That's not true. A scientific theory is a conceptual framework for interpreting and attempting to predict phenomena. It can be true or false, proven or unproven, or even disproven. Evolution, universal gravitation and phlogiston are all examples of theories.

This is bullshit. Mac users have been hammering Apple with criticism all the way since Rhapsody, and a lot of things you see now are the result of Apple listening to that criticism. I know this sounds strange to you, but that's because you have no idea what you're talking about.

The iMac replaced the floppy disk with the internet. That's what the "i" stood for, originally. And they explicitly said "you won't need a floppy disk because you can send files via email", etc.

Well, it's not that simple. By the terms of the GPL, anyone has the right to port the code, even if the original developers object. The issue was that distributing an application with DRM, even if for free, puts you outside the GPL, and thus at the mercy of any of the copyright holders to charge you with copyright infringement. In this case, there was one core VLC developer (and Nokia employee, lol) who really wanted VLC pulled from the App Store, and neither Apple nor the other developers felt like going to court over it, so they had to pull the app.

Non sequitur. Google's campaign is not based on VP8 being as good as H264, but on it being "patent-free". MPEG-LA is just telling the world that the choice is not between a better, but patent-encumbered codec and a worse, but patent-free one; it is between a better codec with a known licensing model, and a worse one whose patent status is simply unknown - and they're looking into it.

I just checked and XMPP now seems to work on port 443 as well, so I can finally use it from university.

What's important to browser developers is getting the upper hand in their constant pissing contest over Javascript execution speed. Nothing else matters. NOTHING.

Cell phone manufacturer had a chance to get it right, but for years they chose to use custom connectors and make a killing selling overpriced chargers and cables.
Sometimes the invisible hand of the market needs a little nudging from the mighty foot of the state.

Among other things, because BitTorrent has very poor latency (ie it takes a long time from the user's request to when you actually start receiving data).

But if you're using Akamai to serve web page content, one second is a huge delay. Adding one second to the download of a CSS stylesheet is likely to have a bigger impact on browsing speed than all of the JavaScript improvements browser makers have been boring us with this year.

How is that a catch? Once the data is converted, you can write a new application that accesses DB2 directly; but on top of that, you can also keep your old application running while you write the new one. That's not a catch, that's a feature.

I see it all the time on Italian trains.

But Chrome's bar is still annoying in its own way. For example, I type "sla" and the first suggestion is slashdot.org, but then I hit "s" and suddenly the first hit is "google search for slas", and it takes it a good second to remember about slashdot again. And that's after disabling google suggestions; the default was even worse. It seems to do a really crappy job at indexing my browsing history, and gives priority to its useless searches instead.

No.

Try using that little wheely thing between your mouse buttons. You're welcome.