You're comparing apples to oranges. Most 5-year-old PCs won't run Windows 7 very well, if at all, and have no chance at Windows 8. Most iOS software doesn't require the very latest version of iOS to run, so it should remain a very useful device. Heck, iPod Touch 1st generation and original iPhones can only run up to iOS 3.x and still sell pretty well on eBay. They are almost 5 years old.

As for battery, just get it replaced for $99 if you still value your device, but I think "barely usable" is an exaggeration. Again, original iPhones are almost that old and retain over 50% of their battery life. A 5 year-old iPad isn't going to be a use-all-day-without-recharging thing, but it will still be a very usable device.

Not necessarily. Without patents, it is conceivable (some might say likely) that a given invention would never get published, but rather be kept as trade secrets in case they are useful later. Given a truly non-obvious invention, there is a benefit to society to see it published and its means of building/operating carefully documented. With the patent system, the idea is that everything is public and in return the company has some protection against competitors using the invention against them even if they themselves don't use it.

The real problem always, to me, boils down to the "obvious to a practitioner of the art" test. If the bar on that were much higher-- let's say such that only 1 out of 10 of today's patents would pass muster-- I think the anti-patent rhetoric would cool to imperceptible levels.

The interesting thing, though, is that Siri itself is NOT a bandwidth hog. Ars and others have tested it and it actually doesn't use much bandwidth at all. But it makes the phone SO much more useful that people are sucking down three times as much information if they have Siri to help them find it.

I don't know anyone who is "pro abortion", but plenty who are "pro choice". Some alternatives have been proposed: pre-conception (Catholic), conception (fundamentalist/protestant), second trimester (Roe v. Wade), "Can survive outside the womb" (some medical definitions), or even "one month after birth" (Jewish law in Jesus' time which he didn't seem to have a problem with).

Actually, the opposite of what you say is true. That's the whole point of using the word "selection" in the phrase "natural selection". Anything that helps the organism survive and reproduce better in its environment is a selective pressure. So if you postulate that there exists somewhere on the planet where multi-cellularism is a selective force, then this experiment replicates those conditions.

Your argument about C# is spot-on on the client side, but I have yet to see any significant movement from Java to C# on the enterprise side. If anything, enterprises are continuing to build larger and larger installed bases of Java software that's further locking them in. In addition, I see a general distrust of Mono and a liking for Linux that biases them against C#.

Not to rain on your troll, but I think the whole point of the article is that Apple and their users AREN'T advocating it.

The parent's advice is almost correct... if you want to distribute under GPLv2, do *not* add the "or (at your option) any later version" or someone else could redistribute it as GPLv3 and then you wouldn't be able to re-integrate their changes into the GPLv2 baseline. If you like GPLv2, make sure you only distribute it under GPLv2 or you lose control.

I find this comment fascinating, and probably helps differentiate geek tools from mass-market tools. Most people prefer accuracy, but I think a lot of geeks really would prefer precision.

1,100 high-tech employees on the processor side of the fab, and more than that on the flash memory side. A $3.6 billion construction project. Yes, I'd say they will appreciate it.