With any luck, this tangled web of patent wars will go on for so long, and reach such an intensity, that legislatures will finally recognize the problems with current patent laws.

The courts have already been swamped with stupid laws and rigid applications of stupid laws and all kinds of parties insisting to reach trial instead of settling things outside the court. It still hasn't made Americans review their approach and turn to mediation instead of litigation.

In other countries they do what they can to keep the courts for really important stuff. In Japan they teach street cops to mediate disputes between people so they don't end up in court -- stuff like "his dog pees on my lawn" gets solved right at the source this way. In the EU they have national organizations protecting consumer rights so people will call on them when they have a problem with a product or service they bought instead of, again, ending up in court. And so on.

I don't believe the US doesn't have any mediation options, so I suspect they're either not very well known, not effective, or there's some cultural bias preventing people from using them.

Whoa, there. Careful with this line of thought. I mean, what's next, arguing that if one who owns reading material about bombs is not necessarily a terrorist, then one who owns naked kiddy pics is not necessarily a pedophile? Or that the ownership of said material, in itself, without acting on it, is not enough for punishment? Come on, think of the children, please. It's obvious that people who read about terrorist topics intend to commit it, just like it's been proven without a doubt that the degenerates who own naked kiddy pics will invariably go out and molest little children. I don't have the exact figures or a study at hand right now, but come on, it makes perfect sense, it's like doubting the sky is blue.

Your basic idea is that "it's not needed but it helps". Guess what, WYSIWYG HTML editors don't help. They try to do both graphical editing (best relegated to an actual graphical editor) and know HTML+CSS (best relegated to a human) and make a mess of both. People who rely on them are trapped in a pathetic limbo halfway from getting either right.

It really is disappointing that no one has an answer to Dreamweaver though. I've been searching for an alternative for years.

Maybe you should have used those years to learn HTML and CSS. By which I mean learning things like the CSS box model and being able to implement designs using a simple text editor.

Once you do that you can implement any design starting from a mockup made in whatever graphical editor you want. AND you will understand what's going on there, and be able to make stuff that's simply impossible for any HTML WYSIWYG editor ever made.

The editors have their place for a competent web designer[...]

I've never met a competent web designer. Most of them come from printing backgrounds are are incapable of understanding the most basic issue: that webpages are not print, that they're supposed to reflow and change depending on browser and user preferences, they're not a poster or a leaflet. Most of them have only vague ideas about the box model and are groping in the dark for the most part, achieving the desired effects in roundabout, non-optimal ways. Most of them have no proper knowledge of CSS or HTML and rely on the editor close to 100% to supply what they don't know.

Programmers who learn HTML and CSS do a much, much better job of it, because they're used to understanding how stuff works. Unfortunately, most of programmers don't have a high artistic ability for the design part. Plus, good programmers are much more valuable writing code, not markup.

The best compromise I've seen is having designers do mockups and programmers implement them. I've never personally met the mythical beast that combines both perfectly. Stop searching for the software version of it, it's a waste of time.

Ditto. It's been... about 5 years I think since I've last used a Windows desktop. It's Linux at home and luckily work lets me use it as well (asked me to use a LTS and that's the last I heard from the sysadmin).

How do I manage that? I don't play much on the PC, the games I do play work on Linux too (emulated or whatever). I have no "special" software I "must" run and all the portable hardware I got so far seems to work with it (Kindle, iPod, Nokia phone, Canon camera etc.)

Why Linux? We just click together I guess. Lots of configurability and options. I've used various distros (mainly Fedora, Debian and Ubuntu), various desktop environments, there's "just works" software as well as getting your hands deep under the hood and rebuild the entire thing from scratch if you want to. Bonus: sharing stuff with others and FOSS.

Basically, I'm a geek and a hobbyist and on the computer Linux is the equivalent of my garage workshop. Windows and OS X don't feel like that. Sooner or later you run into walls and "you shouldn't do that" or "you can't do that".

so, if a non-tech person from idaho was recommended linux, and got ahold of a cd and attempted to install it ............ go figure.

If someone cannot figure out a BIOS switch then maybe they're not the type of person you want using Linux in the first place.

Why does the Linux community try to woo "lusers"? I've never quite understood this. It's quite a departure from traditional Linux geeks, who abhorred users in the good old fashion of the BOFH.

It's like watching Leonard try to attract Penny in "The Big Bang Theory" and fail over and over. Except here there's not even the prospect of getting some sweet booty out of it. What do these ordinary users bring to the community? Absolutely nothing. Linux and FOSS has always been about contributing and they don't.

Is it some kind of statement, a pride thing? Linux is already everywhere else, does it really grate so much that there's one niche left that a technological dinosaur won't give up?

Unless you're saying that Microsoft would modify Windows so that no unapproved software could run.

That's probably in the works. In the end it's all about DRM. They tried to drop it straight at the top of the software stack (media players) and it didn't work out so well, so now they're going from the bottom up.

Here's how it will work:

1) Control the boot-up procedure and make sure no other OS can run on the machine.
2) Tie-in with Windows Update and driver signatures, after all, nobody can argue that having hardware-authenticated updates and drivers is a good thing, right?
3) Next come the security apps -- 'cause nobody wants malware messing with or disabling their firewall and antivirus.
4) Then it's a very short step to application whitelists, which follows naturally from the security step before.
5) Finally, you can really control the app content, since the entire stack is locked tight.

[..]you could have at least shown some respect rather than making the GNU (And by association, Linux, even though we hate you) community look like tools, instead of just yourself as you usually do.

Mate, decades from now, maybe centuries, Stallman (and Jobs) will be in the history books and nobody will remember you. Think about it.

So how about you sit back and shut up and let one of them talk about the other? 'Cause Stallman earned his right to say what he's saying, and Jobs the right to his legacy, however controversial. Whereas, unless you're Linus, I don't see what right you have to talk for the Linux community.

Steve may not have liked your taste in ripped music, your torrented TV series, or your third party apps, but he would defend to the death your right to run them, as long as that means you will pay an Apple tax to do so.

I think you're missing the point. RMS is about free software and has defined the fundamental software liberties already. Software made by Apple and that kept in its walled garden does not match those liberties. The values pushed by Apple don't even come close.

Let's not delude ourselves. As far as software is concerned, with some notable exceptions, Apple always took the hard proprietary line in order to protect and add value to their hardware. It's natural for RMS to point it out. Especially at this moment in time, in a controversial manner, because well, that's what he does.

And hell, if anybody is to talk dirt about Jobs, let it be RMS, a man every bit as influential, who has fundamentally changed things and who has his place reserved in history books as well.

Surgeons and medical doctors in general do have their ethics. As should every professional. I know people are ready to believe that since "cutting into people" is what a surgeon does, he or she can't wait to do it at any opportunity. In fact it's usually quite the opposite. To put it simply, any part of the body you've cut into will never be quite the same as before, no matter how well it heals. So they try to avoid doing it unnecessarily.

Granted, not all surgeons respect this to the same degree, and then there's plastic surgery and so on, but generally speaking it's unfair to say all surgeons are knife-happy.

Lots of German providers do this too (making VoIP a ToS violation), especially on plans which are for smartphones only... the big 5 gigabyte plans which allow tethering usually don't have this restriction... maybe the same is true here.

It's being done all over Europe AFAIK. VoIP is both blocked and considered a ToS violation and forbidden on "regular" plans, as well as grounds for account suspension and damages if you're caught trying to circumvent the prevention measures. But they do allow it on their unlimited plans.

Not sure if it's about hindering a directly competing service, or about them not having enough bandwidth for every client to be using VoIP over regular mobile plans, or about trying to squeeze the extra euro out of the client. Probably all of them. But I don't see how this is news.

He wanted to take back everything he had previously given us. That's a bit unusual.

It's not about us, it's about himself.

I relate to what he did because I did it myself a while back. Let go of my personal domains, email accounts, self-hosted blogs and online image archives etc. I'm still on the net, obviously, just under a completely reorganized identity. I'm now much more careful about separating personally identifiable information from general romping across the net.

Why? Because I had reached a point when I looked back at everything that could be tied to me online and it wasn't me anymore. The blogs contained some useful information but also a lot of it was outdated and some misguided or naive, or worse. Luckily, I have a common name and I've had the insight to mark all my pages "noarchive" so there's no cache in search engines or archive.org. So I just let go and moved on.

People are not perfect, they change and sometimes grow up. But the Internet remembers everything and never lets you forget it. In real life you mostly get the benefit of forgive and forget because human memory is imperfect, but bring a perfect memory into the game and it gets ugly. People look at stuff you did or said 10 or 20 years ago and treat you like you're the same person you were back then.

Besides, if some of the stuff Mark, or me, put online was really useful then someone will have a copy somewhere and will recover and share it. You can't expect the guy to live forever or his descendants to keep maintaining his website forever. At some point that site would either stop working or the information would become obsolete anyway.

I realise that Slashdot and PCMag are US-oriented but I'm getting a bit tired of articles written as if what happens in the US affects the whole world. Where is Apple suing HTC and Samsung? In the US. That kind of patent bullshit does not fly everywhere in the world, and HTC and Samsung are not even mainly US-based. Granted, the US is a big important market, but it's not everything.

So ok, worse case scenario, they win and the US is taken over by Apple alone. Frankly, I doubt Microsoft will let that happen, 'cause it needs hardware to put their OS on, and we all know Apple will never let them put it on theirs in a million years. But ok, let's say for the sake of argument.

So? Why should the rest of the world care? I'm seriously asking. How will the rest of the world be affected by a decision given in one country, that's the host of a fairly atypical, malformed and out-of-control patent system? Will they be able to replicate this feat elsewhere in the world?

All Facebook has to do is make it more streamlined[...]

The question is, will they? And by that I mean, will they even care? Will the users?

I'm skeptical. If Google+ were to prevail it would have by now. We would see reports counting tens of millions of registered users, not "visitors". If it hasn't so far, it probably won't gather enough momentum.

And I'm not exactly sorry. Call it Facebook, Google, whatever, they're all the same. Their bread and butter is our private information and they are slowly throwing away all pretense they even try to protect it. Their latest statements re. eliminating anonymity are proof. If Google thinks that paying lip service to privacy and a different interface will make a difference, they might as well not even bother -- still Facebook in sheep's clothing.

What we need is a FOSS engine, something cheap and flexible that any geek can deploy on their own website (or on public services a la GitHub), and his/her non-geek friends can start using very easily and hook up into a larger, grassroots, distributed social network. Something that no corporation will be able to mine or control.

Frankly, I'm surprised no such solution has appeared so far. Oh, I don't doubt there may be plenty "social network" FOSS projects out there, but the only one that made any waves so far was Diaspora, and that was shortly before it died. ('Cause it did, right? A viable software project of any kind should put out a beta in 6 months from inception and have a working version in a year tops, and they're long overdue.)

If you're running the GNOME desktop environment, why would you want to run the KDE System Settings application?

To deal with settings for the odd KDE app you might be using. Such as K3B, which I prefer over any of the Gnome burners.