Yes, you can buy Arduino boards from any number of manufacturers and the software is open source. What this changes is whether Arduino SRL is going to be a worthwhile source of any of that.

What you say is true, however I feel it sidesteps the point that Arduino SRL's actions are damaging to the brand. They're flushing their own investment by attempting to take control of something that, as you've pointed out, is far beyond their reigns. If I were a distributor of Arduino SRL's products, and had read up on the story, what would I think of continuing to distribute their products?

The Arduino ecosystem relied on the strong contributions from everyone involved to reach the heights that it has. This kind of action by one of the corporations involved is just a way of telling us all that Arduino is no longer worth the trouble. Hobbyists are losing one of the coolest products available because a board producer doesn't understand the value of the software that runs the board. Arduino is no longer worth the time and money in that scenario.

That model of Macintosh was a Road Apple. It had specifications that put it in line with Macintosh models that cost half as much. It was notoriously bad for what it cost, what was in it, and how it held up in real world usage. In 1998, Apple released a Macintosh model for 1,299.99 called the "iMac" that performed better than the $7,500 20th Anniversary Macintosh.

It had nothing to do with the TV tuner. That Mac was junk.

Given everything that I have seen, in life and in computer science...

No. It might even be the exact opposite of the least astonishing thing.

Which is why I hang back and pay attention at intersections. On the 'correct' side of the road, the guy would merge into me in the situation You describe. I am saving my life.

Riding toward them gives me the only chance I have to avoid that swerve. Thanks for suggesting I should get fucked without seeing It coming!

Riding a bicycle while making an honest attempt to follow the rules of the road is by far one of the most frightening experiences, period.
Car drivers will often merge into the bicycle lane to make a right turn. Some of the bicycle lines are dashed to show that this is acceptable, because it's technically the legal way things are supposed to be done. For the bicyclist however, this means that you're constantly at risk of being slammed into by car drivers who are doing what they're supposed to do and the only thing you can do about it is refuse to follow the rules. You don't always hear the car coming up behind you, especially if the streets are busy and traffic is getting hectic.
I've found that the safest way to ride is almost always by doing the OPPOSITE of what you're legally obligated to do. Ride against traffic in the bike lane, making it so you are face to face with the people who are most at risk of hitting you. Make eye contact with drivers as you approach. This also helps with people who are parked and opening their doors. People are more likely to recognize you are there because they have a face coming at them, which the human brain is very adept at spotting. I hang back at intersections and wait until it's actually safe to proceed because I can't trust drivers to accept that a bicyclist has any right-of-way. Too many near misses when doing things the "right" way. The rate of close calls that I've experienced has been drastically reduced since I stopped trying to "share the road".

I point out GNOME because I actually think that GNOME 3 had some value to it. I was pleasantly surprised by some of the changes and genuinely felt they had made some improvements despite the complaints made about it. Unfortunately, it's a lot like the Windows 8 situation, where the honest improvements are drowned out by the silly bullshit. I think that SystemD is having a very similar predicament with the actual improvements being lost in the surrounding wasteland. We're not going to see an end to the tirade against SystemD unless we come out of this change with a system that's honestly better and has honestly solved the problems it's expected to solve.
I get this feeling from the comment I replied to that you expect SystemD to do something to solve driver issues. That's a great example of why I'm not fond of SystemD, the people who support it apparently think it's going to fix all these issues that it shouldn't actually have anything to do with. You're not going to fix drivers by rewriting the userland init system.

If you invested half the energy you folks use for whining about systemd into actually making an alternative available you might actually get something done.
The flaw in this statement is the fact that systemd is replacing alternatives in such a way that it breaks everything if you try to use an alternative. It makes it so being able to use the same alternatives that have existed since long before systemd came about, is no longer an option. It removes the alternatives. Every major piece of software for Linux that decides to become dependent on systemd removes the ability to consider alternatives.
What I see is projects like GNOME, with a growing dependence on SystemD, becoming unsuitable alternatives because they no longer support alternatives. I see this idea that other systems should be expected to conform to systemd architecture if they want to continue to benefit from said software.
I personally prefer to use cross-platform software. I prefer software that runs about the same regardless of the platform I'm using it on, and I prefer to have the option to use any supported platform to run the software. Now I'm afraid that software I've come to rely on is going to take that possibility away. I'm afraid that I won't be able to use my preferred cross-platform applications on OS X and Windows in the future because they gained some strange dependence on SystemD.
If we reach a point where a full featured Linux desktop cannot be run without SystemD, the entire idea of working on alternatives becomes moot.

Richard Stallman needs to be brought up to spec on what computers are capable of. He's still living in a world where he doesn't experience even a small fraction of what technology has allowed. If we don't update his firmware soon, he's likely to become completely irrelevant within the decade. Unfortunately, I'm beginning to feel that decade may have already passed.

VMware Server was free, but I abandoned it for VirtualBox when they switched to a web-based interface that simply refused to function on my machine.
VMware Player must have added the creation of virtual machines because of VirtualBox taking a bite out of their pie. But I haven't seen any reason to switch back to it, especially given that it has more limited host operating system support.
I'm sitting here in awe that they turned VMware Player into a paid option. Wow. They really did not have a clue how to respond to VirtualBox.

Perhaps not right this moment, but I think the consumer will want it soon. You can do reasonable stereo viewing on almost any smartphone by using a Google Cardboard type setup. A few have their own manufactured enclosures for it, like the Galaxy Note4 with GearVR or the iPhone4 with the Hasbro My3D. The content for them is a little sparse, but the entire concept is still in infancy. Lots of us grew up with the ViewMaster and I don't think it's going to be long before we start enjoying a true advancement of that age-old technology. The wild west had stereoscopic viewers using the same optical trick, we have programmable screens being mounted into boxes that strap to your head.

I'm excited.

I already told you to never show me this again. Fuck beta?

It's using the same technique that they used on the early consoles. It's a really nasty hack and if you were running that kind of workload, you'd damn well better know the particulars of why it sucked then and is now completely ridiculous. We've had 64bit options available for decades and it's truly sad that a workload of that size would be forced to run under paging hacks to access that much RAM.