In what way GNUstep + GCC (+ presumably Linux) facilitate "systems [lock]down and ... prevent after-market modifications" more than "Android-esque / Java"?

Some of the biggest NeXT clients were precisely from the military, intelligence, banking, financial services and science communities. And they chose NeXT precisely because of Objective-C and NeXTStep.

Apple don't have to do squat to prevent iPad apps form being "recycled" on a Sony gadget - there are more than enough differences that cannot easily be compensated between this Sony platform and iOS for this to even be a possibility. For example Sony will be using Cairo instead of Apple's Quartz, so any drawing code in an app will have to be rewritten. Also GNUstep does not implement UIKit at all. It doesn't even mimic AppKit all that well. And reverse engineering and achieving parity with either framework is a gargantuan task. So any UI code in an app will also need to be rewritten, or at least significantly modified, at which point you might as well rewrite the whole application in an entirely different language/framework.

Each share of Apple stock is worth one N-th (where N is the total number of shares, which for Apple is about 900 million) of the company's book value. If Apple were to shut down tomorrow you'll get some sum of money without having to pass your shares to anybody.

Contrary to the obviously less than clued in article says, it's all Linux, be it Android, Chrome or WebOS.

But is it? When you have three completely distinct ways of writing applications, would you still count them as one OS simply because they have the same kernel? Would you be running a glorified browser, like ChromeOS, on a SuperDome Supercomputer?

If the PR team is planning to "manage the rumors", I'm hesitant to believe that the rumor is accurate. After all, if HP was really killing the Slate, why wouldn't they want word out as soon as possible, or why would they care about managing what's said?

Actually, I'm reading this exactly the opposite way - if HP were not killing the Slate a simple response would be sufficient, something like - "Of course no. That rumor is ludicrous. We are still shipping the Slate in the already announced timeframe."

On the other hand, if they are "killing" the Slate and, say, replacing it with the same hardware but running WebOS, they probably need time to assess how much time will that take, or whatever, so they can come out and say - "We are killing the current Slate device if favor of releasing so-and-so in six months."

I may, too, be reading it wrongly, though. Probably it's best if we don't assume either way until HP comment on the matter or release the device.

*takes a deep breath* FOR THE UMPTEENTH TIME, NOBODY IS ARGUING APPLE DIDN'T KNOW HIS IDENTITY! *and exhale* The point Doches is making, and completely agree with, is that we should not splatter his name and face all over teh intertubes and laugh at his expense. The guy has it quite hard as is and he can do without out visceral gloating.

Or any individual one of their employees, who have access to said servers. And when it comes to financial information, my position is no on both counts. I sure hope most people share my position.

Yeah, some guy in Australia, I believe, got sentenced to jail for pedophilia because he had pornographic pictures of cartoon characters, but it's OK for government employed perverts to be ogling our kids in the name of "safety". Top grade job UK government, fucking A+.

OK, let me break down fuzzyfuzzyfungus' argument into simple sentences for you, because you seem unable to wrap your mind around it.

-- Government chooses a proprietary format
-- Everybody who is part of "the market" inevitably has to interact with the government and their documentation.
-- The software of the company owning said format, regardless of its merits, is the only one that can be used to comunicate with the government.
-- "The market" can go fuck itself selecting the best product.

-- Government chooses an open, unencumbered with patents format
-- Everybody who is part of "the market" inevitably has to interact with the government and their documentation.
-- Anyone can write software that can be used to comunicate with the government.
-- "The market" can freely choose whichever products they fancy.

And you seem to be absolutely right, only evil socialist governments and the pinko commies who've elected them seem to understand these two simple concepts. Hoorah for libertarianism.

At the very least Apple, and I'd presume Microsoft too, although I don't really know (or care), does not require bank or tax information if you don't plan on selling your app. The developer account registration does not ask you for that information and once you've got your developer credentials, you already have an active contract with the iTunes App store for worldwide distribution of free apps. The developer in TFA claims that Palm asked him to provide PayPal seller credentials (or whatever you call them), even though his only two apps are free.

On the other hand, you have to consider the fact that the weapons that have been used in the past in place of this "sound cannon" for crowd control - rubber bullets and wooden batons, for example - are significantly more likely to cause bodily harm, including permanent damage and "fatal aneurisms". And they are significantly harder to escape.

I'd say crippled is too strong of a word here. Form the libdispatch project main page, linked in the blurb above:

GCD is not tied to the kernel and a parallel programing library (like OpenMP) won't suffice, because none of the ones that I've seen so far is as easy to use as GCD backed blocks.

GCD is pretty clean and, since both libdispatch and llvm are open source (and under BSD-like licenses), it and the code written against it are infinitely portable.

No it doesn't. Since the average executable on linux is static code linked to dynamic libraries made up of static code, you get your "selector uniquing" at compile time - you don't get a method selector description, instead you get a pre-calculated and already unique address of the method or function.

It is a tradeoff. You get to worry about the performance of shared library selector uniquing, but you get all the benefits of dynamic language and runtime. In practice such inefficiencies matter most in cases where you are very constrained for resources - e.g. on a phone, as hinted in TFA. I doubt in the context of the rest of the performance and efficiency improvements in Snow Leopard and on a reasonably modern computer, the 1/10 of a second or the few megabytes of memory saved matter all that much.