Many MACs are adjustable in the drivers.

And yet some are not and are hardcoded. I.e. The Surface Pro series has a MAC that isn't adjustable. The registry hacks don't work because the registry keys don't exist and if you use some software to spoof the MAC you end up in a BSOD loop.

I bought shares in a company should I be compensated when the company folds? Every investment carries risk. Leaving my money in the bank in a savings account carries risk too, just a lower risk with a lower reward.

Why are people always entitled to compensation? Why are companies entitled to go bust and get bailed out? What happened to just letting things run its course?

I don't understand why this comes back to insurance. There is a concept of self insurance, or no insurance.

We run risks every day of doing something where come company won't come and bail us out. Why should someone suddenly be *forced* to have insurance to do something?

GPL-compatible means you are allowed to use software under those licenses *from* GPL'd code, not that the GPL copyleft requirement doesn't apply.

My assumption on reading the OP was that they didn't realize MPL and GPL are different animals.

"Flamebait" my ass. You punk ass little kids are so full of shit and know so little about licensing issues that it's absolutely laughable. You rant on about how Novell "owns" the POSIX APIs without knowing SHIT about how the POSIX APIs were developed in the midst of the *nix vendor wars and published as a STANDARD that all the vendors AGREED to implement.

You spew FUD and bullshit about how "interfaces aren't code", have no respect for the work that goes into a clean and well defined interface specification, and generally are so damned wet behind the ears that I think the whole INDUSTRY pissed on your collective heads.

There is no "depends on how he's using it." If it doesn't have an LGPL interface header, you MUST release the code under GPL terms to use it.

The POSIX APIs were agreed to by *all* of the *nix vendors and published as a standard, which includes a lot of the low-level interfaces used by Linux. They are not "owned" by Novell. Novell merely sold an *implementation* of the APIs.

A completely different kettle of fish than Oracle vs. Google.

If you're using GPL code, you have no choice but to release your code under the GPL as well.

What kind of retard claims interfaces aren't code?

We don't need to. After use in a modern nuclear cycle the final waste products decay to safe levels quickly enough that it becomes an almost non issue. By comparison the waste produced by a coal power plant is significantly worse.

But we won't get there because of an interim stage of the cycle. OMG PLUTONIUM THE COMMIE TERRORISTS WILL GET US.

That was their fuckup. It didn't need to be a worse mouse experience. Note that I'm not talking about metro here which is just a plain bad experience.

I'm talking about other small fine tuned details like the borders which are significantly larger, the larger hit area on icons, the introduction of the checkbox on explorer icons allowing multi-select without needing a keyboard. I'd mention the ribbon too but someone will lynch me for it.

In general none of these had a negative impact on the mouse, just a negative impact on the eyes as some people really hate the window border. Yet they were ultimately product breaking features if you used Windows on a convertible tablet.

I'm utterly impressed with the expertise level the random slashdot user possesses.

Being able to dismiss anyone's study as being written by idiots without even reading the study (as typical on /.), that's really amazing!

Whoever owns or writes the code has copyright on it, from interfaces down to implementation. Anyone who has worked in the software industry for any length of time knows this. There have been dozens upon dozens of lawsuits over the years about people copying functions for spreadsheets, APIs for libraries, and a whole host of related issues. And it always came down in favour of the original author of the interfaces and implementations.

Think about it: What protection does your non-open-source software have if anyone can just use your API to implement an open source variant on the product? There is no way in hell that the entire software industry is going to give up that protection for their products and works.

Some in this thread are going on about the GPL and Linux header files. That only affects people writing drivers -- regular user space code is compiled against the libc interfaces, which are specifically LGPL to allow you to use them for writing products. Products like NVidia's closed-source drivers have always been a legal grey area just begging for a lawsuit to resolve once and for all whether it is permissible for them to write closed source against GPL interfaces. Personally I think if the courts had to make a decision on it, NVidia would lose for the same reasons the commercial vendors want to protect their works. NVidia does not get to dictate what constitutes "fair use" of an API, and neither does Google.

The owner of the API gets to determine what they're going to consider "fair use" and what they're going to consider to be an actionable abuse of their property.

I have never seen any reason nor excuse for the existence of Dalvik and the entire Google stack. Surely the "bright people" at Google could have written some sort of adapter layer for Swing as required for using the OpenJDK/GPL version of Java. But they didn't. Instead they're trying to lock people into the competing Android GUI stack, and are rightfully getting spanked for trying to break the "write once, run anywhere" philosophy of Java.

Google does evil all the time. Sure, Oracle does evil, too, but in this case, it is Google that is the greater of two evils.

Especially when the homescreen has a slider of content I'm likely to not know about (new for example) on a slider.

The video ads I think are a terrible idea, they annoy me on HBO when bingeing, they'll annoy me on Netflix too.

But the interest criticism I don't think is fair.

The know every word part, ugh.