They're still dog fighting. There's even an educable show about this. Some of that included the last Iraq war.

...except they haven't "wasted a trillion dollars". The trillion dollar figure is for the cost of the plane for it's entire lifetime including the 20 or 30 so years from today it's supposed to remain operational.

Only the very lowest levels of programming as a profession are so simple that you can get away with being a completely untrained bricklayer. Once you actually get to the point of building anything remotely interesting, ideas you would have been exposed to in academia quickly become relevant.

Even in the more interesting skilled skilled trades you can't get away from "academic" instruction of some kind.

Sure. Lets pander to the flavor of the month corporation just because they are the trendy thing today. Let's forget about the DECADES of work and progress that has gone into the collective body of Free Software. Let's also give a big "fuck you" to all of the nice contributors while we are at it.

It's Apple that's the newcomer playing the jerk imposing restrictions that are entirely unnecessary.

Freedom is not a Mad Max free-for-all where Apple can try to be the boss of the Thunderdome.

You must be a sociopath then, or work for one.

That's really the only reason to not use something with a copyleft license.

All the GPL does is enforce that "everyone plays nice" with a shared resource. If you can't do that, then you're an anti-social jackass that should be shunned.

Stick to the LGPL and it's not even any more viral than anything else.

Was it all uniform though? As an IT guy, I can relate to black listing certain types of updates and preventing Microsoft from just force feeding updates to everyone.

It's the perpetual problem of Microsoft not really being responsible with the hardware vendor really being the one on the hook. They are likely to suffer for Microsoft's mistakes.

...true. But this is much more like the "Pink Slime" controversy over there in the States. People were not aware of what was going on and reacted quite badly when the cat was finally let out of the bag.

Legal warfare against the relevant whistle blowers in the news media commenced.

The offending meat companies claimed damages.

The problem with cable is that they escalate the number of commercials in a given time frame. This means that even new prime time shows end up being butchered as soon as they go into syndication. Older stuff (like classic Trek) can get mutilated to the point of being unrecognizable.

It's not just about how insulting or stupid or manipulative the commercials are. Content is altered.

Since there is nothing tying your OS to your browser to your search engine the old retort is still a valid one. ANYONE can get in the game. If Google is dominant, it's more like McDonalds than Microsoft.

Browsers can even send you to a different default search engine if you're too lazy to try something else on your own.

We already have a cheap and plentiful food supply.

if you think otherwise then you are highly uniformed MORON.

We have been letting food ROT in this country in order to prop up commodity prices since before you were even born. That's just the stuff that actually gets harvested. Some of it doesn't even make it out of the fields because it doesn't meet stringent packaging guidelines.

> There is no scientific difference.

If that were really true then there would be no value perceived in the "newer" alternative. The fact that these differences do exist despite the shrill attempts of "science fanboys" to say otherwise is why megacorps want to use these methods. At best they are a short cut. At worst, they convey unusual monopoly powers.

There are very important legal ones.

One allows your favorite megacorp to strip me of my personal property rights. The other one does not.

Who cares if it can make money or not. That is simply not the correct metric to judge whether or not a certain type of patent (or other thing) should be allowed. We should not suddenly re-align all of our interests merely to pander to the desires of a few large megacorporations.

Our society is simply not driven by the need for Monsanto to make a buck.

Kind of but not really. The North would have happily gone on with pretty much whatever the South wanted. The South just managed to not get it's way "exactly" just once and they had a collective hysterical hissy fit over it. In truth it was probably an unnecessary confrontation. Genuine abolitionists were an extremist minority in the North and most people everywhere were incredibly racist. For the first half of the war, the Union generals would have happily allowed the South to come back into the Union without any changes to the status quo. Eventually slavery became a military strategic issue and was attacked primarily for that reason.

It was ultimately really just an unnecessary temper tantrum.

Some of us get out plenty.

You're just repeating a variation of the Microsoft fallacy. No. Not everything is total crap. You can escape the crapulence by finding a better option and staying away from the obvious crap.

Not all companies are the same.

You seem jealous and butthurt that some of us have managed to avoid whatever torment you've brought upon yourself.