No, I think the OP's remark is entirely justifiable.

This particular news item may only have been about mixing up samples and vandalizing a lab, but in the UK there have been numerous examples of animal rights protestors setting bombs and making death threats to academics. Life-threatening intimidation with an expressly political aim is precisely the definition of terrorism.

The "update" (retraction) of this story was posted after the story had left the front page. Slashdot readers are only going to see yesterday's unjustified criticism of Apple and their supposed agenda. How many times in the next six months are the Android-trolls going to refer to this story as an example of Apple's control-freak tendency, without being aware that it was based on a lie?

The only use I can see for new TLD is to distinguish between different possible uses of the same name. e.g. consider how many web sites now have $(thing)-movie.com or $(thing)-band.com : if .movie and .band were TLDs, that's actually providing some benefit. But these are generic words, not trademarks. They're only useful if a registrar sells subdomains at a reasonable price, and the TLD will live or die depending on whether it can get a foothold in the market. This is a good thing.

I just don't see a case for corporations buying their own TLD. Is there a substantial usability or branding difference between www.disney and disney.com? Everybody will just type "disney" into the address bar anyway, it will find the right site even if it has to go via google...

You may both be thinking of the ZX80 or ZX81, which used this hack to drive the screen. The ZX Spectrum (released 1982) had proper display circuitry and did not suffer from this issue.

The ZX80's display hack was all a cheap way to get the data streamed out of RAM. To do this they placed the cpu's program counter(!) at the start of display memory, every time it tried to execute an instruction it would read a byte from memory - which was picked up to generate the display - but the data wasn't returned to the CPU and instead it was fed a byte of zero bits. 0x00 is the NOP instruction on Z80, so it would just increment the program counter and read the next byte. This means successive bytes appear in sequence on the data bus, without having to include a second agent that was capable of making accesses into the RAM - a considerable design simplification. Later, for the Spectrum, a separate circuit which generated and incremented its own address was able to access memory, and it had to be arranged that it would get priority over the CPU (which meant the CPU was considerably slower when running programs in the bottom 16k of memory).

A lot of developers aren't on both though, and that's because it isn't crazy to ignore 400 million users if you don't expect any of them will pay.

Sounds like Top Gear...

And santax suddenly went quiet.

Do you have a link for more information? I couldn't find anything about this with a brief google search.

Anyway, there are several several examples of Apple crediting the discoverer in bug fixes, so I don't know why everybody here is jumping to the opposite conclusion.

FTFY.

We all know what happens when you find and report a bug, exploit or whatever on their devices and store. You get credited with discovering the vulnerability when they fix it.

I agree. This proposal would stack the court system against the little guy, which is exactly the wrong solution to the problem.

The problem is not patent law, per se, but that too many trivial patents are granted. That, and patents which describe a problem, trying to claim that all solutions must infringe.

I doubt that's accurate view of their motivation - although neither of us can prove it either way. But judging on past form they don't seem to have held back their Clang modifications so far, why would they want to start doing so later?

I think it is more likely that they are worried about the patent grant implications of GPL 3. A lot of corporations are, rightly or wrongly. Certainly in the company I work for, the legal department are paranoid about the idea that one of our contributions to a GPL 3 project might be picked up and (legally) included in unrelated projects, which doesn't necessarily need to be software products, and thus we might be deemed to have granted a license to all our patents to a hardware competitor. Now me and the lawyers can disagree on how likely that is to happen in reality, but the final words is that it's way easier for me to get corporate approval to send changes upstream to a BSD licensed project than a GPL licensed one. I suspect something similar is going on at Apple, and that backing the BSD-licensed clang project is enabling them to be a better participant in the open source community, not a worse one.

Apps with source code don't need binary x86 compatability.

Just consider it a having-the-nicest-beaches tax.