Hell you can go farther back than that friend, there were injunctions and patent trials over the first steam engines and that case goes back to 1792. and Watt himself used a sun and planet gearing on his steam engines to get around a patent for using a steam crank design so even back then there were inventors having to work around patents, that's the way its been as long as patents have existed.

Yep I surfed on the old Dreamcast many a time back in the age of dialup, its really wasn't bad. of course web pages were a lot simpler then so they didn't take gobs of bandwidth and puke JavaScript everywhere, but for a console (I think it was based on WinCE IIRC) it really was ahead of the game. Its a damned shame it bombed, it was the only console that would run emulators that i know of without hacking. I still have my old DC put up for when i feel like breaking out some classic SNES or Genesis or NES, it was a great console.

As for TFA, has anybody announced the hardware specs on the 720 or whatever they are gonna call it? Because if the reports are to be believed the PS4 is gonna be an X86 that is roughly the same as your average $400 PC, so if MSFT doesn't push the hardware we PC gamers may be ahead of the curve even at release day. Personally I'd be fine with that, the current gen graphics look damned sweet to me and the price of development is getting so high trying to crank up the graphics that if they don't stop we'll be looking at hundred dollar games. Does anybody know if the Xbox is going AMD or Nvidia? because if they go AMD that will leave Nvidia without a console next gen, quite a coup for AMD.

So while I won't be buying one (or Win 8 for that matter) I always like to check out new hardware, so if anybody has a comparison of what the new hardware is gonna be I'd love to read it. I figure the Nintendo will be the weakest but finding out PS4 was going MOR X86 was kinda a shock, now all that's left is to see what MSFT brings to the table.

Its IE dude, it still yucky. I will give the IE guys credit for supporting low rights mode (Which FF STILL doesn't do, even though the feature has been out for 5 years now) but the Chromium based do too and they are frankly faster and suck less resources, at least from what I've seen. They also have a nice version of ABP and it seems like every malware writer on the planet aims straight for IE because that's what grandma uses, so I agree with the other guy, no thanks Billy.

Yes, but we were talking about letters. You do know the difference between letters and packages, don't you?

At least my foaming at the mouth bigotry is well informed. If you bother to look it up, you'll see that I am correct.

But let me ask you this: Now that you know everything you use Siri for is sent to Apple will you stop using it? I'm betting not, anymore than I give a crap that Steam has a profile of my hardware for their little metrics or that MSFT gets a report if I manage to crash something.

Every day tons of data is being created and generated about you and most folks could NOT care less, they really couldn't. As long as it isn't slapping them in the face they honestly don't care what FB or some webmail or whatever knows, as long as its cheap (or better yet free to them) and above all EASY TO USE.

Like I said my GF uses FB constantly so what did she say when I told about all the info they gathered? "And? It lets me stay close to my kinfolks in Oregon easily, that's all i care about" and that's pretty much it in a nutshell, as long as it does what people want to do easily "free as in freedom' never even is given a first thought, much less a second. Those that follow RMS think there are all these "oppressed masses' when people will give you their passwords for a cookie, they just don't care.

I have actually tried this BTW, just to shut up those "Linux is ready for the desktop!" types, only instead of 12 years old I gave them a HUGE advantage by only going back 4 years, less than half the established MSFT lifecycle for OSes. What did I get? BROKEN BOXES, nothing but broken boxes as far as the eye can see.

In just the past 4 years they've got from ALSA to Pulse, GNOME 2 to 3 and KDE 3 to 4, it was just a fucking mess! Wireless wouldn't work, Ethernet would just drop in and out, give audio up it was just a mess, and of course the Nvidia and ATI drivers were crapped on, the Intel worked but only in VESA mode. So what did I get told then? "Well you should use Red hat, its supported" yeah at $399 a year it IS supported, its also 40 times the cost of Windows over that same 10 year cycle.../facepalm/

For all those that think Linux is ready I invite you to read this article by Ingo Molnar, who is one of the head develeopers at Red hat. if ANYBODY would know what is wrong with Linux this would be the guy, and he says mistakes such as lack of an ABI for drivers and a system where the devs try to "own" and control the repo has led to the "death cries" of the Linux platform. It is simply impossible to do QA on 20,000 packages and over a billion lines of code, it simply can't be done. THAT is why Linux doesn't work for the majority, because it simply can't keep up with the changes in hardware and software.

The Earth travels slightly more than one degree of its orbit per day

Mea culpa - make that slightly less than one degree per day.

For example, imagine if the only way you could send letters was the US postal service. Fed Ex and UPS would be illegal.

The USPS is the only way we can send letters. It is illegal to send letters through parcel carriers like FedEx and UPS. This has served us very, very well for over 200 years, until Republicans decided to kill it by passing completely insane "reforms", such as funding pensions to be funded for 75 years into the future. In other words, the USPS is required by law to have pension funds for employees that have not even been born yet.

When you think about it, the ability for anyone in the country to send a letter to anyone else in the country for less than a dollar is really fucking incredible. You won't get that from FedEx and UPS. We need the same kind of guaranteed service from nationwide internet.

Somehow it seems that school administrators are even harder to educate than their charges.

I'm sorry friend but you are dead wrong and in fact I'd argue that many of the open source projects would probably be EASIER to plant bugs in than Windows, why? Because there are a ton of projects that are made up of a handful of guys that are always understaffed. Don't think those guys would welcome a highly skilled volunteer from XYZ Corp? And just because the code is open don't mean any people with the skills to spot a highly obfuscated bug actually look at the code, look at how an infected Quake 3 was in the repos for over a year and a half.

So I'm sorry friend but all it takes is money and desire and the three letter agencies have both in abundance so it really wouldn't be hard. Look at how many packages are used in damned near every distro, now tell me have YOU looked at the code for all those common packages? How well do you know the teams that made them? Its not magic folks, you find a weak spot and exploit it and with so many FOSS projects understaffed that is a nice target for exploitation, pure and simple.