In the early 90's I used vector!dev!benreser@vecdev.attmail.com as my email address. I know I had a non RFC 822 address but I can't remember what it is and can't seem to find any reference to it on the Internet.

Thanks for posting that. Forgot about the whole Costco copyright nonsense. Sure would be interesting to see Apple try to run with that. Another case, especially a conflicting one in another circuit might encourage SCOTUS to look at that. Of course Apple would probably sue in the 9th Circuit. Ohh well.

Not all jurisdictions have recognized nominative use as an affirmative defense. SCOTUS has not ruled on a case on the issue, nevermind the rest of the world...

Levi's v Tesco is a horrible case to cite for this. It only applies in the European Union. It only applies when the goods are being imported from outside the European Economic Area. If Tesco had been buying the jeans inside the European Economic Area Levi's would have had no case.

Unless the companies running these promotions are in Europe (which the TV station in the article isn't) or are importing the Apple product from another region then the case is not applicable at all.

The case you cite is almost entirely about managing separate global markets with different pricing. It's not relevant to a dilution claim from promotional give aways.

For someone who acts like they really know trademark law you're getting some very basic things wrong on this story.

What you describe above wouldn't be trademark infringement. You could argue that it is trademark dilution.

Some juridictions recognize nominative use as an affirmative defense to infringement and dilution but not all. Trademark law is not uniform. Not only does it vary from country to country but in the US there are even differing state laws on trademarks.

It's probable that if Apple actually took several of these cases to court not all of them would come out the same due to these differences and the specifics of individual cases.

Neither side has a clear cut legal high ground.

Oops, that's right. It's XCode3 you can still download without paying anything. As others have pointed out they're still shipping XCode 3 on the install disks.

Burried at the bottom of that page is this "Looking for Xcode 3? Download Now" which directs you to log into a Apple Developer Connection account, which is free to get.

Xcode is most certainly still a free download. Sure you have to register for the Mac Developer program but that's really not that big of a deal. You probably have an Apple ID already so signing up is just a matter of logging into your Apple account.

http://developer.apple.com/xcode/

"Download Xcode 4 for Free. Xcode 4 is a free download for all members of the iOS and Mac Developer Programs. Log in to your account to begin the download."

Now developing anything for iOS is a whole different ball of wax.

What a load of bull. Persistant bank robberies doesn't imply an organized military operation is behind them. There are bad people, they do bad things. Hacking is even easier to rationalize than robbing a bank, especially if you're not doing anything other than "stealing" information.

Not all Mac users are that one guy. There are plenty of equally ridiculous things being said by people about Windows with respect to security.

I don't think Mac users are smug. I think they state a known fact. There are fewer exploits to Macs. That doesn't mean there are fewer vulnerabilities. Yes OS X and Windows share many of the same vulnerabilities. Yes Windows has implemented some great security features. But all of that has done little to stem the large number of exploits to Windows because it has a much larger market share.

Someone (I think it was Charlie Miller) put it best (paraphrased): You can stand in a war zone or you can be thousand of miles away. Running Windows is standing in a war zone. Running a Mac is being thousand of miles away.

You seem to be unhappy about this asymmetry. Even despite Microsoft doing all that work it remains. The real interesting question will be if Apple can respond to being a popular target better than Microsoft?

OS X has used sudo since the beginning. It's long been suggested practice not to setup your day to day user with Admin rights. There's no real problem there because anything you need admin rights to do prompts and you can put in the admin username/password, basically GUI sudo.

Example of the long standing suggestion to not use accounts with admin access dating back to 2006. I could probably find older ones if I felt like going past the first result on google:

http://www.macgeekery.com/tips/security/basic_mac_os_x_security

There's a certain amount of learning with every keyboard. Pretty much every keyboard is slightly different. My statement could have been just as true with "I think if you actually learned how to use your Thinkpad's keyboard you'd like it better." But sure trot out the fanboy argument. Pretty sure if you look into my posting history it's clear that I'm far from a fanboy of anything.

I can guess why they didn't put those keys in. Possibly so that people don't hit them on accident. I know on some laptops I've had with them I've hit them on accident from time to time.

I'm primarily a vim user so I don't miss the insert key or delete, though I have used Fn+delete to get forward delete a handful of times.

The eject button works for me before the OS boots. It takes a bit before it's active but then it usually takes a bit before a hardware eject button works unless it's purely mechanical as a lot of laptop eject keys are.

Not sure about how the volume keys work. I haven't tried it and don't feel like rebooting right now to muck with it.