Why on Earth nobody else had the guts to stand up against MS if prior art seems to be so easy to find?

No, MS Word prevents them that.

MPEG-LA has ius prima noctis?

If everybody needed only appliances, who could become a developer? Even Jobs had to have a hacker on his hands to succeed. Now he tries to keep them as far as possible. Passion and marketing can do only so much... What we are witnessing now is an inflation of trademark.

I use technology in order to hate it more properly. (Nam June Paik)

Me too. The "Games for Windows" tag should be the other way around anyway. And nothing else.

It seems that Google is in some kind of a hurry and tries to catch-up with Twitter and Facebook using Gmail (quite aggressively) as a leverage. It seems that they didn't ponder a lot about social consequences of their move.

*****Warning: Linux Troll***** If you are the resident "expert" then your family didn't have much choice. Just like my girlfriend didn't :)

Well, it has all the components that normal computer have, and behaves that way to - seems very computerish to me! Now all we have to do is to hack it.

I noticed that I take half a second to a second more to find the now iconless menus in Ubuntu 9.10. It looks like icons can become a visual markers to not actually look at them and decipher their meaning but just to memorize the general outlook of them, like when you read, you read the whole words, not just letter by letter.