Sorry, that argument went the way of the dodos fifty years ago with the Civil Rights Act. If a business is open to the public, it has to be open *to the public*. Its called being a Public Accommodation.

Consider, for instance, if a town has only one grocery store. If that grocery store owner decides he doesn't want to serve black people, then that one owner can effectively make that community neigh on impossible to live in for black people.

Your freedom doesn't extend to exerting control over other people. Withholding a service offered to the public is a kind of control (as is getting between doctors and their patients in making healthcare decisions).

The story is that yesterday (the day before? I dunno, bad with time and don't feel like looking it up) \. reported that Chrome required TSYNC going forward. That was not true, thus, this story correcting that stance.

Look, someone compares market wants to religion. Again. Because they can't fathom that people decide to buy things with reason and knowledge behind their choices.

No. It *has* to be the Cult of Apple, nothing else explains why someone makes a different choice from you.

The funny thing is, you say we're the religious ones. Your faith fails to work as you want and predict the reality you experience, so we're the cultists. Its us who are irrational, not you who say things should be different from how things are.

Good luck with that.

Uhh, no. Nope. Not certain at all. That a local phenomenon may have happened that is described as coming back from the dead -- something easily possible for a wide range of reasons -- does not provide evidence that magic teleportation halfway around the world is equally possible or likely. Apples to dark matter, that comparison is.

Says who? Where is the evidence of the native americans having some kind of civilization collapse around 200 AD with absolutely nothing left behind that even vaguely represents the like of a Judeo-Christian god showing up and saying Hi?

I'm not an expert on Native American civilizations, but I'm not a layman either, and I've studied several through various ages and I've never seen anything at all like a remnant of Jesus hopping over and being like yo.

Your claim is incredible, you need incredible things to back it.

I find the criticism far from weak.

It rings very, very true as forgery, to me.

A prophet speaking in anything but his own voice makes a lie of his words.

No. But you haven't even kind of gotten past the first items yet, well.

What?

QTF = Quote for Truth.

I'm saying he's right. He said truth. (To be fair, I didn't quote, but its a thread so there's no point)

I'd mod him up, but can't, because I have no mod points, so the least I can do is add my higher karmic voice to the anonymous voice in hopes it gets more views from those who do have points.

Jeez, you'd think recognizing Anonymous Cowards being right and sensible instead of blathering idiots would be worth something. Then a blathering idiot responds to ruin it all.

Who runs on 4% margins that has any choice at all in it? There's nothing more moral or good business about razor thin margins. If you run at single digit margins you have absolutely no ability to invest in development.

Yes, they could still make more profit then anyone else -- because everyone else is putting out crap that isn't profitable, sustainable or with the economics of scale factoring into production.

That last bit is important. Samsung can match it, but they do so by making many products and they're suffering a lot lately on making money via that strategy. They're keeping share, absolutely, but making money is waning.

Apple margins are high relative to its bottom-feeding competitors partly because they are leveraging scale. They make very big deals over long terms, invest in suppliers and buy out supplies for years (Yes, at a premium rate, someone's going to mention the sapphire plant that went bust: they signed onto a deal they couldn't execute and you blame Apple? Please.)

As to the comment on taxes, I don't know what it means but it makes me think you don't know how taxes work.

QFT.

I don't have mod points but that'e exactly what I was gonna say, so.

There's too much to count.

I have some questions if historical Jesus existed, but the idea that he popped over to North America is absurd. There's evidence that there were Jews in the particular areas where Jesus was at the time of his possible story, and maybe one had ideas and gave rise to things-- son of god or not, there was perhaps a Jewish Rabbi who splintered his faith into a new one. If he preached to the Native Americans, he did a pretty shitty job of it, and the whole thing is absurd.

I have some questions if the Gospels were written by people at the time of historical Jesus, or were handed down through vocal tradition and changed with passage, but the idea that some guy thousands of years later wrote a book in Elizabethan English is absurd on its face. Either the tablets he found were in a proper language spoken by Jesus-- aramaic, for instance, or perhaps Navajo because if he was preaching to native americans he surely spoke their language-- or they were in the modern language by some grace of God, but the fact that they matched the otherwise out-dated dialect of Elizabethan English rings the fraud-cault bell quite strongly. The only reason to put the Book of Mormon in those terms is to lend it legitimacy so it sounds like the common-at-the-time translation of bible, but that's fundamentally deceptive.

The list goes on.

I'm not confusing them at all.

I am friends with people who I deeply disagree with over religion and beliefs.

I don't smile in their faces and curse them behind their back: to their faces I say what I believe, and we argue over it from time to time. We agree to disagree, often, but at least we respect our individual beliefs, and we can recognize that there is a great deal more we agree on.

My Grandfather was a devout Christian, and fairly conservative: he loved me until the day he died, and I know every day he prayed I'd hear God's grace. We would never see eye to eye on this, yet his belief was not hatred, it wasn't rejection, it wasn't disavowal of my life and happiness. Yes, there was something between us like a wound that couldn't heal, and it never did heal, but it didn't stop him loving me, and it didn't stop me loving him, and it didn't mean he was mean, cruel or even rude to me or my boyfriend.

We argued about God, the world, goodness, evil, sin, grace, and we disagreed and were stronger for our arguments. My beliefs are stronger, clearer, more meaningful to me because of our disagreements.

I wish I could have convinced him to believe in a world that was just slightly different, but I couldn't -- but that doesn't mean he wouldn't have done, without hesitation or consideration, anything at all to help me if anything happened that I needed his help on.

It makes me sad now that he's passed, that I know the last time he prayed, he prayed for my soul, believing I was on a path away form God.

Yet, we agreed on so much more then we disagreed on. We agreed on the value of good works and what it meant to help people and leave the world better then we find it. He was proud of me for my accomplishments, my successes, and when I was sad he comforted me.

There isn't this wall between us and them: we are all far more alike, with far more concerns alike, then what separates us.

That's just one relationship, but its not the only one by far. I can be, have been, will be, friends with those who are strong in their faiths that diverge from my own. Its a choice. You can choose to make them the enemy, or you can choose to recognize your shared humanity. Choosing to be friends with them is how you can begin to show them that you are a human being just as they are, and not just some other.

The alternative is to demand recognition and deny their own humanity because it doesn't embrace you. Its your right, you don't have to be the better person, but the world would be a much better place if we all gave it a try first.

That doesn't mean you stop fighting for your rights, but that struggle doesn't have to make people who disagree into enemies -- even if they can't see themselves as anything else.

Change one mind, show one person there's such a thing as you, who is a real, thoughtful and good person, and you change the world a little bit.

Its not stupid at all.

I can coexist quite well with Catholics who think my being gay is a sin; we can do good works together, have lunch, be friends. I can coexist quite well with Seventh Day Adventists who think alcohol is sinful, too. We can all be friends. Heck, I can coexist with people who have a religion I think is patently absurd (I'm looking at you, Mormons), because when it comes down to it -- everyone has beliefs, and things they think are right and wrong. As long as it goes no farther then their skin, we can all be friends.

Tolerance doesn't mean you beat someone until they agree with you, its that you recognize peoples differences and don't try to force them to change. Now, where a minority of Catholics and I part ways and will have problems being friends is at the point where those Catholics try to enshrine their beliefs into law.

It has nothing really to do with my sin being a choice at all (for the record, it obviously isn't), but at the line between beliefs and mandates.

Hate the sin all you like, I don't care. Teach that the sin is against God's given path all you like, I don't care. If that's what you believe, all power to you to believe whatever it is. I'll argue the other side and we'll see who is more convincing. Try to mandate that the State give you special rights that I don't have, there I start caring. Try to argue for violence or discrimination based on your beliefs, there I care a lot.

Its true that cancer is an almost inevitable consequence of simply living, and the longer you live the more likely you'll have it -- but many cancers are treatable, depending on the particulars of the strain. You think these people aren't prepared to pay top dollar for the best treatments when/if the time comes that their longevity has a consequence?

Again: That's one element of many. The design patent is not infringed on by having one element similar/the same.

Ugh. I'm so tired of this ignorance.

The "rounded corners" were not a utility patent -- it was a design patent, and only one element of it. Those are completely different things. Obviousness has nothing to do with design patents. Design patents are not solely based on a single trait, but a number of traits that are not essential to the function of a thing which, taken together, represent a particular design.

Obviousness is one of the reasons you reject a utility patent, as utility patents are about functionality. Design patents are NOT -- they cover only those parts of the design that are not functional, and only when taken as a whole with all the particular elements (not just rounded corners, but certain ratios, with certain colors, placement of logo, number of buttons, packaging, and so on and so forth) and are meant to protect knock-offs that confuse consumers (as opposed to utility patents which are meant to give temporary monopolies in return for releasing technology to the public).

That said, patents get rejected for obviousness all the time. They just don't make slashdot. This one is so obvious anyone who has ever taken Econ 101 should have considered it obvious so it takes very little in the way of domain knowledge to figure out its obvious -- some other obvious things are maybe obvious to us techies but harder for patent examiners to figure out, especially in the murky world of business method patents (which are all crazy).

No, I mean the customers who are party to the suit -- Apple's customers. Yes, there was other channels they could have gotten music, but the catalogs were not exhaustive and were just as locked down as anything Apple ever did.

ITMS wasn't the first to try to do legal online music, I'm not arguing that. They did get all the paranoid labels on board and made it easy, and at the time that was a big deal. I remember I *could* buy music online at the time, but it was mostly a pain in the butt from most sources -- it was no real competition to the illegal napster route. Then ITMS made things easy and had everything I wanted, so I started using it to buy my music online.

Had they not made the DRM deals, ITMS would never had much of a selection and that would have harmed me as a consumer.

That's awfully weird considering Apple dropped DRM from its music store before Amazon opened their music store.

Your memory and reality are having a somewhat awkward dissonance.