Please remember there is a human being on the receiving end of your comments. Being called an âoeidiotâ and a âoemoronâ is hostile and frankly misguided. It achieves nothing for civil discourse. You should be discussing the danger of any entity - government or other - deciding what is âoetrueâ while displaying zero transparency or accountability. Not trying to start a war of aggression against people youâ(TM)ve never met.

Twitter linked to an opinion piece. The opinion piece had factual errors. When this was pointed out Twitter silently edited the opinion piece and left no mention of the mistake or the correction. Orwell would be appalled. âoeFact checkersâ indeed.

If you want to while away an afternoon, download SIMH and one of the PDP-8 kits.

People who complain about systemd the most seem to have been using Linux for a very long time

Aka people with lots of experience. 24 years Linux experience here, for example.

and just "don't want to change"

Happy with change. Unhappy with systemd. It's a terrible idea and a badly run project as well.

HTC didn't start the war

Really? Because Apple claims that HTC did start the war. HTC stole Apple's property, Apple responded by using legal injunctions to stop the theft, and you're claiming Apple is the bad guy?

Bias showing much?

That's the biggest load of crap I ever read.

The Slashbots are claiming Skype and 2001-era Nokia phones as "prior art". If that's the level of understanding you consider to be "intelligent", then god help us all.

Of course, you've already compared me to a Nazi sympathiser, claimed FUD, and used potty language like "crap", so I honestly doubt you know what you're talking about either.

That you can't see the obvious - HTC is a rip off merchant who just steals from other companies - is your blind spot here. I'm not an Apple fanboy. I think software patents suck. I prefer Linux and GNU. But I'm not so blind as to defend HTC when clearly HTC is in the wrong. HTC stole technology from Apple, Apple took them to court, and Apple won. Good for Apple.

Unfortunately you are so blinded by your hatred of Apple that you would blame them no matter what the facts.

It is clearly self defence.

So your argument is that for reasons of "self-defence" it's OK for HTC to use frivolous patent lawsuits and injunction requests to try and destroy another company.

So if Apple were to assert that HTC attacked first by blatantly ripping off Apple's inventions, and that Apple was merely "retaliating" against HTC by asserting their legal property rights, you would defend Apple?

Or does "self-defence" only extend to lawsuits, not to property rights? Or, as I said earlier, are you just giving HTC a free ride because you're an Apple-hating Slashbot.

Apple get roasted on patent issues on slashdot because anyone with even basic programming knowledge (i.e. almost everyone on slashdot) knows how ridiculous Apple's lawsuits are

It's not for you to decide whether a patent is trivial or ridiculous. From reading other comments, most Slashbots don't even know the details of the patent, let alone the subtleties of patent law.

HTC ONLY sued Apple in retaliation,

Right, so in your world it's acceptable for HTC to launch frivolous patent lawsuits because it's retaliation against Apple.

That's exactly what I surmised. That's also why I said you and your ilk are hypocrites. If you were consistent you'd be heaping as much scorn on HTC as you heap on Apple.

I think the overall comments reflect a dislike for software patents, be they Apple, HTC or ,* . The ".* sucks" comments will probably be thrown at any company bold enough to sucker punch someone that actually is doing a good job.

Nonsense. Even when it was pointed out that HTC is doing the exact same thing, the only response was somebody defending HTC.

You don't need to look hard at Slashdot to figure out the bias.

So Apple sued HTC and two years later HTC sued Apple, and HTC are the bad guy?

So you really are defending these frivolous patent lawsuits from HTC and your justification is "they are countersuing Apple, that makes HTC the good guys"? Astounding.

The Slashdot anti-patent brigade must have a special exemption for when patents are enforced against Apple. Hypocrites.

No mention that HTC sued Apple and attempted an injunction against most Apple products. http://www.itnews.com.au/News/267160,htc-sues-apple-over-patents.aspx Because only Apple sucks, right? I think the only real story is Slashdot is so predictable.

The outrage is right here - or are you missing the large number of comments calling out Apple for the crooked, non-innovating, patent-abusing company they have turned out to be?

Outrage against Apple on Slashdot? Colour me shocked. News at 11.

Slashdot goes full-on retard whenever Apple is mentioned. That's why nobody cares what Slashdot thinks.

The Lisa & Mac were total ripoffs of the stuff Jobs saw at Parc.

So would you agree with these statements?

PARC was a ripoff of Engelbart's demo at SRI.

Linux is a ripoff of UNIX.

GNOME is a ripoff of Windows.

Because not a single one of those statements is true, but they're equivalent to your bullshit.

You need to get a grip on reality. Nearly everything in computing is an incremental improvement from something else. That doesn't make it an automatic "ripoff". Apple massively improved the desktop metaphor with the Lisa and Mac. They contributed greatly to the advancement of user interfaces. Have you used a Star? Have you used a Lisa? If you had, you would not for a minute claim that the Lisa was a "knockoff". There are graphical elements in the Lisa and Mac that were not created nor used at PARC. Yes, there are some similarities... WHICH APPLE PAID XEROX TO USE. There are also elements in the Lisa and Mac that were copied from UI research that existed before the groundbreaking work at PARC. And there are far more elements that were invented by Apple and their employees (Apple employed some of the brightest UI designers on the planet at the time).

This historical rewriting that occurs amongst Apple-haters - that somehow the Lisa/Mac were just "knockoffs" of PARC - not only shows a profound ignorance of PARC, and of Apple, but of computing in general. It paints you as a blinded zealot. Is that what you want to be? Rewriting history doesn't make you cool; it just means you're a nimrod.

Do you drive a Ford/Champion/ACDelco ?

Or a Porsche/Karmann/Bosch?

The Linux kernel is a small part of the OS. Some would say it's a trivial part compared to some of the other components (e.g. the desktop environment). Yet it gets naming rights?

Might as well name your car after its brake calipers, or the engine oil. Do you drive a Bosch? Do you drive a Mobil? How about a Porsche Bosch? Or a Ford Mobil? Still feel the need to mention "Linux" in the name?

Honestly the correct names should be Red Hat, Ubuntu, Debian, without any "Linux" or "GNU" prefixes, suffixes, or appendages.

WebKit was started by KDE under the GPL license. I highly doubt apple would have given anything back if they didn't have to (with, say, an Apache or Mozilla style license).

The Apple hatred on /. knows no bounds. Apple can literally contribute to an existing GPL code base, adding so much valued code that the project soars from ineffectual to industry leader, give all this away for free to their competitors, and still /. finds something to complain about. "Meh, no praise from us, because Apple once killed a puppy".

Take the sour wedge out of your mouth; it's affecting your ability to recognise valuable OSS corporate citizens. Google deserves less praise than Apple here. Google is literally shitting on the very spirit of GPL, while Apple is doing everything by the book and to the spirit.

Give praise where praise is due.

That said, we did get contributions back to linux didn't we? No, we didn't get much of that either.

Meanwhile, Apple has contributed significantly to Open Source, including the HTML engine used in Android (Webkit), and an entire operating system (Darwin).

http://www.apple.com/opensource/

Makes me cringe whenever somebody complains about Apple and in the next sentence they praise Google (not saying you did this). Apple's contributions probably exceed Google's.