There is money to be made being part of the problem.

*Raises a glass*
Proudly contributing to losses due to IT failure since 1997.

Great, now in the future when robots and machines rule the earth, they can use this to harvest energy from all of us, just like the Matrix.

the most you could do was rack up (a debt of) credits for the door games

For once I am pleased with Apple's quirky business policies.

In addition to being a biohazard, enough smoking over time by many people seems to actually deposit a greassy residue on the inside of the computer parts, like the heat sinks, integrated circuits, fan blades. I used to be the IT administrator for an office of a dozen people, back when it was somehow allowed to smoke indoors in the office while you work. And the style was for everyone to smoke. As a non smoker I was a minority, and had to put up with working in that mess.

But for the computer parts, after about six months the parts looked as though someone had sprayed them with PAM cooking oil, and then dusted with ashes. All chunder stuck on fuzzy layer of dust bunnies, and "that" smell of 1000 cigarettes. We went through a lot of computers because of the lack of ability for the parts to cool themselves with the ambient air circulation inside the cases.

So my fendangled point was, it is not fair for Apple, or any computer company to have to honor warranty claims for computers that were subjected to the abuse of a smoker, as the hardware was subjected to environmental conditions that was not in any of the designed intended use. For example, if I put my computer through a dish washer, they would have the equal right to not honor my warranty claim, as I 'intentionally damaged' it in much the same way. I would like to see other companies start doing this too.. Buy a car? Did you smoke in it ? Oh, now it has no resale value, sorry.

I wonder when will someone just patent the procedure for patenting obvious concepts. How awesome would that be, could cash in on all of these types, and then we won't have to spend our time commenting on these silly patents [for existing] concepts.

How will the Codeplex foundation organize and align its [future] projects ? For example, in other foundation sites, over time there are typically several projects created by different groups, and while each is different, there is a good bit of overlap in the features and the main goals of the purpose of the project, and this can lead to confusion for people that would want to use the project, not sure which one is the better one to use.

I'm sure [the EC] could spend almost a year to decide to object to this too.

But doesn't the numerous back doors and severe drive by invokable kernel security flaws already allow arbitrary privileged execution.?

Usually the patent system is abused by those patent foundry companies turn out patents as their 'business model' to later troll up the real companies that do the innovation. It's good to finally see a story where a legitimate company that is trying to innovate a real product, might finally be able to use their patents to get a foot hold against what would otherwise be an impossible battle against a huge company.

Yea, that's the first thing I thought of too, very 1984.

It seems to be the trend for companies to throw the DMCA at anything any time something comes up that outside their original marketing vision or makes them look bad. There should be a top level category to track all these stories.

I guess we can post our comments over at /B/ then

Kind of funny how today there was that other announcement here about Microsoft sponsoring CodePlex foundation to help bridge the gap between commercial developers and open source projects, which kind of seems to be what they should have done a bit more here right.