If he's seriously making a business suggestion then it's moronic because:

• A hostile takeover isn't an opening gambit, it's a last resort when a company's board strongly opposes a takeover.
• The companies have absolutely no overlap outside of iPhone cameras which is hardly worth buying the entire company for.
• Kodak is making a loss at the moment, so probably not the kind of profits Apple would enjoy reaping.
• You don't make acquisition of random companies because they have minor overlaps with one of your product lines.

But that's irrelevant, because it was clear from the second sentence that he was suggesting that Kodak were out of date ("ancient cameras") and deserved punishment for making this accusation by Apple ("target practice"). None of that seems to justify being labeled Insightful. Apologies for my age, unfortunately ad-hominems aren't considered legitimate arguments nowadays gramps.

God forbid that a company that helped pioneer photography for the last hundred or so years be paid for doing so. These are real patents designed to incentivise R&D and prevent competitors cashing in on another company's research. Judging by the number of companies paying them they're not without merit - why should Apple be exempt?

That's a very difficult thing to argue - in China I can't sell a newspaper, I can't run an ISP, the government won't want me competing with state run and state managed heavy industry, I won't be able to export or import at free market prices due to exchange rate fixing, I won't be able to change from being a "rural" to "urban" worker without government permission, if I run a search engine I will be required to sensor it(see: Google) etc etc.

It's very difficult to have a free market and for the government to retain the degree of overall control that China's government demands. Perhaps not impossible, but no existing or historical society has managed it.

It's hardly a secret that governments conduct cyber-espionage - what seems shocking in this instance is that they have been caught and that a major company, a telecoms giant and the US government have all gone on the offensive. This seems like a pretty dramatic shift, and you have to wonder what China's really done to provoke such a reaction after everyone's spent the last decade quietly appeasing them to try and get a foothold in their markets. It sounds like reading the subject lines of a few Chinese activists' emails is only the tip of the ice berg in this case, it'll be interesting to see what else has yet to be revealed.

Granted, but that's because relatively few linux developers are making an effort with Gecko/Firefox. In particular, Gnome has undergone a 2 year transition to Webkit that so far is showing very limited performance improvements and has meant that many projects have seen no real user visible changes (especially epiphany, which has not been changed noticeably since it reached parity with Firefox 2 a couple of years ago). It's quite sad that a FOSS icon has been largely rejected by the linux community and that it now performs worse there than on closed platforms.

Regardless, I use epiphany on Gnome because it feels much more native and slicker than firefox or chrome, even if it's still wanting for features.

Firefox at this point is really quite reasonable with its memory use - I can't get my head around the continual complaints. The only area where it's appreciably worse performing than Chrome is in UI responsiveness and this has significantly improved in 3.5. It also has far faster back/forward navigation through the cache and (although I don't have figures for this) it feels faster at displaying pages without extremely heavy javascript. There's also less flicker - most pages load in one paint rather than loading in sections. Besides that, web browsers have a lot of useful RAM caching they can do (your history, uncompressed images etc) - it hardly makes sense to keep browser usage below 174MB when even netbooks come with 1-2GB and that RAM can be used effectively to speed up the browser. Frankly, if you're too stingy to splash out on a stick of RAM use xterm with lynx or another browser from the era when that amount of RAM was normal.

Users have always had the ability to run apps in their home directory that *run with user privileges*. As this stands, there's nothing to stop a script installing a daemon that runs as root with a known exploit and running that exploit. If the application is within the user's home directory, there's no chance of it having privileges beyond that of the user in a properly configured system.

I've switched from Fedora to Ubuntu recently just because of various small things that add up. Synaptic has a much nicer feel to it than package-kit for me at this point, and PPAs are a brilliant system for keeping apps up to date over a single release cycle or testing out new applications - I'd love to see a Fedora equivalent if there is one. I also find following developer releases more pleasant with Ubuntu, having used Karmic a couple of months before release.

Fedora does somehow give me a nicer feeling than Ubuntu, perhaps since Core 3 was my first full time Linux distro, so I'd welcome any arguments to get me to switch back! I do appreciate the tech orientated development and user communities, and its out of the box experience is far more professional than many other distros in most areas.

I think this is an understatement - it's a dangerous ruling since if prisons exists as an example to others then those most genetically predisposed to killing will have less of a deterrent and be even more likely to kill if gene tests become as common as many predict.

You seem to have quite an optimistic view on the benefits of software licensing. While I do think the consumer would benefit from a more open OS X licensing model, I'm not sure Apple would benefit:

1) If Apple enters an all software market, they lose a major selling point of their hardware and enter an area with more competition and a lower barrier to entry (see: Linux). OEM licensing could potentially be more profitable, but I'm unconvinced that the market for OS X is much bigger than the market for Macs - users, particularly businesses, are often held back by software requirements rather than by the price premium.

2) Apple likes dictating what hardware you purchase - cheaper, more standard tower blocks don't fit with its image as being refined and premium, and the netbook market has far lower margins than they currently reap on MacBooks. One MacBook purchaser could well bring more profit than 5-mac-netbook purchasers. Apple doesn't want to enter a race to the bottom - they make plenty of money through brands that are seen as higher quality.

3) Why? It gives them higher margins and it's unclear whether the market share increase would offset that.

Most importantly, in my opinion:

4) Apple is so profitable because they have created their own "premium computer" market that is far larger than anything held by Alienware or Dell's Adamo. They do this by creating products that appear relatively unique and are functionally different from competitors' equivalents thanks to unique software, design and minor features (such as battery life on their laptops). Without OS X, a Macbook is just another expensive laptop. There is also some level of positive feedback - unique hardware makes the software appear higher quality, which makes the hardware seem more unique etc - and some of the major selling points depend on hardware-software integration.

I'm not saying it isn't possible that Apple would benefit from opening up their software, but it's far from being certain.

And I quote from the link you posted: "Upgrade your Mac with the latest versions of your Apple software — all in one box" Apple sells computers with disks licensed only for that computer, which won't work even on other Macs of different configurations. The only OS X copies you can purchase on their own are upgrades.

The Core 2 Duos that will provide perfectly adequate battery life are fine for gaming - no games can really take advantage of four cars, and few are particularly CPU bound in the first place. The issue there is GPU power, and there's simply no way to come close to a desktop, regardless of budget, in that department. In that sense, you have to accept sacrifices and go for a decent mobile chip, and there's no point throwing four i7 cars at something like that. Even then you could buy a good laptop (with moderate gaming capabilities) and a gaming rig for a similar price, and cover all your bases.

The article doesn't seem to suggest that this will really be enough to bring quad core laptops out of their current niche - we're talking an expensive machine which will clock in a bit over 3 hours battery life if you don't use its power, and potentially under an hour if you do. This would presumably be even worse with the higher clocked chip mentioned. I just don't feel there's much demand for such portable workstations - I can't see a good case for doing anything that processor intensive on the go. What does look very interesting is the 32nm dual core version - if they can carry over a comparable power consumption improvement to what they've achieved at the quad-core level that could be a very fast, very power efficient machine.

I don't believe it's reasonable to expect all papers to be funded by advertisers. Things like investigative journalism, sending journalists to press conferences, researched opinion pieces and the like *are* expensive, and somebody needs to fund them. Free (gratis not libre) press only exists because of the paid press and the likes of the AP/Reuters who do the initial research. People definitely pay for a higher quality of news coverage online - look at Bloomberg. Granted that's a niche, but I personally would be willing to pay a reasonable amount (less than the cost of a daily newspaper) for better, more up to date news coverage with more insightful editorials.

Ploughing waste back into the land or leaving it to decompose is hardly wasting anything - it's a natural fertiliser and reduces the need for less sustainable artificial fertilizers. Creating artificial nitrate fertilizers often involves using huge amounts of fossil fuels to extract nitrogen from the atmosphere, and many other minerals are mined unsustainably and in a highly environmentally destructive manner.