Now, years after the iPad was announced and launched...

Considering the iPad was announced Jan 27, 2010, your statement is only barely true. (If that, because it is not a whole number of years since it was launched.)

It's not like Proview Technology waited a few years to file suit; less than a year went by during that time. And presumably the company was trying to negotiate during that time.

It can be. That is why cloning a library under an incompatible license typically requires an expensive "clean room" engineering process

"Requires" is a strong word. A well-documented clean room process provides a strong argument for why something isn't copied if they wound up in court, as well as a way for an organization and the people in it to be sure that they aren't inadvertently (or even, uh, vertently) copying. Thus it can make sense to do.

But there's no reason it's necessary.

While I like the sentiment, and I think I've expressed it too in the past, I think it smells like the potential for a lot of unintended consequences. For instance, imagine that some folks want to add some provision to the law. It'd probably be way easier to do that on the back of a vote to renew (since congress "has to" act anyway) then it would be to go through the whole legislative process to amend.

It also seems like it'd lead to a lot more see-sawing of laws: party A is in control and passes some legislation, party B takes over and lets it lapse, party A takes over and passes it again, etc.

Right, because no organization would give their employees user access to a machine but not root.

High rise building? What the hell else should a building manager be using that gigantic, flat roof for? (Other than leasing space to a cell-phone antenna, of course) You don't have direct control over this, so I suggest looking for it as a feature the next time you move, if it's that important to you.

And how's that roof which is, say, 10 times the size of a house's roof, going to supply power for hundreds of times as many people?

Sure, some costs are saved (e.g. heating and, probably to a lesser extent, cooling) by the higher density, but you're also crazy if you think that the 'available power:used power' ratio is comparable between apt buildings more than a few stories and residential homes.

(I'm not saying that there shouldn't be solar cells on the roofs of apts, at least in lieu of a nice garden or something like that which you occasionally see, but I seriously doubt you'd be able to create a net-zero, tall apt building unless it's filled with people who are completely dedicated to very very low consumption.)

Maybe it's finally been implemented properly in 7

It was implemented mostly properly (see other posts in this thread for a couple caveats) in Vista, which was the first version that had it at all.

Previous versions have had things which function sometimes in some cases a little bit like symbolic links, but Vista was the first version which had anything that MS actually called symbolic links. It's also the first version with mklink.

The Gentoo wiki used to be very very very good, until it died a couple of years ago - and it never regained it's glory

Aw, that's too bad. I didn't know that it went away; I haven't used Linux at home for a few years. I've said a few times in "what distro should I use" conversations that if you have a few rare qualities (the time and will to tinker, some knowledge about computers even if it's not about Linux specifically, and aren't afraid to play around and try things), Gentoo is actually a decent choice to even start off with because the docs are soooo good. I'm disappointed that it sounds like this may no longer be the case.

Symlinks and hard links to files are allowed for standard users. Symlinks to directories are not.

Not under my setup, and I am not aware of anything that would have changed it from the default setup. I get a permissions error even for file symbolic links, even as a non-elevated administrator let alone a standard user (I tried both).

Uh, what? Symlinks are implicitly traversed when you open them, just like they are in *nix.

Oddly, Explorer won't do everything NTFS allows. For example, Explorer doesn't let you rename a folder with a leading dot.

Files too, not just folders.

In fact, there are sort of three levels: what Explorer allows (e.g. not naming a file ".gitignore"), what the Win32 API allows (e.g. not having two files whose names differ only in case), and what NTFS itself supports and is accessible through, e.g., the Interix/SFU/SUA/whatever-it's-called-now subsystem, which is fully Posix-compliant AFAIK.