Microsoft vs. Apple was a copyright thing. Lindows was trademark-related. Microsoft is often the target of patent lawsuits. I can't recall them starting one. Please show your work.

Apple does not have a monopoly on anything. They made one good deal with the music industry and apparently came up with a compelling value offer for consumers (or the easily duped, take your pick). But nothing prevents consumers from buying music through many, many other channels and putting them on one of the hundreds of different devices in the world that play MP3. Apple also came out with a decent phone and lots of people bought one. But the only "monopoly" here is over delivery of applications to those who own those phones. Lots of other "smart" phones exist. BlackBerry and Windows Mobile have been around a lot longer than iPhone and are still very popular. iPad? Whatever. A niche device for the moment. If you invest time and money into putting your entire business model into Apple's hands, the only serious issue is your gullibility. Apple have been raving control freaks since at least 1984.

one of the most selfish things a person can do. Are you crazy? In a world where 16,000 children die of hunger every year, eating is the most selfish thing one can do.

At least the something he is doing is to benifit people that vote, and not a company that puts money in pockets.

Because if there's one thing I hate it is money in pockets! That's why I'm glad Senator Franken gets paid well into the six figures to help scold private businesses for how they treat their non-paying "customers". I guess the money in *his* pockets doesn't count? Because what with the bailouts and health-care bill he voted for, I'm sure going to have a lot less money in *my* pockets, in spite of the best efforts of the company I work for to pay me a decent salary.

Please note: The whole reason companies exist is to put money in pockets. The pockets of those who risk their money to start the company and those who put in their time and ability to make the company successful. If you don't like how Facebook runs their business feel free to not sign on to their system.

Plus it's written in [expletive deleted] .NET, so it will probably never be available for Ubuntu

That's funny, because Ubuntu is including F-Spot, which is written in C#.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Who

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_time_pad

They are not like Microsoft, where for the longest time there was no alternative to Windows.

Um, what? There was always an alternative to Windows. It was called MacOS, it was first released on January 24, 1984. That's over a year and a half before Windows 1.0 was available in November 1985.

But I note that any blindly anti-MS sentiment on Slashdot can get modded "insightful" no matter how contrary to fact it is.

Why, if we both pay for the same service level, should your packets get priority just because your protocol wants less latency? That means that you get the service you paid for and I don't. If you want more of the pipe more of the time, then you should pay for the privilege.

OTOH, Mod parent up would be a good name for a rock band.

And how would that be any different from just using commit hooks in any old source control system? Any idea how much more/less work it will take to set up these "wizards" and code templates correctly in Wave, as opposed to, say, just building them in your IDE of choice?

No. The secret ingredient is marketing skillz. Their products are neither innovative nor particularly well executed. But they are fashionable -- partly because they are designed to look and act as fashion accessories, but also because of marketing.

I'm not suggesting beating your child with a stick

By process of elimination I guess you are suggesting to beat the child with a carrot then. I mean, how many kids do you know that think a carrot is any kind of reward? Most kids I've seen, on the other hand, love to pick up and play with sticks.

That may be, but they also don't usually confuse "peddling" with "pedaling".

So you'd prefer to learn lessons from fairy tales than from actual history? Interesting approach. :)

it is a concept that I have never quite been able to grasp.

Try harder then. Seriously.

GPL isn't "weaponized". What does that even mean? Nothing, that's what. GPL is no more pernicious than basic copyright or any other license.