The right to a jury trial in a civil suit is MUCH more limited than it is in a criminal case. In particular, civil juries decide only matters of fact, not matters of law (they're supposed to in criminal cases as well, but a criminal jury has an absolute right to acquit for any reason).

They didn't make an antivirus. They bought a company that made an antivirus, rebranded and released it.

"Do one thing and do it well" really wouldn't have flown in the days of hand-written CONFIG.SYS files.

Certain companies (Apple) have no-GPLv3 policies in place.

Things like device drivers can be easily diked out. When it comes to stuff like memory managers, VFS, CPU schedulers, basic networking, so on and so forth, I imagine that the bloat hurts the embedded guys more.

The downsides were too glaringly obvious, though. Most distros near the end of 2.4.x's useful life were either a.) supporting 2 or 3-year old hardware at best, or b.) backporting balky changes from the dev tree. Come to think of it, kind of like RHEL.

Actually, FreeBSD 6 is set to EOL (ie, security fixes stop) next year, and FreeBSD 7 will EOL 2 years after the last release. I hear ya on the rest of it though; if hardware turnaround times were better, I might be running FreeBSD 7 right now instead of Ubuntu.

Mostly ancient history. Free and NetBSD split off from the original Jolix project (NetBSD split off early; the FreeBSD guys tried to work within the system until it was unfeasible), OpenBSD started up when Theo de Raadt got kicked from NetBSD, and DragonFly happened with the whole FreeBSD 5.x Royal Mongolian Goatfuck. They never had one benevolent dictator like Torvalds or RMS, so personality conflicts had the potential to split systems.

It was mentioned outright on one of the news channels yesterday that a stock buyback was coming.

That's what I meant. If a computer is controlling the reactor, one can't take the computer to Captain's Mast when it screws up.

This. Most of the US civilian nuclear power industry is, to say the least, heavily influenced by the military nuclear power industry and the cult of personality surrounding Admiral Rickover. If nobody is in control, nobody can be held accountable when the fan hits the shit.

Or, in a real world, the Year of XP Yet Again.

Why not? The key figure right now for the effects of concussions is a WWE wrestler who killed his wife and child, then strangled himself. Nowinski's Sports Legacy Institute was the one that examined the brain, and their findings were similar to those of the various football players examined.

What next, is Microsoft going to have to drink from different water fountains than the "normal" software companies? Are they going to have to wear a Windows badge on their shirt every time they show their face in public?

How about we have two different families living in your house independent of each other? How much better would the lawn look?