Would you prefer the Red Guard as an easy way to make the point?

Of note is that you didn't actually have a meaningful answer.

I hope you do pay due respect to the fallen Waffen SS troops.

I find that worship is a perfectly accurate word to describe the "support the troops" cult, for example. So no.

A patent promise doesn't specifically forbid certain behaviors - it merely gives a legal guarantee that the patent holder will not sue if certain conditions are met. In the absence of such a promise, the patent holder can sue in more cases. I just don't see how no promise can be better than an explicit promise, no matter how meager. So long as you know (or can reasonably assume) that someone holds a patent, it is a threat regardless of the license, unless it contains its own patent promise.

The problem is that it still ended up with an overbearing dominant beast, just a different one - Chrome (or rather WebKit/Blink, but Chrome is the lion's share of that). The good part is that we're still in the stage where stagnation is not a thing yet. The bad part is that it could change literally overnight.

I don't know who the 'real right wingers' are, but I suspect it's a specimen of the same sort as the True Scotsman. What I know is that the people whom most everybody, including themselves, and who number in the millions, worship the military and the police.

The room of litigation is always there, obviously. But how can the language be worse than the default, unless it somehow explicitly overrides and rescinds some provisions of the original license under which the code is released?

If true, the next obvious question: can the same be done to GPL(v2)?

Bruce, to clarify: are you saying that, since the code in question is released under the MIT license, which is OSI approved, there is an implicit patent grant there that renders the separate explicit one basically redundant, and this whole thing is a non-story?

Given that the code in question is released under MIT license (which is considered open source by everyone, including officially by OSI), and the patent promise is on top of that, and only grants you additional rights on top of the license grants, aren't you basically saying that using an open source license alone is not sufficient, then? And that most software released under pretty much any open source license (including GPLv2) does not "comply with standard open source terms"? I mean, most of them don't come with any kind of patent promise at all, nor will anyone guarantee that there aren't any patents applicable to them.

You assume that someone, somewhere, isn't holding a patent that Python infringes upon. That's a pretty big assumption, given the sheer number of software patents issued.

That's kind of one of the obvious things that people are missing about all this... a patent promise, even a meager one, is better than no promise at all, which is what you get with most software these days.

If there's one thing that you don't need to worry about taking the hatchet from the right wingers, it's the NSA (and the military-industrial-police state complex in general).

It is plenty fast for a tablet.

The price?

Why should Apple be apolitical? Apple, as any other privately held company, should be what its owners - i.e. its voting shareholders - want it to be. Shareholders express such desires by voting for the board, and the board places a guy in charge who is the spokesperson for the company. If the guy in charge voices a particular opinion in his role as a CEO, then he's speaking for the company, and ultimately, for the shareholders. Do you expect the shareholders to be utterly apolitical?

Furthermore, the political view that is voiced is not even necessarily matched by the shareholders, but they can expect the company to voice it for the sake of PR. Given the stereotypical Apple customer, this seems like a smart strategy. Then there are employees, who do expect a some degree of political alignment from the companies they work for - and, again, given the overall IT culture in US, and especially in the Silicon Valley, being firmly pro-gay-rights provides Apple with a good public image from hiring perspective.

If you don't like it, why, go ahead and voice your displeasure by selling your AAPL stock. If enough people will do it, the company will notice. You have the shares, right? If not, then why are you even bitching about this in the first place?

It's a positive message insofar as it works toward reducing discrimination. Or at least most of Apple's customers will see it that way, which is what matters. And "slandering" is, of course, just your subjective politicized twist.

Not at all. This is a crucial difference. Note that you can still seek redress against corporations if you want (e.g. by organizing boycotts and such), but it's a different ballpark if you want to seek such redress via courts and other means provided by the state - which meansusing state power to achieve redress. So, again, this isn't state using its power to make it more difficult - it's state withdrawing its power to make it more difficult (because otherwise that power is used to make it easier).

At no point did I say that it's okay. It's a bad law, and I think that state power should be used to combat discrimination like that. I just want us to be perfectly clear about what exactly we're doing here - which is using the power of the state to force people to do a certain thing, because the social value of that thing is higher than the negative of infringing on their freedom (of speech and association). I also want to make clear the difference between private discrimination (limited by the fundamental protections the law provides to everyone), and discrimination by the state (which basically has no limits as to how far it can go).