Yeah, I was going to say. Try transposing a tune on a C#-D button-box, and come back and tell me that it's a “slight mental shift”.

You should see people freak out when they try to type on my Das Keyboard II, with the Dvorak layout activated.

But to your point: I recently learned to type fully pointed Hebrew using a layout designed for academic work (SBL Tiro, FYI. It is based upon the modern Hebrew typewriter layout). Not having the keycaps, I avoided making incorrect associations between English and Hebrew letters. I'm reaching for a daleth or a gimel now, and not a D or a G.

Now try it this way:

LANG=C grep -v "[^aoeuidhtns]" /usr/share/dict/words | grep "^.*" | wc -w

vs.

LANG=C grep -v "[^asdfghjkl]" /usr/share/dict/words | grep "^.*" | wc -w

Coincidence? I think not.

And as long as there are Dvorak users around, there will be people like you who cannot tolerate the existence of happy non-conformists, and feel obligated to get in their face. And when they happily tell you, "I'm fine, thank you. Now piss off," you can feel content that there are people in the world obviously more ignorant than you.

You hate Microsoft so much that you have a keyboard with two Fs?

“Absolutely” it is possible — if the Chrome developers would do something so utterly foolish as to spend hundreds of hours writing an API emulation layer for Chrome, add tons of hooks into the base browser code to support the emulation layer, add massive code bloat, slow the browser, find some way to make this jive with their multiple-process execution model, probably only work with a limited number of extensions, and saddle everything they do to the design decisions that Mozilla may make in the future. In short, yeah, if they re-write Chrome to be no different than Firefox, and thus erase it's entire reason for existing, it would work.

How in blazes are “installed by the end user” and “deeply tied to Mozilla's internal API” contradictory? Do you even know what an XPI is? Evidently not. Go Google it and stop making such a fool out of yourself.

Actually, I would like to understand this point as well, so I'm not sure about all this "HP Conspiracy" stuff. Sounds like an honest question to me.

If components were ever discovered that could couple Flow and Charge, or Flow and Flux, why would those not be "fundamental"?

Why was there only one missing circuit element? Why not three?

No, this is completely false. You are confusing plugins with extensions. Plugins are compiled to architecture-specific machine code, and Chrome already supports them.

Plugins allow you to display content types that your browser does not natively support. Flash is a plugin. So is Java applet support. Extensions extend the browser itself, and are deeply tied to Mozilla's internal API.

Mozilla extensions are written in XUL and Javascript. Chrome does not and will never support XUL. And, as the Javascript in Extensions calls into the Mozilla/XUL object model, that won't work on Chrome either.

OS X has a habit of introducing radically new APIs in newer versions of the OS, such as Core Animation in Leopard. There are usually lots of goodies that developers can't help but play with, which then make their apps non-backward compatible. This then cascades to the end-user purchasing OS upgrades from Apple. Now, I may be wrong, but I doubt that there is anything in Core Animation that requires Leopard. Apple could choose to create installable versions of the newer APIs for Tiger (and perhaps Panther). However, they have no financial incentive to do so.

Now, Microsoft also introduces new APIs. The difference is that Microsoft has historically back-ported APIs to previous versions of the OS. For example, WIndows XP shipped with DirectX 8.1. When DirectX 9 came out, Microsoft released it for both Windows 2000 and XP. The same can be said for .NET. (2.0 supports W2K, 3.0 does not - but it does support XP). Of course, now Microsoft is following Apple's lead, and DirectX 10 only installs on Vista.

To whomever modded this "Offtopic": What the Dickens is the matter with you?

Yet another illiterate modder who can't even be bothered to use google.

And to whomever modded this Offtopic: Whoosh!

Ok, Mr. AC, apparently you don't understand the meaning of the words "overly simplified". It was an analogy. Get a clue. Nor was I saying that every new use for an existing machine could not be patented.

But what is certain: If the process is not intrinsically tied to a specific machine, and if the process does not perform some sort of transformation of one thing into something else, it cannot be patented.

Trivialize it if you wish. Patent lawyers are freaking out. They at least don't think it's trivial.

http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20081103134949355
http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20081105132651542
http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20081109185020183
http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20081112034806294
http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20081102011538422

Somebody better feed Grandpa his oatmeal.

I have not used Mootools. I was first exposed to jQuery when I was trying to integrate WYMEditor into my company's CMS. When we ran into an issue, where we needed to add a CSS class to some server-side-generated code that we could not touch, the answer from somebody on a forum was, "Just use jQuery," and I was shown a one-liner that did exactly what we needed. Not only that, it was instantly understandable. My initial reaction, having struggled with doing this manually in the past, was, "It can't be that easy." Of course, I have used it in countless ways since then. I personally find it quite self-documenting.

Your point is well taken. I was not aware of this distinction.

Now, the next step in the right direction would be a ruling to the effect that a method claim cannot be recast as an apparatus claim, just to avoid the machine requirement. i.e., that if there is no essential difference between a method claim and an apparatus claim when the apparatus incorporates a general-purpose machine, the apparatus claim, by the same standard, should be denied.