I guess this turns Apple into a true Mickey Mouse operation.

The simple fact that he is declaring that a court should make the declaration is within his rights, even if he stands to gain nothing from his crusade. This includes pursuit in spite of speculation that, since he has nothing to gain from this and has no interest connected to him, it will likely be dismissed outright.

Yes, but he also wasn't Jonas Salk or Ghandi or Pasteur or Einstein or Justus von Liebig or any of a thousand others who had far greater impact of human life and culture and health. He had a brilliant design sense and he was a brilliant marketer but this whole "He changed the WORLD!" thing is more than a little overblown.

He made better gadgets and made a metric crapload of money doing it. More power to him, but his contributions are incremental and not terribly important.

Makes me glad to live at the other end of Interstate 90 from there.

Boy, I'm glad I got replacement disks back in May....

I agree, WebOS is really nice. I picked up a TouchPad last week and so far I'm really impressed. I have used Android since the original release date of the T-Mobile G1 and I have a ASUS Transformer that is nice but I don't pick it up over my Macbook. I've found myself using the Touchpad quite a bit. I don't know how to explain it other than it's very comfortable to use.

> 3. It has cleared it's orbit of all other bodies that aren't satellites of itself, Lagrange point bodies, or "twin" satellites of similar mass that it stably co-orbits with where the co-orbital point exists outside either body.

Wouldn't this definition preclude a Kemplerer Rosette? Sure, they don't occur in nature, and are in fact quite unstable without active stationkeeping, but if you put (to pick a number at random) 5 Earth-sized planets equally spaced in the same orbit, be kinda silly to declare them non-planets as a result.

I got downvoted all to hell and back on Reddit when I pointed out that at some point, the risk of killing a cop and trying to get away with it may be safer than the risk of trying to deal with them peacefully. That's certainly already true from the perspective of the family dog.

The only thing you got wrong about this is that there isn't actually any requirement that there be drugs or any crime actually taking place. The standard of evidence for asset forfeiture is basically "suspicion of being related to a crime". No arrest, no charge, no crime actually needed. There is literally nothing stopping cops from simply pulling you over and taking your car and everything in it, except that they _might_ have a slightly harder time keeping it _if_ you later sue them to get it back. In fact, there are towns in the US with police farces that run exactly this racket full time. They pull over out-of-towners, demand they turn over everything of value inside the car or else they'll take it all _and_ the car as well and leave them penniless and stranded. They've threatened to take children from their parents during some of these shakedowns. It's beyond insane, and they don't even bother to take steps to hide it because it's entirely legal and above-board for them to do it.

The real question is, how good a language is Danish for creating stealth insults, or insults with plausible deniability?

"It's difficult to get a man to understand something when his paycheck is dependent on him _not_ understanding it"

That's not true. It's easy to get a cop fired. You just have to nail them fro a crime they can't excuse away as "just doing my job, it was all the other guy's fault". Things like drug use. Police farces come down harder on cops for toking up on the weekend than they do for them committing cold-blooded murder on the job.

"God made man
But he used the monkey to do it
Apes in the plan
We're all here to prove it
I can walk like an ape
Talk like an ape
Do what a monkey can do
God made man
But a monkey supplied the glue"

-Devo

In my opinion, in most (democratic) countries, the current voting system is too simple, and this simplicity favors the two major ruling parties, preventing all alternative voices from gaining any traction.

There are other (more complex) voting systems. I believe that some form of graphical user interface is necessary, should one ever intend to introduce any of these more complex systems.

None of this solves the software patents problem in the USA. The software patents problem isn't caused by some bad apple applications slipping through the procedures. The problem is that software has to conform to standards (interfaces and data formats), and these are being covered by thickets of patents.

I think everyone concerned about this sad state of affairs should read Xiph's comments to the FTC Patent Standards Workshop. Their submission focuses on how software patents affect Standards Setting Organizations.