow... that's a really good point! It would certainly give them a lot of leverage if they ever decided to sue an open-source competitor.
Does anyone have any links or copies of MS shared-source NDA?
Slashdot Mirror
probaby (hopefully) it was just a typo
-rt-
You can't, it is not legal for sale in Canada (contrary to what the other poster wrote). Canada regulates caffeine as a drug in "light-colored" beverages. This is why Canadian mountain dew has no caffeine, compared to the 55 mg contained in american Dew (see motion, the "citrus flavored drink refered to is Dew).
What I did was email the fine folks at www.red-bull.com, and they sent me a list of distributers in Washington State, which is only an hour from my house. I go down every few months and buy 3-4 cases, they cost $34 ($USD) each for 24 cans, and have never had problems with the customs officials.
Oh, and I mix it with alcohol all of the time, and it tastes really damn good with vodka.
-rt-
As this poster has already mentioned, our own intelligence works in a similar way. There is nothing that makes human intelligence "special" except the level of complexity of the input and processing that we do in a unique way compared with the current crop of computer technology.
Personally, I would classify intelligence as a scale. At one end of the scale would be simple formulas such as the ones used in this poker-playing machine, and in a simple organic creatures such as a fly, which has pre-programmed responses to stimuli (if food, eat(food), else flyaway()). At the other end of the scale would be the human brain with a learning neural structure that accomplishes much more than its evolutionary programming could have hoped for. But in the end, it's all the same intelligence. Since it's lunchtime, I'm going to find food -- just like the fly would. =)
-rt-
I don't see the relevance of this statement. He is still a physics professor. Even if he has a crazy belief about one thing - let's say, for the sake of argument - that doesn't mean that when he wrote that paper his arguments weren't sound.
You are partially correct -- the logical fallacy "argument against the person" springs to mind. But it does bear relavence that the "renowned physics professor" holds beliefs that may be considered crackpot. It is valuable information, because it leads me to suspect he may be just craving the media spotlight.
-rt-
yeah, the "aimed at enticing perverts to spy on women." is mildly referenced in the article -- but what they do is say: "You can put this tiny camera anywhere" in big bold letters and list options including the bedroom. And of course there is a revealing pic of a busty woman leaning over. It's not outright -- but I have talked to several other people who have made the same connection, and apparently enough people agree for FoxNews.com to write an article focussed on them.
-rt-
Anyone think these three CEOs might do better to spend their time fixing their companies
There's only so much that a CEO can do to "fix" a company in a collapsing tech market. Being on a committee such as that is a good thing for a tech CEO to do in their spare time. But I'm going to stop short of flaming you...
For the same reason that if I lived in a village without clean water, I would prefer clean water to a PS2,
The idea is for the PS2 to help educate about clean water -- they probably don't even know the water is unsafe.
-rt-
Your question is at the crux of the advertising business. What marketers have learned is that recognition is everything.
/. I was actually quite happy with it. But their marketing techniques made me buy supplemental products from a competitor, SmartHome, which for me was unknown.
Nope, it's not everything. Perhaps it's everything when making choices between two apparently similar products (Tide vs. ABC) or alerting the public the availability of a new product (which X10 is to many people I'm sure). But as for me, and legions of others, I will not buy from X10 because of their marketing. I personally got an free X10 kit 2 years ago when they were advertising on
Maybe I'm in the minority here, but I doubt it. I don't think X10.com will ever be a successful large corporation because people associate their products with sleazy advertising that is aimed at enticing perverts to spy on women. Infact I think their advertising has actually hurt the overall market for X10-based products. Maybe I'm wrong -- I hope not.
-rt-
Nothing is more random or harder to produce than your thumb print or iris pattern - perfect, non-stealable, unique identifiers.
When is the last time you have ever heard of someone getting their thumbs or eyes stolen?? If all you need to get at someone's bank account is a thumbprint, muggers would start ripping off people's thumbs. Personally, I would prefer it if someone just mugs me and gets me to tell them my PIN.
-rt-
And OSDN needs a lot of bandwidth. I guess all that bandwidth isn't provided for free.
Well... if they can't pay for bandwidth they could always shut down for a weekend and blame it on an incompetant female Cisco tech. I hear that works....
-rt-
You have it backwards because I was being so terse. The quoted response of dawkins (and it does appear to be a response here) where he accuses some of cultural relativism.
/. masses. 'Twas not my intention. Perhaps I posted too eagerly after just finishing a Dawkins book that dealt with the exact issues he was criticized for in the article. It's a good read: "River out of Eden"... fairly simple stuff, but a good primer on genetic natural selection.
Maybe I was too generous providing context around the Dawkins quote. My on-topic point was the bit about faith and science in the last two paragraphs. If you read my original post as me setting up the article as supporting cultural relativism you are right, that would be a good definition of a straw man logical fallacy (I did take a semester of logical reasoning after all). Apologies for that.
What I was trying to do was to provide some context to the quote from the last two paragraphs, as they would not make much sense without the first. I read the cultural relativsm bit as an example of faith-based reasoning, separate from the conclusion paragraph. The structure of the argument is:
1) tribal science (faiths) are not evidence based.
2) western science (real science) is supported by evidence and has predictive qualities
3) western science has more value becase "they get results"
(The cultural relativist anecdote is just context for the science vs faith bit, but the confusion arises from the parts that I cut out, which deal with tribal origin myths, which I figured as too off-topic for the post.)
I am sorry if I mislead the
-rt-
Straw man, as that's not what the author meant.
Excuse me? The article stated that: "faith of Dawkins and others in biology seems even greater than the faith of the simple believer in God. " But Dawkins rightfully rejects the idea of his ideology as faith.
It's not a straw man, its a direct response to "what the author meant". The author "meant" that Dawkins had faith in Biology, and Dawkins had addressed this earlier and points out the obvious differences between faith and scientific beliefs.
-rt-
[1] makes the obvious assumption that the universe is predictable. The problem here is that predictability is a subjective claim. It's a faith claim based on experience. What you don't get is that that's just fine.
No, science predicts that some things (ie some aspects of quantum physics) are unpredictable.
[2] Assume you have a model that accurately predicts all phenomena. What methodology do you use to prove that this is how the universe works? Simple. You believe that the model is accurate, even though there is no way to check it.
Of course not, that's the whole point. I don't know that gravity exists, I know that gravity is the best model for predicting the attraction of very large objects. The model of "gravity" is useful in my life and as a predictive tool. Thus gravity may not exist at all (it might be gremlins dragging us all down to the surface at 9.8 m/s/s) but it still has value and is better at predictions than "faith" or complete uncertainty. Now I have heard that the gravity model breaks down in some extreme cases, so a better model may have to be drawn up. That's the TRUE benefit to science... it is malleable to adapt to new evidence, unlike faith.
-rt-
The notion that science alone holds all the secrets of our existence has become a religion of its own. The faith of Dawkins and others in biology seems even greater than the faith of the simple believer in God.
From Richard Dawkins' book: River out of Eden, pp.31-33
There is a fashionable salon philosophy called cultural relativism which hold, in its extreme forms, that science has no more claim to truth than tribal myth: science is just hte mythology favored by our modern western tribe. I once was provoked by an anthropologist colleague into putting the point starkly, as follows: suppose there is a tribe, I said, who believe that the moon is an oldl calabash tossed into the sky, hanging only just out of reach above the reetops. Do you really claim that our scientific truth--that the moon is about a quarter of a million miles away and a quarter the diameter of the earth--is no more true than the tribe's calabash? "Yes," the anthropologist said. "We are just brought up in a culture that sees the world in a scientific way. The are brought up to see the world in a nother way. Neither way is more true than the other." [...]
Western science, acting on good evidence that moon orbits the earth a quarter of a millions miles away, using western-designed computers and rockets, has succeeded in placing people on its surface. Tribal science, believing that the moon is just above the treetops, will never touch it outside of dreams. [...]
Science shares with religion the clain that it answers deep questions about origins, the nature of life, and the cosmos. But there is where the resemblece ends. Scientific beliefs are supported by evidence, and they get results. Myths and faiths are not and do not.
-rt-
it is simple faith to assume that your senses give you an accurate picture of reality. The philosopher Hume (regarded as the father of modern atheism, btw) made that point in
NO NO NO. Science incurs prediction, and if the model fails the prediction that model is invalidated and we try again. If you think your senses are wrong, come up with a way to test it. If you can accurately predict your senses are fooling you, science will accommodate it (optical illusions, holograms, interference patterns). It does not require any sort of faith at all. If science uses faith at any step of the way, it is "bad" science.
-rt-
It's what you Americans refer to as "a penny"
-rt-
We have a man who was informed on the contract that he signed that he would be fined $150 for each incident of speeding with their vehicle. He was informed that there was a tracking system installed on the van. What's his excuse? He glossed over the statements
I mostly agree with you: but I think that ACME could get burned for not making a new provision noticable enough on the contract. From what I remember of contract law back in university, a company has to make it very clear what you are agreeing to on a contract. That's why the most controversial clauses in a contract often require a separate initial to prove that you read that clause. Especially when am standard contract is altered, as seems to be in this case.
I support the move of rental agencies to track speeds via GPS (potentially it would save lives as well as reduce rental fees) -- but they need to make it clear in the contract. Contracts that are designed to trick people never stand up in court.
-rt-
In my personal experience my Palm crashed more than my iPaq has.
do you have any suggestions on how to reduce iPaq crashes? both of my crashes so far have occurred during USB syncing -- and produced complete knockout of the iPaq device requiring re-flash. I suspect it may be a hardware issue as my dad's iPaq has yet to have any issues (yet). Or maybe it's because I have the thing loaded with software.... it gets much more use than my palm ever did.
-rt-
I've personally owned a Palm Professional (Palm II), a Palm V, and now an iPaq, and I agree with the poster completely. I've also been blown away by how much more I enjoy the iPaq in comparison. What makes the iPaq superior:
1) Media Player. With a cheap compactflash card I have a portable MP3/WMA player.
2) RAM and CompactFlash: With 32 megs of RAM standard, and the extra CompactFlash, I can carry files with me.
3) Excel: okay pretty self explanitory, but for anyone who uses spreadsheets this alone is worth the purchase price. And yes I have tried the shareware palm spreadsheet apps, there is no comparison for actual use.
4) Character recognizer: I thought that I liked grafitti until I started with the iPaq, which is significantly more intuitive. For the uninitiated: The iPaq character recognizer has a seperate pane for lower and upper case characters instead of having to do the bloody "up" motion all the time.
4) Screen: the iPaq screen can be viewed in just about every condition: sun, shade, indoors, and everything in between. Tho I heard the m505 is just as good, but it easily beats the Palm II and V that I have previously owned.
What I don't like about the ipaq compared to the palm:
- OS crashes and requires resync to restore all data (it's happened twice in three weeks so far) - MP3 playback chews battery life - the calander and contacts functions are sometimes a tad counterintuitive
Overall: buy an iPaq -- it's worth the extra few hundred dollars for anyone who already uses Excel, or wants a portable media player on the same devices.
-rt-
I don't want to see adverts for tampons or...
I bet that you will still be a target for tampon advertising (or other feminine products). I read once that sometimes they run ads at times they hope men will see them, in order to market to the men who will buy products for their significant others, but are completely brand-unaware (honey, while you're at the grocery store, can you pick me up some tampons?). It makes sense, even tho the market may be much smaller the advertising will work much better (from their perspective).
-rt-
...but I am.
Oh yeah, I forgot that we were spending the trillions of tax dollars on more important things like appeasing OPEC, supporting/suing tobbaco corporations, and buying tear gas to break up peaceful demonstrations
Well, I remember a peaceful demonstration that took place at UBC in Vancouver about three yeras ago that was protesting an APEC conference, and they used excessive amounts of pepper spray (in some cases). So that takes care of two of your points. =)
As for supporting/suing tobbacco corporations, Canada taxes them at a much higher rate (think higher tax revenues for the government) but is still suing them. It's been in the news around here quite a but I doubt that you get it down south.
Oh I almost forgot. If Canada can do this, why can't the US?
You can get it in the US, go to Radio Shack.
-rt-
Wouldnt torvalds want to 'opensource' his autobigoraphy?
Maybe he wants to make a little bit of money off of his name/reputation... I am sure that his stock options are worth much less now and some cold hard cash would be nice I'm sure!
-rt-
MS: Linux will fork.
Linux: Win95, Win98, WinNT, Win2000, WinXP...
You cannot call the upgrades of a system forks, because they clearly are not. Most software written for Win95 will run on all of those systems, just as most software (open source or not) vendors do.
As one other posted has already replied, the NT series (NT 3.1 - 2000) could be considered a fork of the API, in some senses. But with WinXP they are closing the "fork-ness" by finally stopping the Win9X fork.
Forking is a problem mostly unique to open source, as Microsoft has claimed. However forking can be positive in some senses too, we all know that.
-rt-
Remember a few years ago when the "Torah Codes" (aka "Bible Codes") came out, where people ran the text of the Torah through a computer program and came up with intersecting words? This link critiques that... a very similar argument to what you were just saying.
-rt-
Why is this news now?
Because the contract expired in January... and many people guessed they would switch to Moz which would drastically decrease the percentage of microsoft user agents out there in the wild. This affects web developers, linux enthusiasts, and other people interested in the news!!! read the article (that applies to the moderators who modded that up too).
-rt-
Wow... that's a really good point! It would certainly give them a lot of leverage if they ever decided to sue an open-source competitor.
Does anyone have any links or copies of MS shared-source NDA?
-rt-