I think a lot of people are missing the point - nobody will remember steve jobs for Mac OSX.

They will remember him for the ipod, macbook air, mac mini, ipad series etc.

Whatever your views on their corporate behaviour, you have to admit it: mac laptops are shiny! ;)

None of this makes him a better or worse person, but all the talk about Apple's legal disputes and software derived from UNIX is missing the point. OSX is great to use, in a dull sort of way, but I much prefer debian. However, I have seen nothing as good for its size as a mac mini - even my 2008 model is better than non-apple models.

There is this http://www.math.ucla.edu/~jimc/koolu/

There is a fundamental misunderstanding here.

Corporate BB users generally run their own servers, which are encrypted end-to-end and as far as I know are "secure", or at least not directly compromised by RIM.
Consumer blackberries, however, rely on RIM for their servers and it is here that governments may spy on communication.

Governments have treated encryption like a WMD since enigma, and if they cannot access data simply make it illegal to either import, export or run encryption http://www.wassenaar.org/.

This makes me want to find a new continent and set up a country where the citizens are free ... oh wait...

Can you imagine the equivalent chat face to face, perhaps in a bar?

Troll: "Your mother is a slut!!"
Nerd: "I agree she is rather free with her morals, but what makes you think so?"
Troll: "more aggressively because I like ****ing her" & punches...
Nerd: "mphmph" (mouth blocked by fist)

In the real world, we pay big men in black clothing to help such "trolls" leave licensed premises.

Perhaps its just because I mostly associate with gamers, but really, +b http://www.quakenet.org/faq/faq.php?c=52&f=62#62 was invented for trolls.

well said - oh for some mod points.

With his history, as its publicly reported, if he wasn't seeing an oncologist even if only to rule out cancer it would be surprising. This should be expected.

Of course, he could have been going to see a friend there or any one of a thousand things... cancer patients often get to meet each other at clinics and become friends.

I hope he gets well soon, in any case.

"this is obvious."

Since I put debian 6 on her laptop - the frequency of ubuntu updates annoyed her, and she refused to install them (windows failed her long ago - even without viruses the spyware slowed it to a crawl) - she thinks it matters a lot. And who am I to argue...?

I am slightly amused by all the insistence on its geek credentials. For the above installation I put the installation CD in and essentially pressed return until a working desktop came up. I admit I had to type 2 user names and passwords, but I didn't find it too onerous. For my other machines I might do other things - but that is me complicating matters and nothing inherently to do with debian. It seems all my hardware is so old now, it just works out of the box.

{Kindly refrain from posting "j00r m0m" jokes... heard them all before... really. Not a challenge, either.}

Traitorware is something that you pay for thinking that it has a specified purpose (e.g. printing) - but it betrays you.

Spyware is something that you didn't have any knowledge of (e.g. 3rd-party cookies on websites)

I agree that the end outcome isn't so different, but maybe how you get there is important sometimes?