Legitimate points. However, I'm more inclined to put the blame on Flash, since Silverlight somehow doesn't seem to have any of these problems on Mac.

I don't think its nearly as simple as you claim. Having read this piece. It made me re-evaluate the point of it. To basically sum up, yes, this locks developers on the iPhone OS. On the other hand, these meta-platforms hurt Apple's ability to improve their devices. It makes them depend on a 3rd party runtime too to actually provide support for the new features. As we've all see with flash, Adobe has no desire to provide runtimes on time that actually work. So yeah, its platform lock-in. But it's also more than that. Apple hates being beholden to anyone else and this move could be seen as ensuring their independence.

There is a similar method currently in effect. It is possible to convene a caucas of state representatives in order to ammend the consitution. I believe the bar is set at 3/4ths but if enough states felt strongly enough they could ammend the constitution in such a way to guarantee that the law would be declared unconstituional.

I would think even better than unique IP addresses would be something like requests for an update to a component guaranteed to be installed in the base system like say grub or the kernel. That way, if you have 3 computers behind a NAT you will, hypothetically, eventually get 3 counts.

Its playing catch-up to google in some areas, but some of the new interface tweaks in google as of late are highly reminiscent of Bing at launch. Bing still has some cool features like searching for plane tickets. I did it once just to see and clicking on links will take you directly to the carriers sign up page with the relevant flight information filled in. Plus, it gives you trends on the ticket prices. While Bing still needs to catch up on the general goodness of its results, to think Bing hasn't done anything clever or innovative at all is just silly.

You've never seen the political spectrum represented as a circle before?

I'm pretty sure that is a myth for complicated stuff. Otherwise the ATI drivers that are open source wouldn't be crap and Intel's drivers would break every other version.

Uh? You entered government property. Just as you have the right to subject anyone entering your own house to whatever probing you desire before admittance so too does the government before you enter its property. You were not in public; you were in a government owned building. The government cannot randomly search you out on the street because it feels like it.

Google for Cornhusker kickback for 1 reason why it is extremely controversial. The short story is that the rest of the country is now subsidizing healthcare in Nebraska.

Do you really think it's that simple? Do you think, somehow, that students couldn't figure out how to similarly disable whatever software is running to active the webcam if they had known about it. The machine is user configurable. Similarly, having the source is no guarantee of security either unless you think mystic code audit gurus are going to step through the portal from geek nirvana to audit the entire software loadout of every system. As we have seen on numerous previous occasions, having the source is no guarantee of security.

All that is needed is the ability to audit what external connections a program is making. And, since this was discovered there is a class action suit against it. Presuming they win, which imo seems likely, I doubt any other school district will try this.

No, they can't. No matter what Microsoft does they will always be trashed by people who believe Microsoft is the devil incarnate in technology co. form. You'd think releasing their file formats for broad use under legally binding promises and other software projects under OSI approved licenses would have been enough.

Ok. How much does it cost to maintain the plants and below what threshold of power generation do they become inefficient. I simply can't imagine that having backup energy sources for around 40% of energy needs is effective.

So, my question for you is: How much back up capacity sits there doing absolutely nothing on days when you are getting 50+% of your energy from wind?

Uh? The only thing the two systems share that is relevant is support for OpenGL 2.1. They each have their own windowing systems as you mentioned, however, OS X also has CoreAudio while Linux has some stuff that may or may not work or play sound and varies across distributions. And if by userland, you mean in the sense that they both usually have bash and awk and sed. I'm sure those are all things that have tremendous utility in modern game programming. It doesn't help either that as far as I can tell, Linux programs tend to make extensive use of environmental variables while OS X essentially doesn't use them outside of bash sessions.I'm also curious if there are applications for GCD and OpenCL in the Source engine which are available on newer OS X but not so much on Linux. Still, the fact remains that pretty pictures are only a small part of the equation.

In comments to the Ars article one of their tech guys says that they don't run ads that play sound without user interaction and they load all of their ads in iframes so a slow ad won't delay page loading.