Sometimes a clever but simple idea is brilliant. (Like Tetris).

The problem with some kind of legal protection is that sometimes somebody has a neat idea that is badly implemented, or maybe its implemented ok, but somebody else can provide an implementation that really brings out its potential. Not always is the original the best. So it would be stagnating the category to bring the law into it.

Why not just learn scheme, and everything else is a book exercise? Use it with a CLOS clone for OO. Most scheme courses probably dive into writing a VM also, so that takes care of the assembly side.

Errm, Scheme has strong typing with NO static typing.

Maybe the gun was a water pistol. Maybe the "killing" was part of a game. It's quite possible this status report was actually true in its own context, not creepy at all, not weird at all. Don't you think asking a few questions might have been the first step, rather than calling in police, mental health people or whoever?

If he'd said he'd shot Osama bin Laden, they probably would have made him Valedictorian, and nominated him for a medal.

I've wasted countless hours trying to bend MS Word to my will. Just yesterday, for some unknown reason it wouldn't start from page 1, but rather page 2. No it wasn't in the "start from" insert page number dialog like you'd think. But an obscure page setup field had an option to always start on even numbers. I have no idea how my document suddenly had that option activated, nor why MS word's help couldn't tell me that, nor why the pagination settings have to be in two completely unrelated dialog boxes. It's hard to believe any program could be worse than Word at wasting your time.

I don't doubt that you can make documents that don't render well, but in this day and age, when printing documents is somewhat quaint, should anybody care much? The city can print their own documents, and presumably anybody else can see them fine, even if they look slightly odd. If they cared so much, they could download open office for free. And shouldn't most stuff these days NOT be document based? Sometimes its hard to remember the last time I killed a tree to print something.

Possibly, but cutting out obvious spam-ware would hardly be criticised by anyone.

Yes, the real problem is not so much presumption of innocence, but rather lack of due process.

Your analysis seems to assume that there are apps, and that is it. But in reality there are apps that are virus hosts in themselves. VB within Excel. Javascript within browsers.

It seems to me that anti-virus would be a waste of time in a well designed system. Binaries should be protected from modification. Applications with built-in VMs (like browsers) should be secure and with separate memory protection (like Safari). If a vulnerability is discovered in one of these puzzle pieces then the correct solution is to patch the vulnerability. The patch should be provided with the same speed as any upgrade to anti-virus signatures. And if you don't patch a major vulnerability in time... well all bets are off anyway, you can't be sure the virus didn't disable your anti-virus anyway, so you're screwed in any case.

I don't believe I've ever got a virus on my Mac. When I tried to help friends out with their malware on Windows, anti-malware software did a poor job. It didn't prevent infections, and couldn't repair them. My conclusion is you have to stop them at the border with good system design, not with band-aid anti-virus anti-malware.

Hmm, in a black hole a theoretical photon trying to escape is sucked back in because of gravity. But what will happen when a photon hits the hypothetical edge of the universe? Bounce back? I haven't heard of anyone theorising that.

But those secondary reasons might not be a sufficiently compelling argument for spending public money on it.

Then buy them yourself. Your idiosyncrasies are not a reason to not push ahead with e-libraries.

Regardless of naming and marketing, the tablet space is too crowded for any company to have two entrants.