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Actually, E.D.Tex is so popular with patent infringement plaintiffs because it hands down victory after victory for plaintiffs on questionable procedural rulings and blatant plaintiff favoritism. Why? Sit down, its story time.

Once upon a time, a certain area of Texas was popular for tort plaintiffs because it frequently produced enormous damage awards, thus providing employment and tourism revenue for an otherwise inconsequential part of the United States. Then, a series of tort reform laws were passed to curtail the activities of the offending courts. So, in search of a new means of corrupting the judicial system to keep a constant flow of legal tourism through Mayberry, a judge from Marshall, Texas decided to publish a paper on patent rules.

Having a judge who understands patent law is an excellent proposition, except when the judge intends to contort the law to draw business into his remote domain and benefit his local associates.

Who decides where a case is brought when the defendant (say, a national corporation) is subject to personal jurisdiction throughout the entire country? The plaintiff. How do you persuade patent plaintiffs to bring lawsuits in your backwards town? By handing out numerous favorable decisions and large damage awards.

And so, E.D.Tex and Marshall, TX are the bane of patent defense attorneys throughout the United States, and patents of doubtful validity regularly receive the imprimatur of a federal district court.

The Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit doesn't agree to hear appeals for every case, nor should it. That would be impossible.

In conclusion, we should never have let Texas into the Union in the first place.

Apple users are definitely wacky. I bought a MacBook recently because of the stability, ease of administration, nice kernel, reasonable dev environment, etc.

Now I can't stand it. The Apple GUI is a piece of shit. They have gone to weird symbols in their GUI instead of nice buttons with labels.

Example: I needed to add a user. I bought up the little user management app and didn't see any add user button. After a short Google, I found that to add a user, you click the small plus sign at the bottom. Maybe I should have figured that out without Googling, but it sure didn't seem obvious at the time.

It seems like Apple is generally going for a pretty interface over a useful interface. That may impress some people but it drives me batshit. The only question now is whether to put KDE on top of OS X or put some Linux Distro on it.

I heard so many great reviews of Mac and now I'm looking at having paid too much money for a Linux notebook ... sigh.

You didn't see the "?" button on the Accounts pane? Clicking that clearly outlines what you need to know.

The "+" and "-" and similar buttons are used almost universally and consistently throughout Mac OS X, Apple applications and 3rd party applications.

It isn't about being pretty but consistent and directly useful/discoverable without clutter.

> I find it hard to credit them with technological innovation
> when these ideas were being casually thrown around by a bunch
> of random geeks on a mailing list.

And there wasn't any technological innovation involved with the Apollo program, either. I mean, Kennedy talked about us going to the moon ten years before we got there. And he was just a politician!

Sorry, I know it's a bad analogy, but the argument was bad to begin with.

because it exposes the fact that today's Mac desktops are just commodity hardware with an extra $1,000 charge for an OS X dongle (TPM).

If it's all marketing then why does Apple have the highest consumer satisfaction rates in the entire industry?

If their products were crap, or even equivalent, consumers would not speak so highly of them, for so long after their purchases.

Unless you are talking about film grain, I have no clue what "artifacts" you are talking about as Blu-Ray, outside of the early Mpeg-2 releases, and HD DVD both use more efficient compression codecs than DVD does. If you are talking about film grain, yes it is more apparent now due to the higher resolution which is able to resolve such detail now, but it is supposed to be there.