Automatic updates weren't enabled on XP until one of the service packs. So millions of PCs will never know about the new browsers.

Fair Dealing != Fair Use. Fair Dealing is far more constrained. Note: format shifting is typically believed legal under fair use but would need to be explicitly specified as allowable under Fair Dealing. Note how time shifting is given its own line item.

I mean, they are rather bland looking, have poor 3G coverage, and limited memory.

To each his own, I suppose, but Java better keep it's damn mitts off MY G1.

What do you suppose would happen if the Book publishing industry went to Congress and demanded that all used bookstores pay a percentage of all book sales back to the book publishers?

How far would the Electronics and Jewelry industry get if they demanded that pawn shops do the same to them?

Used video games are not infinite goods. A book, a video game, a stereo system, and a diamond ring are, as far as the law is concerned, indistinguishable from one another. When you buy one, it is yours. It no longer belongs to the person who sold it to you. You can do what you wish with it (aside from violating copyright). You can break it, burn it, or give it away.

I am astounded at the gall of these prima donas.

exactly. And the med students can dissect cadavers at home too.

I don't care much for Ruby myself. I'm a Python guy, but I don't give a frack what language people use.

"Least used scripting language"? Right, because nobody develops on Rails (like it or hate it).

Ever check the stats on Developers who use Macs (vs. the general populace)? Didn't think so.

And finally: that which makes MacRuby very very fast can also make Ruby on *nix very very fast.

The problem with Ruby is not the language. It is the VM. Improve the VM, and more people will look at other uses where Ruby is a great fit but for its speed.

Actually, I do have a problem with the case design of the old-style Aluminum Macbook Pros. The cases are weak. They dent or bend WAY too easily. I have stripped more than one of them down just to pound out the dents and bend the case back into shape.

And, of course, I can't read. Sorry. My bad.

Take it from someone who has actually replaced LCD panels in a MacBook Pro. This is NOT a relatively trivial hack.

And you cannot just "get the backlight off the LCD". The back portion of the panel proper is a reflective surface. Take that off, and your panel goes dark, except for two of the edges where the CCFL tubes or LED arrays are located.

On the MacBook Pro what this guy is doing would be nearly impossible. There is just no room between the panel and the shell. There's a bit more room in the regular MacBook.

If you've stabbed 5000 people, why stop? Keep going and reduce your marginal cost further!

Yeah, I was just going to say. That "anomaly" is around 126 miles, corner-to-corner, and the "streets" are something like 1.5 miles wide.

I'm not sure what to call it, and suspect that it is actually just a processing glitch, but in any case, it's not exactly "city" material.

caprica(web-ecommerce); kobol(fileserver); adama(admin); gaeta(database); starbuck(prototyping)

Because leukemia is such an exotic disease, nobody ever dies of that while waiting for a bone-marrow transplant.

Shipping IE with Windows wasn't what violated anti-trust laws. It was their manipulation of the markets surrounding that that was. I read the judge's findings of fact back when the lawsuit was taking place; I remember the details clearly. MS didn't let OEMs remove IE (naturally, it's part of the OS) but they also didn't let OEMs install competing products. That, and other related market manipulations involving the price of the Windows OEM license, was what violated the law.

The browser and the HTML controls are a fundamental feature of a complete operating environment. If the government can step in and say "you need to take X out of your OS because someone else might want to sell and X", that does not actually benefit the customers whose software, which used that X, no longer works. Consider notepad: it's such an important program that Windows won't even let you replace it. That's because, for the decades that it's been there, there are hundreds of programs out there which have come to rely on it. If you take it away, those programs will malfunction. Even if you install a different text editor. The same is true for IE.

All that MS has to do to satisfy antitrust violations is to provide a way for people to replace certain IE functionality with equivalent COM objects, or to allow people to install other browsers. The applet which allows you to specify system-wide default browsers, media players, etc, is the right idea. Getting rid of the MSHTML control or iexplorer.exe is not.

I guess nobody cares about the countless applications which depend on installed apps like notepad or iexplorer.exe to get stuff done? Sure, those apps may be badly coded, but they exist and people want to continue running them.