This guy seems to have no moral standards whatsoever (Taken from his software website http://www.chiaramail.com/ ):

Besides Apple no one cares about consistency on the Desktop anymore. Have you looked at Microsoft apps lately ? Visual Studio looks different then the rest, Office looks different from the rest, Outlook looks different from the rest of Office, Media player looks different from the rest, Home Server UI looks different from the rest and I could go on and on.

In the like 14 years of Swing existence there have only been 3 themes in the JRE: Metal, Ocean and Nimbus. And metal is selected by default. Java never sets one of the newer themes by itself. So basically the default theme hasn't changed.

So there are people who make crappy programs in Java. How exactly is that different from other languages ?

A few years before pure JDBC drivers were available ? That was when, 2000 or something ? Since that problem is long solved I don't really see how thats relevant today.

Apple does the Java implementation by their selves, not Sun / Oracle and yes, it shows. If Sun had done the Mac OS X implementation for Java it would probably be better.

According to the Wikipedia a standard is (I assume we are talking about a technical standard, this is Slashdot after all...):

Which in the case of Flash (SWF) would be available here: http://www.openscreenproject.org/about/faq.html . So I think we can safely say SWF is a standard.

Open source != Democracy. In the end only Linus Torvalds decides what gets merged into 2.6. If you don't like Adobe's reference implementation for SWF, use something like Gnash.

Seriously, what kind of a comparison is that ? Those formats are long dead.

If the appstore does not deliver content according to you, then what does it do ?

The people who bought an IPhone bought it because its shinny not because they thought it would endorse openness. People don't care about the ugly side if they can't see it. Or did you think all the pigs at the McDonald's farm get petted every day ?

After surfing around a bit on the source site I can't find any compelling reasons why I should use a giant unwieldy printable 2D Barcode instead of a smartcard ? A smartcard reader costs 25 bucks now a days so that cant be much of an obstacle.

After I started using NX ( http://freenx.berlios.de/ and http://nomachine.com/ ) I never looked back at VNC. NX provides near local speeds for remote X11 desktops.

Only geographically closer to home. Switzerland isn't part of the EU, they just happen to be surrounded by it.

And just as with Opera the total lack of SPNEGO support will ensure a whooping 0% adaption rate in the corporate environment. See http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=28282

If you ask people if they are willing to pay more for quality 90% will answer yes. However when the moment supreme is there to purchase for example a new notebook 80% will go for the cheapest and don't care about long term stuff like quality. I think there is a good chance this survey works the same; People SAY they are not influenced by reviews because 'Hey, I'm an original, I don't let anybody influence me'.

Ah come on, I don't mean to flame but:

Firefly anyone ? Im a Startrek fan all the way, I even got a cut away poster of the enterprise D in my bedroom. But TNG was pretty shallow compared to Firefly. Yet Firefly got canceld and TNG ran for 7 seasons. Why ? Because of politics, Firefly never got a fair chance. Since when was quality a guarantee for succes in this world ?

Are you serious with "Pirating was the main reason for bnetd" ? Have you got any idea how crappy the official bnet was back in those days ? 9 out of 10 times I couldn't even connect to the official bnet because it was down or unreachable. An yes, my time was (literally) money since I was on dialup.

Where's the Kirk vs Picard option?