Let's step back a moment and examine the bigger picture. Lots of people support patents because they believe patents encourage innovation, and indeed that's more-or-less the Constitution's stated purpose in granting Congress the power to issue them:

But here's the question I have never, not even once, seen a patent advocate address: where is the evidence that patents actually promote innovation (i.e., that they cause a net increase in inventions, discoveries, etc.)? Indeed, there are some compelling arguments being made against patents and other forms of intellectual property, like Boldrin and Levine's Against Intellectual Monopoly, mentioned previously on Slashdot. Should we not demand that such a costly and disruptive regime as the patent system be supported by hard evidence that it actually does what it's intended to do?

Really? The snarky "I bet you don't read much" retort from the person who apparently hasn't learned how to capitalize?

Don't ignore Fitts' Law-- the menu bar at the top of the screen has an effectively infinite height, so even though you have to move your mouse farther, you can just slam it to the top of the screen and only have to aim horizontally. This is actually more important with higher-resolution screens, as the UI elements are smaller (at least until we finally get a resolution-independent UI, any decade now...).

Besides, the idea is to use keyboard shortcuts for menu items you use frequently. Much better than having to aim for a tiny rectangle on the screen, wherever it's located.

For better or worse, Apple is trying to do away with making users know or care about whether an app is running, much like how things work on iOS. For example, there's a new API in Lion called Automatic Termination that allows apps to let the system automatically terminate them when the system needs to free up resources. See John Siracusa's Lion review for more details.

Oh, come on. How common do you think it is for users to want a second instance of an application, rather than just another window? I mean, I've only wanted to do it maybe once or twice in the five or so years I've had this Mac, and I'm very much a power user.

Your perspective is very hard for me to understand. I couldn't care less about the story, or the characters and their motivations. Take a modern game, cut out all the dialogue/cutscenes, remove all the pretty textures etc., and it would still be the same game as far as I'm concerned. If I wanted story or characters, I'd be reading a book.

It's like when I hear people praising the lyrics of a song-- it's incomprehensible to me, since I view the human voice in song as just another instrument. I don't really care about what the artist is trying to "communicate" to me; it's all about how the music strikes my ear. Otherwise I'd be reading poetry.

The system is deeply flawed on a fundamental level, and no amount of "rejiggering" will ever "bring it back into balance". There's nothing wrong with "extremism" when the situation calls for it. Or would you reject chemotherapy for a cancer patient as too "extreme"?

Amusingly, the "wild west" is mostly a Hollywood fabrication anyway. I guess that's a good indicator of how reliable the MPAA's claims are.

Relevant reading: The Not So Wild, Wild West.

He's not talking about taxation. He's talking about funding wars through currency manipulation (printing money), which is basically a stealth tax not requiring popular support.

Not actually true.

IMO stripping governments of the ability to manipulate the money supply is entirely a good thing, and I'd guess Amir will agree.

One more reason why functional programming matters. Many programs become trivial to parallelize when you avoid mutation and side-effects outside of limited, carefully-controlled contexts.

It's truly a joy when you can parallelize your code by changing a single character (from "map" to "pmap"). There's usually a little more to it than that, but you almost never have to deal with explicit locks or synchronization.

These aren't the Droids you're looking for.

Isn't is too late to effectively shape incoming traffic by the time it reaches your modem/router? If that were truly the bottleneck, couldn't you get a faster connection just by buying a faster modem?

And surprise!

It is a pipe dream, but for different reasons. Who is going to enforce these "strict limits"? Why, the selfsame organization that is supposed to be limited by them! "Limited government" is an oxymoron: once you grant ultimate authority to an entity, any limits you try to place on it are moot.

We keep trying to create "safe" engines of mass subjugation, and somehow they keep getting abused. When will we finally realize that whatever difficulties we might face without a master, it's the only way we'll ever achieve lasting freedom?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7-KczCp0OQ4

[citation needed]