Are you kidding? Gamers have been wanting XBOX Live style integration for Windows games for years.
Define "gamers". I have yet to meet any PC gamer who speaks of GfW LIVE and all the other supposed gaming features in Windows without drawing extensively on the not so nice parts of their mental lexicons.
You're suggesting a 15" 1366x768 that weighs 5.4 pounds and is made of plastic. A Macbook Air is a 13" 1440x900 that weighs 2.96 pounds and has a metal case. [...]
Disregarding the weight, I have seen an MBA go dead after a drop from a common work desk, while my ThinkPad T-60, bought refurbished, has survived 4 years in emergency services and disaster relief. I have stopped counting the drops and bangs. The case is scratched, of course, and the keyboard looks its part. But nothing is broken, deformed or lost its functionality. So I suggest you look beyond the mere material of a laptop at how it performs in the real world.
It will run any OS you like.
This comes up quite often in this discussion. The only current mainstream desktop OS available for x86 that will not run on anything but a Mac is OS X. And that is not due to the technical superiority of Macs but legal restrictions Apple has put on it.
[...] only without the inevitable commercial conflicts of interest that would arise from such a secular gathering.
The rally was sponsored by a rabbinical group, Ichud Hakehillos Letohar Hamachane, that is linked to a software company that sells Internet filtering software to Orthodox Jews.
Oh, I am sorry, what was your point?
[...] Ellison failing to have an answer offhand to a technical question is not a failing. [...]
It is when the whole bloody lawsuit - or what is left of it - rests on just this one question.
[...] Where a culture does not deny or even promotes something, be it slavery or the theft of intellectual property, that culture defines itself. Ancient Greece was a culture, in part, of slavery. China is a culture, in part, of theft.
Where a culture does not deny or even promotes something that it does not know or that it does not deem wrong, that culture is defined by other cultures who have those concepts and deem them wrong. Ancient Greece was in retrospect from our enlightened point of view a culture of slavery, because we have a concept of slavery, and this is seen as a bad thing because we, in our society, deem slavery bad. China is a culture of theft when it comes to "intellectual property" because we see it that way.
That's like saying the Somali pirates aren't pirates because there's nothing in their culture that makes it wrong. There shouldn't have to be laws for people not to steal, and people who steal are thieves whether there's a law saying so or not.
Laws are dependent on culture. Here in Germany we have a law that explicitly makes it a felony to deny the Holocaust. We also have laws (and would be willing to put up more if loopholes arose) that require services like Google StreetView to erase or blur out individually identifiable information - faces, number plates and, upon request from the owner, even whole buildings - from photographs. Both examples are rooted in our nation's history. Our neighbours may very well shake their heads over our "silly" laws. And we would not force our regulations on them. But we expect everyone to respect those laws when they are in or deal with our country.
So if China does not have a notion of legally guaranteed monopolies on ideas it is up to them and no-one else to decide whether copying a film or album or software constitutes thievery. And believe me, Chinese culture does have quite a good idea of what constitutes theft and how to punish people for it. You may remember the case of Wu Ying?
The hardest part of climbing the ladder of success is getting through the crowd at the bottom.
