Simple enough even for some four-year-olds. My daughter (now 16) wrote her first program in MicroWorlds LOGO at age 4. It drew a cat. I had her act out what she wanted the turtle to do, using only the things she already knew how to tell the turtle to do. She worked from there.

Indeed this is so. You can also compile Objective-C using clang/llvm . See: http://clang.llvm.org/compatibility.html#objective-c . The clang implementation is at feature parity with the Mac OS X 10.7 version of the language, and based on my limited understanding of some comments I've read in various announcements, supports some additional features as well. Use of those features requires the GNUStep Objective-C runtime (libobjc2), rather than the GCC runtime. A high degree of Cocoa compatibility is available using the GNUStep Base (Foundation) and GNUStep GUI (AppKit) libraries, for numerous Unix platforms as well as Windows. A version of CoreFoundation is also available which wraps GNUStep Base, with a rewrite coming very soon that implements CoreFoundation in plain C. Various other Cocoa and iOS-compatible libs are available in disparate states of implementation. As always, GNUStep could use more developers and more users. Companies wishing to port their MacOS software to other platforms are encouraged to investigate GNUStep; previous porting efforts have positively contributed to the project by discovering and reporting bugs and sometimes by providing direct improvements.

GNUStep was recently used to port the Mac-only racing game CoreBreach to Linux: ( http://corebreach.corecode.at/CoreBreach/About.html ). Other visible examples of Cocoa/Objective-C applications ported to Linux from MacOS include the 'eggPlant' automated testing tool from TestPlant ( http://www.testplant.com/ ), and plenty of previously Mac-only Free/Open-Source software such as Bean.app ( http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_2qH5zqXu7wQ/TRi6sNiNZjI/AAAAAAAAADM/i8RwqzQ6OYE/s1600/bean-gnome-theme.png ).

The parent is correct that you do not need Apple kit to develop in Objective-C. To work with most examples you will find, you will need Cocoa-compatible development libraries and tools, though. Interesting starting points include the Windows Installers, which include all of the components you would need to get started ( http://www.gnustep.org/experience/Windows.html ), or the GNUStep Core packages ( http://www.gnustep.org/resources/downloads.php ) for other platforms. The Étoilé Project http://etoileos.com/ is also interesting. Those of you in Europe who are interested and intend on attending FOSDEM should stop by and visit the talks and devroom sponsored by these projects.

No, 40-55 is still too early for wearing Depends, unless you have some sort of health issue (or just enjoy that sort of thing).

I must have missed the article about the government forcing/nudging/encouraging people to do triple-X, and refusing to give money to people who don't. Interesting.

You forgot Ken Olson (DEC), Scott McNealy (Sun), John Warnock (Adobe), Alan Ashton (WordPerfect), Philippe Kahn (Borland) ...I could go on. And, arguably, all of those companies were a lot better off when they were lead by their original CEOs than they are now ...those that even still exist.

No, you aren't. At least, once they put the little dent on the front, it was great. But then, I have small hands, and it fit perfectly well into my palm. I always liked the DEC 'puck' mice too (still have a couple), but they were a little too big and heavy.

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2011/08/24/technology/steve-jobs-patents.html

He is credited in 317 Apple patents so far. He is principle inventor or designer on 33 of them. I think this list actually misses a number of them from outside of Apple; NeXT filed patents under several different names, among them, NeXT, Inc., NeXT Computer, and NeXT Software. There are also still a boatload of pending patents with his name on them, some as principle inventor.

Jobs wasn't around for the Look and Feel lawsuit, though, even if you were:

- Steve Jobs was forced out of Apple in 1985 by the Apple Board of Directors and John Sculley.
- Apple sued Microsoft in 1988, when Windows 2.0 was introduced and it finally had resizable and overlapping windows.
- Apple lost its final appeal in 1994, mostly because Sculley had licensed designs for 179 of 189 GUI elements they were claiming infringement on back in 1985, after Steve was gone. Microsoft had previously licensed some of the same ideas from Xerox, and Apple had licensed them from Xerox for $100M in stock. This figured into the dismissal of the other 10 claims, since copyright only covers an original expression of an idea.
- Apple bought NeXT in 1996.
- Steve became iCEO of Apple in 1997.

Good reading: http://bit.ly/me36I (note that Steve was not involved).

The license certainly contributed to Microsoft's victory in court. Digital Research, which had no such license (and a much better implementation) lost a similar suit by Apple in 1985 over GEM, which nearly duplicated the Mac GUI, and was forced to change the look of some features and remove others; due to issues of infringing "trade dress." This is sort of like Kodak suing other film manufacturers for boxing their film in packages using the same orange-and-black color scheme. I think there is some merit in protecting a "look" from being exploited by commercial competitors, and GEM was certainly intended to look like the Mac as much as was possible. A shame, really, since it had a lot more going for it, and was in development by a former Xerox PARC employee before the release of the Mac. A few extra hours invested to make it look unique as opposed to identical would have benefited everyone. Interesting reading here: http://www.computernostalgia.net/articles/GEM.htm .

I have used all of these GUIs (and many others) at one time or another. I still have a GEM box sitting on a shelf in my office here at home, just for nostalgia, along with my Ventura Publisher manuals, etc. That was the most productive GUI I ever used on a PC prior to OpenStep.

Another false assumption.

Remember 'Total Information Awareness"?: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_Awareness_Office

Officially, that died on October 1, 2003, when President Bush signed the defense budget in which Congress axed the program after its existence caused a public uproar. Read through the various programs under that umbrella, including "Scalable Social Network Analysis". Zuckerberg released his first "social network" project (Facemash) on October 28, 2003, only 27 days after TIA was officially put down and split up between different agencies. For some reason, Harvard saw fit to drop their proceedings against Zuckerberg to have him expelled for hacking into the student ID databases to obtain the photographs he initially used to populate his site. He was then able to rapidly expand his project and get venture capital funding. Given that this all occurred well after the dot-com bubble burst, it seems that selling the associated data to advertisers would be a weak financial foundation to rapidly build such a project on, particularly when the principal leader of the project is a college undergrad, and its membership was limited to colleges at the time. I think the underlying idea may really have been to privatize parts of TIA all along. In particular, while the US government is bound by the Freedom of Information Act and the Privacy Act amendments, later amendments weakened the original acts in favor of protecting corporations, so the government is not required to reveal information that is considered a "trade secret" of a third party. See the article from a few days ago ( http://yro.slashdot.org/story/11/10/13/1938241/facebook-the-law-says-you-cant-have-your-data ), where Facebook is claiming this exact protection.

One related point is that the FOIA gives you standing to find out what records the government is keeping about you, to challenge the accuracy of it, and to sue the government for abusing it; the Privacy Act limits how they can share it, even between agencies. Data held outside the government is exempt from all that, at least in the U.S.

Viewed in that light, the individual information is the *most* valuable and unique; not worthless at all. Now, pair the social network information with all of the photographs that are pumped into FB and tagged by individual... Take a look at cheap software such as http://http//www.facegen.com/ (even has a free version) and http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BsFj1-fvbkA&noredirect=1 (first couple of relevant Google links I could find, I sure the three-letter agencies have access to better). Even if you aren't on FB, you are probably tagged somewhere in a photo, unless you are a total hermit. If the authorities were looking for you and had access to parametric data about your facial and body structures from this database, as well as access to the National Facial Recognition Network discussed recently ( http://yro.slashdot.org/story/11/10/07/2342240/fbi-plans-nationwide-face-recognition-trials-in-2012 ), they have a solution that would make the Stasi drool. You have everyone snitching on everyone else, documenting their comings and goings, providing up-to-date photographs, etc., and it is all there in one place, already tagged and organized.

The advertising revenue may just be the gravy on top of the government contracts.

>> You gave it to the person without restrictions.

You are making an incorrect assumption. On the rare occasion that I do give away an email address or telephone number, I state that the information is not to be shared. People do it anyway, often inadvertently. Most people have such a poor idea about how the internet functions that they don't think that entering an email or telephone number into a web form and clicking 'Submit' to 'Share this article with your friends' is disclosing anything. My father-in-law did this with my daughter's email address when she was two years old, sending her links to kids pages on some web sites about animals. Within a week she was getting SPAM from a dozen different environmental and anti-hunting groups. I had to read him the riot act about his mistake, and change her address. The email account was strictly meant to be used so that family could send her notes and photographs -- nothing else. My mother-in-law has been worse about this, and she honestly just forgets. She puts addresses in CC: instead of BCC: and then tons of people have the address. Recently, one of her great aunts chose to share her address book with Facebook and LinkedIn. My daughter got SPAM from both, inviting her to join. I never even gave the aunt her address; it was in her address book because she copied it there from an email she had been CC'd on. My daughter is a teenager now and there are dozens of photos of her on Facebook, though she does not have (or want) an account. Friends post them and 'tag' her in the photo, sometimes when they already know she doesn't want them posted. She has often asked to have them removed, and gets treated like a weirdo as a consequence. My 8-year-old is dealing with the same issue, from teachers posting photos with everyone in the class labeled, to other parents, to her own friends who are 7 or 8 years old and have their own Facebook accounts.

I don't share *anyone's* email address or other personal information without explicit permission, nor do I use information I happen to come across (in something like a CC field, for example) without obtaining permission first. This is the only fair assumption to make.

I spend no time "memorizing" anything. If I see something I have not seen before, I find and/or figure out what it is, and after that I know, and will recognize it in the future. Knowing a vehicle by the sound of it is just a fun personal challenge. I like to guess who pulled into the driveway by the sounds. No biggy.

The only vehicle that has cost me any time to learn to recognize in recent memory was this little red roadster that passed by me on my way to work early last spring: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:HondaS600.JPG . The license plate that read '1966' was a big help in figuring out what it was, and I knew it was an old Honda when it went past, from the sound of the engine. There were only 111 of them built that year, and they are a few years older than I am, so that explains why I don't ever remember seeing one. Interestingly, it has chain drive to both rear wheels, rather than a driveshaft. The one I saw looked as good or better than the one in the photo, and was the more rare left-hand drive, rather than the right-hand drive pictured there.

I could. Easily. I can tell them apart by the sound of the engine, sight unseen, by the shape and spacing of their headlights in my mirrors at night, or by a raft of stylistic details from several blocks away. But, then, *I* like automobiles. These lawyers probably don't care at all about technology. Hold up a $50 and a $5 at 10 feet and I bet they have no trouble at all distinguishing the two.

Actually, no, MFN status for China had to be renewed annually, and was renewed annually for China by Carter (on his way out), Reagan, Bush Sr., and Clinton. Clinton campaigned that he was going to let MFN status lapse as leverage against China's human rights abuses. He ended up knuckling under to pressure from agricultural interests who did not want to suffer taking a hit to grain exports (estimated at about $3B in losses, and another $2B in retaliatory tariffs). He also became convinced (as Bush had argued) that China was more likely to make progress on the issue if the subject were treated separately from the subject of trade, and would respond poorly under threat of sanctions. Bush (Sr.) was a former ambassador to China and recognized widely as an expert on the Chinese, so he was probably right. He had the hardest time of any of the above Presidents in getting MFN status pushed through Congress, mostly due to the Tienanmen Square massacre. That's probably the only reason the topic was in the air when Clinton was campaigning, and he took heat from his own party (Pelosi, in particular) when he followed Bush's lead on the matter. Late in Clinton's second term, Congress granted PNTR (Permanent Normalized Trade Relations) status to China, and he signed it into law. This was somehow a prerequisite for China joining the World Trade Organization. At any rate, all members of WTO are supposed to grant MFN status to all other members. At the time, our exports to China had tripled during the previous decade, so it seemed to be in our best interest. Perhaps this latter move was what you are thinking of? If so, examine news articles from the time period and you will find that Newt Gingrich was instrumental in getting this through Congress. There's enough "blame" to butter both sides with, in this case.

I was a roommate for a week with an HIV researcher during a medical seminar, in the late 1980's or early 1990's. We were both working for the seminar (I was doing A/V, I don't remember what he was doing). I asked him if it was possible to contract the disease from a mosquito that had bitten an infected person. He said it would be unlikely but it was certainly possible. He said it was unlikely because the virus likes to be kept warm, and blood in a mosquito cools down rapidly. But if you were in a crowd with mosquitoes zipping about quickly from person to person, certainly possible. Since then, I have always wondered what effect induced, controlled hypothermia might have on the virus in HIV patients (assuming that cold means it dies rather than going dormant).

Eh, Sorry. I've used tons of interfaces over the last 32 years; I am quite capable of dealing with change. So far, the only way I have found to deal comfortably with the 'ribbon' is to eliminate its use. I hide it completely, and learn the keyboard equivalents for even the most obscure commands, in software I rarely use (like Word and Excel). It just takes too damned long to "discover" where they've hidden the feature I need, even though I know it exists. It is faster to Google for the keyboard equivalent than to find it in the ribbon. I also cannot stand how much space it takes up. I'm a certified toolbar-hater because of the space they consume, I turn them off and do not use them; I do not like having this toolbar/menu mashup forced on me as my only option. It is pretty bad when 'Ctrl+Shift+5' has more meaning than anything I can quickly find on my screen.