I had similar problems. I finally talked to someone and had a several hour screaming match filled with legal threats and personal insults, after which the calls stopped for me.

So, there's this thing, called research - you should try it sometime before posting your uninformed opinions.

My sarcasm detector must be going bad, because I actually thought you were serious.

You're confusing advertising with rights.

I have a right (a liberty in Hoefield's scheme of rights) to curse within my own home. I also have a right to live off of brownies if I so decide. I don't have that right because brownies or cursing is so "valuable" per se, but because it's my right, legally, to do what I wish within my home so long as it doesn't affect others. To carry my example, I can't curse so loudly as to disrupt my neighbors, even though I can otherwise curse - again, the issue isn't the cursing here, it's that I am disrupting my neighbors.

We can argue that smoking seems to cause a lot of health issues for non-smokers who are nearby. The majority of the research we have at this point seems to indicate a causative pattern pretty strongly. Therefore, at least in some states, you can't smoke in a restaurant or by a door way. On the other hand, there is absolutely no reason (nor does the Federal Government have the ability to) limit smoking within the privacy of your own home. I would argue that most businesses don't either unless they can prove that your smoking/non-smoking is required for your job (say, if you work at a hospital).

TLDR: "If [eating brownies] is so great and such a valuable right that others shouldn't be able to stop you doing it whenever and wherever you please, why do [brownie producing companies] spend hundred of millions of dollars every year just to keep convincing people they need to keep doing it?

If you're on slashdot, you have a "more expensive host". Hell, if you have a smart phone, you have "a more expensive host". It's a freaking 30$ computer. Get over it. Yes, you can develop on it directly if you want. For the rest of us, there's this beautiful web based IDE.

I agree with you, but I also agree with Linus.. Argh, what to do!?

What University do you go to? CS at my Uni is 80% Macs, 10% Linux machines (disproportionately Ubuntu, for better or for worse), 5% Windows machines, and the rest never bring laptops (and borrow a mac from the Uni to do work on).

Again, all of our software is either on a central server that can be SSH'd to with X access (and thus any machine can be used to get to it), it's cross platform, or it's OS/X or Linux. I can only think of maybe one specific class that you *must* have a windows machine for (and it's like a C# class or something) and even then, I think they meet in a computer lab of Windows machines.

Any mac can be setup for development trivially quickly and easily. I'm not at all a mac fanboy (quite the opposite) but Apple did figure out how to treat their developers well. It wouldn't surprise me if a great amount of Universities are pretty Windows leaning, but it's not the de facto standard by any shot. OS X has a good hold on the Universities (and most programmers) and I strongly suspect it will continue grow. (Personally, they can have my Arch laptop when they can pry it out of my cold dead hands).

Welcome to programming? Lets you see develop windows applications without buying a 400$+ windows PC, or even Linux applications without a machine that runs Linux. If you buy a mac, all the programming tools are free, all the documentation is free, and you don't even need to show student ID.

Yup. This has absolutely kept us perfectly safe. All of our consulates are safe, we've never had any terrorist attacks, and there have never been any breaches of government security. This is clearly working so well.

By the way, you're a selfish bastard if all you care about is "My freedom".

It's not supposed to be legitimate to give a pass ex post facto, but it happens. This is pretty clear in both the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.

It's not free money. You do understand how insurance works, right? You pay into a system based on estimated risk and if bad things happen, they pay a large lump sum to your survivors to help with expenses. It's not unreasonable to force an insurance agency to cover all types of work so long as they get to set the premiums and deductibles.

You clearly can't read spec sheets. Go read what the Nexus 7 specs actually are and then try again.

"User License Agreement", ie, Contract. In order for a contract to be valid, a few things have to be true, in this case, the contract has to be legible/readable, and the other party must affirmatively agree to it. (This isn't an argument so much as just fact, which I'm sure you'll agree to).

I'm going to argue that most EULAs represent a "sticker contract", and would typically be considered non-binding because they fail to be readable by any average person and that no affirmative consent is given. Legally, EULAs may or may not be legally enforceable in different states. South Carolina considers EULAs not-enforceable while some states may consider otherwise. From my own reading of the law, I think any "Here's a long complicated 20 page essay on how you don't have rights, written in a foreign language, click 'I Accept' to install" type thing doesn't constitute an actual legal binding agreement - YMMV, it's usually up to the court in question.

Several authors did specifically file just "complaints", not DMCA takedowns. Whether or not there were DMCA takedowns in there, we don't know.

You are correct about not needing a EULA, it just helps.