Probably the first that was used in the movie that was fileshared more often than bought ^^ Which probably would be a commercial film, thus CGI -.- Still doesn't make stop motion outdated! *shake fist*

...and it looks a lot better than even modern 3D CGI. So no real irony - stop motion obviously is not obsolete, just a hell of a lot more expensive to make than CGI, limiting it to shorts. Still, not outdated.

Most people don't stand a chance in politics when they don't have some connections. Those they get with social skills.

What's that strangeness, there are multiple interviews? Besides that, yes, some social skills might be helpful, but don't people usually learn those automatically in a corporate environment? About when they notice they won't get what they need for their project, that they themselves won't get anywhere without getting into office politics and generally socializing with other people.
Of course, they probably won't quite acquire the sales-person level of communicative skills on their own.

Oh noes, not 'ls' too! Is nothing sacred anymore.. :(

Not to mention Skype's interest in offering their services where ever it makes good business sense to do so, i.e. China. And they do, it is not blocked by the Great Firewall. That alone strongly suggests there are ways to controlling Skype that go beyond just blocking it.

It's even worse. Supporting Linux is expensive, there are a bunch of distributions with fundamental differences, not to mention desktop managers and audio systems . Supporting them all is.. hard, way too hard for most purposes.

Really, Windows gamers would accept having to reboot their system to play a game? I know I wouldn't, but then, I'm not them.

When their stats say you people are like 0.001% of total users, and responsible for like 0.000001% of the revenue, can you seriously blame them for not being overly eager to expose themselves to the support nightmare that is Linux?
Of course, opening their protocol would allow them to have the Linux crowd support itself, but what's the gain?

I'm not sure that's going to work out very well, you will still need to authenticate yourself to the network and an easily reachable "this fucker's spamming me" button will keep those people at bay.
Unless of course there are holes in that authentication mechanism...

If its protocol's secrecy really is the only thing securing their revenue stream, they probably deserve to go under. It doesn't seem very likely though.
a) There's a whole industry of Skype related hardware and a little also for the "Extras" (little pieces of software extending the Skype client, like games and collaboration applications). When a network's revenue stream and therefore existence is based on just its secrecy, it doesn't seem likely so many people will invest there.
b) Skype itself offers additional features of their network for paying customers. Those features are bound not to their protocol's secrecy, but to the infrastructure they have build over quite some years. They're not easily duplicated.

Skype is a business tool to many. Somehow crippling their MacOS client doesn't seem like a smart move then, given how many Macs are used in offices. But maybe that's just my impression and their stats say the MacOS part of their network is insignificant compared to the cost of maintaining the MacOS client. In which case, who could blame them for concentrating on something more worthwhile? It wouldn't even be all bad, as that could legalize reverse engineering for interoperability.

Not really disagreeing with your point, but the term "network" does not necessarily mean it's something physical. With its huge amount of (locked in) users, many of which depend on its services, Skype is a network. One build on another one, but in itself a defined structure.

Well, I'd call it convenience instead of opinion. If you find a proof that works when 1 isn't prime, would you really start over to find a proof that works regardless, or would you just publish and call it a day? Or vice versa.
I don't know if it's possible that something that can be proven one way can't be proven the other way, but I'm sure there's a proof for that.

Don't get me wrong, copyright infringement is unlawful, and rightly so (within reason). But claiming that copying a piece of software impedes some sort of cost to the maker of that software is hard to argue. Even when everybody pirates, the problem would be elsewhere. E.g. the set price of the software, its availability, the company's public image, etc. So even then, it would come down to a miscalculation by the company's number crunchers.
Saying people pirate merely out of spite or because they lack any feeling of morality is too simple, imho.