I'm not going to give you a yes or no, because I don't have to. This is Slashdot, not a grand jury. And, because the answer is more nuanced.

Although Steve is gone, Apple is continuing everything that both Richard and I didn't like about their business. So, Steve's malign influence on people's computing continues unabated.

Like I said, I could have written it better than Richard, because Richard has problems with empathy. Had I written it, it would have been more graceful.

Steve also had no shortage of head problems. What an idiot for not retiring when he was first diagnosed - but I guess the public Steve Jobs was the only Steve Jobs there was, and he couldn't stop. Besides his foolish continuance of work, an eating disorder contributed to his demise. He did end up becoming the richest guy in the graveyard.

I was also offended by the New Yorker cover, and I think Richard was too.

Nobody should be surprised that there was much that is negative about Steve. I do oppose Apple's way of business, which is high on DRM and control of the user. Were I writing the same piece, I think I could have said it better than Richard.

I think the saddest part is that Dennis Ritchie, who really invented the stuff of our modern world, died around the same time and in comparison to Steve, was unlamented.

Of course I worked with Steve for 12 years, and despite his reputation he was always nice to me - even the time I put him on the spot about something in front of the entire Pixar staff.

So, I was offended by those comments, too.

I don't think adultery is directly illegal anywhere.

See Article 134 of the United States Military Code of Justice. Military officers are still tried and prosecuted for adultery - there have been cases in the last few years.

Whether you agree with him or not, I think that everyone can acknowledge that RMS has devoted his entire life to something that has done many people very much good.

So, (and this is not the first time) it never ceases to amaze me that the response of some contingent of the Slashdot audience is to dig through his blog and use the worst two comments you can find to smear dirt upon him. He's a libertarian, and yes, if you take Libertarainism to its logical extreme, you might indeed believe that anything that doesn't hurt someone else should be legal. Nobody is accusing him of performing these acts, only of believing that freedom really means all possible freedom.

Like RMS, I'm getting old, and travel a lot to do talks. If I fall ill or get hit by a car, I hope you turkeys never find out.

There seems to be a duty on "luxury" items or something. An inflatable camping mattress that would have been less than USD$30 was AUD$130, and other prices in the camping store were similarly crazy. If you're outfitting as a camper there, you can probably save by flying to the U.S. to buy your stuff.

It's embarrassing that the Apache foundation got involved in such an obvious act of vandalism.

I think so too.

We know that Google already has mature speech-to-text software, it's on every Android device (and lots of other places, I guess). It doesn't seem to me that they would have a problem catching up with the expert system provided by Siri or Wolfram Research.

The difference is Siri gives you the answer to your question if it can. Regular search gives you a list of web pages that may or may not have any relevance.

You're not keeping up. Go on google and type "UA 647". You will see the flight status, properly formatted, right at the top. There are a significant number of questions that are answered this way, and it will only increase.

Right. As you and the other two have reminded me, this should have been "The search engine companies can't put their ads in there without paying Apple". And you can imagine that any constraints and regulation that are put on Google will make their way to Apple eventually. Will this protect the users? Absolutely not. Nothing can protect Apple users, because the problem is protecting them from themselves.

Forget about leveraging the cloud, AI, all of the wonder of Siri that nobody else has (or some portion of myopic Apple users think nobody else has). Asking Siri something and search by typing a field in a bar are both... search. What looks different is that Siri can take advantage of the semantic web and similar things to read the result to you, and come close to actually understanding what it's doing. But text search can have all of that understanding too.

Somewhere behind Siri are search engines, and will remain search engines.

The only thing that's unique about Siri is that the search engine companies can't put their ads in there.

I operate a consulting firm and work with large companies and governments. I always ask for a bilateral NDA. That way, both parties are bound to the same terms, and both have to respect each others secrets. Having a company bound to respect my secrets seems a bit more fair. And no company puts onerous terms in an agreement that it has to honor. I think once a company had a little trouble with this, but I asked why and addressed the issue in the NDA text. Everyone else has treated it as routine.

It seems to be mostly contact, it really does look like a SIM to me. The little bump in the middle might be a discrete component. The die is probably the middle of the sandwich, not visible in the photo.

We're going to need a vacumm pick-up tool to put these in.

Watch out for those lead car radiators.

You haven't established that they have to be soil bacteria. There's probably no harm in introducing antigens of things that can't eat you until you're dead. But does that mean that exposure to antigens of infectious soil bacteria like listeria won't do?

Also, I am dubious that our society is keeping its kids and their food so clean and so completely avoiding raw vegetables, which are reservoirs of soil bacteria, that children aren't being exposed to them once they can handle solid food.