That doesn’t sound very practical. Sure, it can help with your hydration issues, but how did you fit it in your wallet?

640K ought to be enough for anybody

This summary is needlessly breathless. For all we know, Google plans to use this chipset in the next rev glasses.

Usually I like to learn things, but this...... (shakes head).

I hope someone mods your post up.

IBM used to do this: you could pay different prices for different clock speeds; if you paid for an upgrade the technician would arrive and remove the "slow down" jumper.

Oddly enough people felt ripped off by this. Who'da thunk it?

Actually the end of the war was a slow and messy affair (the break in Japan was cleaner) and various successor movements do break out around Europe from time to time (look at the current government in Hungary for example, as well as some parties in the balkans, perhaps including, to reconnect to TFA, Breaking Dawn). Postwar by Tony Judt is a good summary.

In the US those other laws you talk about were passed and implemented, but reconstruction was rolled back after a change in government. It's a nice A/B experiment, actually.

Basically I agree strongly with what you wrote in both philosophy and practice. But I cut Germany some slack here, using the US as the example.

Nazism was a “philosphy” that was harnessed to the state within living memory. As a result there are plenty of remaining artifacts around from old driving licenses or professional certificates (e.g. Opticians) or marriage licenses that are still valid documents (old German driving licenses had no expiration dates) which bear swastikas and other nazi references. There are still old granddads who had fun shooting guns in the war. I know one friend’s dad, drafted at 17 in 1944, who's main memories are crazy russians running through hi farm trying to defect to the west. Plus learning to shoot. But every once in a while he uses an old aphorism from his childhood that's not only disturbing, but doesn't even agree with how he lived his life. I am sure there are living grandparents with stories they learned in school in the 30s and who were happy with those times. So since the wound is still fresh, this is a part of trying to heal it.

Compare that to the US. The civil war ended in 1865 but old southern racists survived well into the 1920s (even reaching the presidency, with Wilson) and the Jim Crow legacy continued into the 1960s and beyond. The reconstruction program which was killed early in the US was the equivalent of the reconstruction of Germany, which, in these laws, continues to this day.

I agree with Brandeis that "Sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants" so feel free speech should be extremely free. But the German's position shouldn't be rejected out of hand.

Oh they care about the people, don't worry about that! They care like the bull cares about the cow.

Thats all very exciting but doesn't really match the reality on the ground.

I can write anything I like. Yes, the mac is a proprietary platform so I can't dig around inside kernel datastructures as easily as I could under linux, but I acknowledge that's the price I pay for a proprietary platform. But I can write and sell or distribute for free apps that poke around and use undocumented features, stray outside the sandboxes etc. Apple has made no effort to restrict that over multiple OS releases and I don't see why it would be in their interest to do so. In fact the largest vendors for the Apple platform, Adobe and Microsoft, don't use the app store, don't pay the 30% tax and don't use sandboxed apps.

Some developers do use the app store and some both use it and distribute from their own web site. It's just hard to see how this is a problem.

Apple can be assholes, no question about it: only app store apps can use iCloud -- though it doesn't work well so this is hardly a restriction! -- and yes you have to obey the sandbox restrictions to use the app store. OK.

Oh, and really, is the sandboxing more extreme than linux security domains (e.g. kernel/user space)? In fact it's easier to program for than managing SELINUX. Even though I write code for in house use I stay in the sandboxes too because it helps me write more robust code. But I don't have to if I don't want to.

Err, nothing stops you from using other chat apps. Sadly iMessage isn't open, but neither is Skype (nor apparently google talk any more either) and they don't seem to cause people to froth at the mouth. And there are plenty of jabber clients (actually the apple messages app speaks jabber fine too).

And they have their stupid proprietary book format, but most of the books they sell are ordinary epubs. That's true of the iTunes store -- they prefer their own proprietary lossless format, but you can use all the mp3s you want (and even make them, by jumping through some hoops).

I know this makes me sound like some sort of apple apologist, but I have plenty of reasons to criticize them. I just don't get the "walled garden" thing, at least, when compared to most alternatives. It feels like a lazy trope.

If you're running a proprietary OS yes the set of options you can tweak (focus follows mouse) are limited, though the complexity and gratuitous hair (I'm looking at you systems) of Linux limit that too for most if not all people.

I have a ton of third party programs on my mac so I'm not sure what you mean about few realistic alternatives.

I'm not saying this as some rabid mac fan, I just think it sucks less than the desktop alternatives. For servers I use Linux and bsd.

I am puzzled by this common complaint, that the Mac is a "walled garden" (not talking about iOS). I can write any program (mostly I write posix code in fact), and download any app I like from the web. I am really not sure why the Mac is any more a "walled garden" than Windows is. Arguably less, since things like mail are kept in flat ascii files rather than some proprietary database as does Outlook. Mail speaks ordinary IMAP and POP (and has an adaptation for Gmail's aberrant implementation). The calendar can subscribe to various sources, and apple's in house service exports its data in a standard format. So where's the walled garden?

This is not an attempt at starting a flame fest, it's a genuine question.

(I could prefer more support for plug ins (e.g. in itunes) but apple is hardly alone here).

Interesting. <joke>Sounds like the broadcasters should just switch off their towers and collect the cable fees.</joke>

(I assume the fee comes from some sort of "must carry" in the area supposedly reached by the towers, and if they switched off the towers the cable providers would simply drop them.)

If you read the plaintiff's pleading before the court (quoted here):

The decision below has far-reaching adverse consequences for the broadcast television industry, making the need for this Court’s review urgent and acute. The decision already is having a transformative effect on the industry. Industry participants will not and cannot afford to wait for something of this magnitude to percolate before responding to new business realities. And once Aereo’s technology is entrenched and the industry has restructured itself in response, a ruling by this Court in Petitioners’ favor will come too late. The disruption threatened by Aereo will produce changes that will be difficult, if not impossible, to reverse.

They are explicitly saying "our business is changing and we want the courts to stop things because creative destruction is unfair." They are not even pretending that they are trying to do something in the public's interest; they are nakedly asking the court to save the entrenched interest. Pathetic assholes.

I can't understand how they could be considered leeches:

• They connect viewers to broadcasters that the broadcasters would not otherwise be able to reach, and at no extra cost to the broadcaster
• They stand on their heads with this crazy device so that each subscriber has an antenna, same as if the antenna were directly attached to the subscriber's TV.

In what way is this being a "leech"? If anything it's a service to the local broadcaster. In fact if you think of it, if Aero becomes successful, the broadcaster could save money by lowering the broadcast power.