USL vs. BSDi had absolutely nothing to do with Linux. That was a battle between USL (former Bell Labs people) and Berkeley over who owned UNIX. Linux wasn't based on any of that code (despite what SCO would later claim), so it wasn't involved. Yes, Linux wouldn't have existed if BSD was open and available at the time. Hell, it wouldn't have existed if Tannenbaum had been more open about MINIX. But that's like arguing that the USA wouldn't exist if (like Ben Franklin wanted), the British would have just allowed the colonies to have their own MPs.

You also pay $0 to Apple if you don't distribute your apps. You can download Xcode for free and install apps you write on your own phone for free. I've done that myself. You pay the $99 for the ability to distribute your app in the App Store. Yes, I know there are advantages to Android's openness, but for this particular example it isn't any different.

You do realize that people can find apps by searching, right? Yes, I wish there were better search tools as part of the app store, but other than popular games in the top 50, pretty much everything I purchased I discovered through searching -- I realized I wanted an app to do X, and then searched for some keywords to find it. There are plenty of very niche apps (dictionaries of ancient Greek and Latin, for example) in the app store. These may not be getting anyone rich, but I'm sure they break even and give the developers (probably hobbyists) some pocket money.

It's pretty much the same reason Alternate History is considered part of SF, even ones that don't depend on time travel or something like that to cause the difference. Traditionally, AH was written by SF authors, so it's part of SF.

I was thinking of using Coherent at the time too, but I was an undergrad and even it was too expensive for me :-)

My favorite moment in early Linux history was asking if X11 was going to be ported, and getting a personal message from Linus saying "maybe, but don't count on it". I still ended up installing Linux in fall of 1991 despite the lack of X.

If dozens of Japanese started coming up with alternative physical currencies that looked just like Yen, they certainly *would* confuse people. Similarly, if people start coming up with ByteCoin, BitBuck, CoinBit, etc, they certainly *would* cause confusion with BitCoin. The difference is while the Japanese government would take a dim view of the former and intervene, nobody can prevent the latter.

While I prefer git, it's worth remembering that just a couple of years ago, svn was the young rebel upstart (hence the name "subversion") -- most commercial shops were using cvs until recently. It's a hard sell to get IT departments to shift again ("why, just a few years ago you nerds made us switch to svn when cvs was working just fine. Now you want to shift again?")

I know -- it's so frighteningly like Palm -- even down to making a crippled version of whatever was hot at the time (a netbook for Palm; a tablet for RIM) that only work if tied to a phone of theirs.

Circa 2000, you may have had a point. Big bookstores like Barnes & Noble and Borders were popping up all over, and generally had lots of comfortable seating. As a rather fast reader, I often spent a free afternoon or evening reading a book cover to cover in those stores back then. Guess too many people did just that. Now, you can hardly find a chair in most big box bookstores and they are closing up many locations anyway. I guess the free market can't support these big bookstores, which is too bad in a way.

The idea that educated people aren't selected for a jury just isn't true. I've served, and I have a doctorate in microbiology -- and there was another professor on the jury as well. Obviously both the defense and the prosecution want to eliminate people who would be biased against their side (and take turns doing this from the initial pool), but there is no reason why the educated can't be unbiased.