This statement is disingenuous. That means that 2 in 3 pirated copies of windows do not have these (i.e., they are exactly as Microsoft released them) and they are still considered not "genuine". Please don't redefine genuine to mean "Microsoft got paid".

The purpose of this software is very clearly NOT saving people from viruses. If that were so, it would be a virus-cleaner. The purpose here is to stop piracy (most likely piracy by computer builders and fixers).

The people who paid for a computer or a repair and got a pirated version of Windows are victims. But if their computers are working properly, they are only further victimized by Microsoft invalidating their Windows license. Microsoft is not doing this for the welfare of these people. Just the opposite, they are leaning on these people to get them to turn in those that provided them with the unlicensed copy of Windows.

If you believe this is about Microsoft caring about the welfare of people with pirated Windows, you're being ignorant.

First of all, all versions of Windows are "genuine". There isn't someone out there making a knock-off operating system and selling it as Windows, so let's stop the doublespeak.

What you're trying to stop is unlicensed installations. If I bought a machine from some vendor and he put on a copy of Windows, I honestly don't care as long as it keeps working. If this thing starts popping up, you've made your copyright enforcement problems my problems. Trust me, I have enough problems without dealing with Microsoft's.

Voluntary is another bit of nonsense. It's voluntary but you can't get updates without it. We all know how that goes, we've seen it before.

No personally identifiable information is transmitted. That is until you need to call Microsoft to get your Windows reactivated.

Pirates will work around it. Honest users will be inconvenienced. MS can keep this patch, we don't want it.

This was obviously a joke. Slashdot is still run by a mess of perl scripts. They've yet to drag themselves into early last decade.

Objective C / C++ is only required for doing the UI. 99% of your project can remain in C or C++ with only a very thin shim in Obj-C for the UI layer. There is no requirement to move your code base to except for the Mac-specific UI layer.

There is no 64 bit Carbon, because it's a relic. Cocoa easily mixes with C code (Obj-C is just C with extra stuff). Unless you're Adobe and you have a huge amount of UI code in Carbon, there is no reason to keep hanging on to it.

Grand Central Dispatch is not required for video at all. Mac OS X supports the standard POSIX pthreads interface for threading.

I run Linux, where's my ZFS? No, FUSE doesn't count.

x | ~x = 0xFF..FF, which is equal to -1 in the 2's complement signed version of the resulting type. Why not (0x2B | ~0x2B) == -1

example:
    main() { printf("%d\n", (0x2b | ~0x2b)); }

No, it's GNU/FreeBSD. It can, however, emulate Linux system calls and therefore natively run binaries compiled for Linux.

I recall Fake Steve Jobs had some rather insightful thoughts on this.

What's wrong with Objective C? You can mix Objective C and "pure" C / C++ in the same project. Any decent C++ programmer can pick up Objective C / Objective C++ in one day of practice[1]. Obj-C is a superset of C, all of your favorite tricks still work. You can program it on Linux or Cygwin using GnuStep and gcc (though admittedly getting it going is kind of a pain). If you really hate it that much, you can get away with writing a pretty thin wrapper of Obj-C to interface to the OSX specific APIs (most of your calls will probably be standard libc calls in C anyway), and have almost all of your code in C/C++. I don't see how it would be an obstacle to anyone.

[1] No True Scotsman would doubt this comment.

I did some research into this a number of years ago (before torrents were around). I found that you can store 64 KB (if I recall correctly) in a slashdot comment. Now, the idea was not to to use slashdot as storage, they'd quickly put a stop to that. The trick is using slashdot and other forums and wikis as a way to get your data into the Google cache, where it will be served rapidly for everyone who wants it. There should also be forward correction data uploaded (like parity files) so that if some segments get lost, they can be recovered. Then what you need is an index file (kind of like a torrent file) that tells you what Google keywords you need to search for to find any given segment of the file, and software that will parse this file, download, and assemble the chunks into the completed data.

I wrote a little bit of code for it. It's all very straightforward, I just never got the time to get enough of it implemented to release anything. With torrents, it seems somewhat worthless to pursue now.