I'm amazed your comment is marked insightful. Admittedly, I wouldn't call asm.js ready for prime-time, it is interesting technology and it will take lunatics like this guy to exercise it just like it took lunatics 15 to 20 years ago to port Doom and Abuse to Linux to begin to see what needed improvement.

I don't plan on buy games for my web browser, but that doesn't mean that an optimized javascript environment couldn't go somewhere as a portable environment. The good parts of javascript are far more elegant than java. I applaud this nut job.

I see few that a dozen useful posts on most /. articles. Admittedly though, Soylent could probably afford to step up their game on "Hot Grits" and shills.

Because, if you "accidentally include v3 code" you'll only be violating one license instead of two. ....wait??!?

They used to call it indulgences.

That depends. How many universes are there in the Multi-verse? At least one times that I guess.

No one and I mean no one in the scientific community thinks the existence of the Higgs Boson means the universe should have been crushed

There used to be some, but they've somehow ceased to exist.

That list is a bit small. It leaves off Ray Orbison and Tennessee Williams. I'm guessing they've left off other notables.

Get to know some people. Maybe your neighbors. In my case, half the people in town seem to know me or my wife. I actually know the Mayor, city council, several police officers, to president of one of the banks, the owners of several shops, a lot of the staff at my kid's school. That's not to brag. It's just that we're known. If I lose my ID, I can easily find dozens of people who can positively ID me. Some would actually even help us out while we're dealing with getting a normal life put back together. It wasn't always that way. Our kids forced us out of anonymity, but it's actually not a bad thing.

What you are talking about is the idea of "Portability". Systemd has very little to do with that, instead taking the "Our way or the highway" approach. If systemd catches on the way it appears it will, I hope someone forks it away from the current maintainers. They may not be enough to destroy the Linux ecosystem, but they are certainly damaging it.

So if something you've done stirs up an angry mob, you've done something bad? My grandmother had an angry mob burn a cross in her yard one night because her parents "helped the wrong kind of people". I suggest you refine your definition of what makes something OK.

Well the rules are tighter for a government than companies for a reason. You have an easy(-ish) choice who to contract for email. Your say in who governs is much smaller. Especially at the federal level. And the government has more authority they could abuse.

But overall I'd say yes it was 'ok' for Microsoft to do what they did because the user agreed to a contract that said it was ok for Microsoft to do what they did. I blame the user, and the billions of other users who agree to such contracts allowing them to become the norm. It would be one thing if companies or governments were forcing people into these contracts. (You can't vote without a hotmail account. You can buy food without a facebook account.) It another when people agree to trade away things like privacy for a free email account. It's awful but this person has no more right to complain than the guy who basejumps for fun and get injured due to a mishap. In both cases they have the information up front to understand the risk and choose to proceed anyway.

I'm just angry that some many people have been this irresponsible that now the few who don't want to be so irresponsible are looked upon as freaks. Things should change about how private information is handled, but the answer isn't to have the government rewrite the contracts people irresponsibly agreed to. The answer is for people to start acting like grown ups and change the demand in the market.

Amongst other fallacies, sounds like you are assuming it takes longer for an innocent person to get on this list than it does to get off the list. Otherwise the list could ever be free of innocent people.

Common sense is on a watch list. It has a hard time getting around government areas much less getting past government surveillance and getting in the front door of a court house.

The thing is I disliked Microsoft and their business practices long before the Netscape thing. By then Microsoft's style of foul play was already established. Microsoft acquired their monopoly through questionable business practices and while producing products with awful quality. I had assignments in introductory level programming classes where I had to produce simple things like pattern matchers with higher quality than the pattern matching in MS's production operating system at the time. (DOS 6.1 I believe.)

By comparison, Apple may be acting awfully, but any weight they might have to throw around came from giving people enough of what they wanted to get people to buy their products. I just watch the market in shock. People are putting on their own shackles and buying into the walled garden, but they are doing it freely. Apple hasn't worked out deals with vendors and hardware companies to block or cripple competitors. (There are the patent wars, but that's different and awful in it's own special ways. It's not unique to Apple. And MS has had their role as well.)

So in the end I don't like Apple's model. I don't like Google's either. But you can't call what Apple is doing a monopoly. They don't own the PC market. They don't own the server market. And thanks to Google, they don't own the mobile market.

I might buy that Google is using its position on the internet and the lock-in is has started to create with the Play store in a way that could be abuse of either a horizontal or vertical monopoly, but I think it would be a hard sell legally. Too many people are buying in for the convenience and then want to complain after the fact. Google, Facebook and Twitter all act very nasty in my opinion, but the market (the consumers themselves) are buying it. The consumers like these things better than what they had before. Why, I can't fathom.

I certainly would not give Apple, Facebook or Google a pass. But none of they have yet earned the reputation for foul play that Microsoft has.

I can't think of how many times I've heard comparisons asking "Is X the Microsoft of the Y world?" Microsoft has set the bar for being underhanded and abusing a Monopolistic position and have done so to such an extreme to be Godwin worthy. You want to talk about facism you compare to the nazis. You want to talk employee abuse you talk EA or Foxconn. You want to talk monopolistic abuse, you go to Microsoft.

They've worked hard earning that reputation and actually had to wrestle it way from others. You don't just expect that to be forgotten.