Even outside the area of software and genetics patents, it's hard to make a case that patents meet the requirements of the Constitution, which states that they must exist to encourage invention for the betterment of culture and society. Patents do not engender innovation (invention does happen without patents), and the monopoly protection they afford does not improve culture and society, and in fact results in lower quality, higher prices, and less innovation (since no one is truly permitted to improve on an invention).

Microsoft made some veiled threats a few years ago, intimating that their deal with Novell for Mono was exclusive. No one is really privy to the terms of that arrangement, but it made a lot of people really nervous.

C++ is quite capable of operating entirely without a run-time environment. It depends only on the C++ standard library and the C standard library, which, while implemented by the OS, are completely optional.

But this is not the case on non-Windows platforms.

They already do, to varying degrees: Apache has a wiki entry describing levels of support.

The FQA gives the word "disingenuous" a bad name. The author spends a lot of time with red herrings, straw men, and minutiae, and never actually seems to have a point. Worse, many of his claims and assertions are flat-out wrong, or at the very least, badly misleading.

Calling it a "pack of lies" would be unfair to packs of lies.

auto is the default behavior of newly-declared objects. It simply means "automatic storage duration."

No one actually ever used it, so it was decided that it wouldn't be missed. The new meaning ("automatic type") is clearer and more useful, IMO.

He's referring to the fact that the C++11 lambda syntax is sugar for functors - simple classes with an overloaded operator().

Boost's Lambda library constructs functors with a rather bare syntax as well, though it's more error-prone and difficult to use.