Great. Now when you get a virus, it'll be able to reprogram your *hardware*. I'm sure that couldn't go horribly wrong at all...

A little more here, sadly: http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/dxmvr/oracle_google_directly_copied_our_java_code/c13qfov

Upshot: Decompile the code with JAD and it's identical. It looks like someone screwed up pretty badly in this instance.

I was obviously *too* subtle...

"If I ever had to 'go rouge' I feel that I could last for years just off of common sense alone by using different public computers in a place with no cameras."

You'd probably still be caught red-handed, though...

That's nice for you.

However, I live in a city with a fair bit of history, too (Edinburgh, Scotland). It too has a university (in fact it has three) with a good tech reputation and it too has 50mbit broadband. Know how many iPhones I see?

Shitloads. iPhones every-bloody-where. You pretty much can't spit without hitting someone carrying one of the damn things, in fact.

Somehow, given Apple's sales figures, and even with a population of only 120,000, I doubt there's a black hole in iPhone sale in one specific area of the west of England...

That should be "I don't think that's what he meant". Brain and hands apparently not entirely connected today...

*sighs*

That's not what he's being sued for.

He's being sued for suggesting that the chiropractors were willfully giving people treatments they knew to be be useless. Personally, I don't see think that's what he meant in his article and that's his argument, too, but the one thing he's *not* being sued for is saying chiropractic remedies are little more than horseshit - there's be no lawsuit if that was all he'd said.

There always seems to be a remarkable amount of bitching about the British libel system, but really all it boils down to is that if you publicly smear someone, you'd better be able to damn well prove it. Where exactly is the problem in that? From what I've seen of American media and politics, it'd be a hell of a lot better if there were some requirement for people to be able to back up their accusations...

Except Dream Theater are on RoadRunner (a Warner subsidiary) rather than Warner directly. Even then Warner merely own a majority shareholding in the parent company - they don't own them outright.

RoadRunner may be a subsidiary (and by all accounts bastards in their own right), but they've had a notably different approach from Warner to this kind of thing, particularly in the case of YouTube.

Not quite. That was what the adverts creators intended the message to be, but Apple twisted the meaning to be anti-IBM at the very first screening of it ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lSiQA6KKyJo ).

Given the rhetoric in the rest of your edit though, I suspect it's really not worth adding any more than that. You don't like them, you think people who do like them are sheep. People who do like a lot of the things they make think differently. Ho hum.

I know, it was an easy shot, but there's an important difference.

The lockdown here is on *two* devices. You want a laptop or desktop you can do whatever you want with? There's the macbook, imac and mac pro for that. Want an expandable handheld appliance with a limited (albeit ever-expanding) functionality that'll have no hidden surprises? There's your iPad and iPhone.

You may as well criticise arcade machine makers for vetting all the roms you can put in their hardware. Or any of the console makers for vetting what's available for theirs. Or that kindle can't do anything but display books. Experience has shown them all, time and time again that as soon as you open up a platform to anyone and everyone, quality and reliability take a hit, not to mention susceptibility to attack. It's a specific product for a specific market and like the iPhone, will be hated by geeks everywhere, but loved by everyone else who want something that just works. Apple will likely do little to stop people jailbreaking these things, they'll just make it difficult enough that only determined people do it.

I hate to break this to you, but the 1984 ad was aimed at IBM, not Microsoft. Microsoft were small-fry at the time, in comparison.

Woah.

Did you just use a computer analogy for a car problem? Is this Soviet Russia already?

Agreed, though not with your code (underscores aren't valid, dude). More likely you had something like

01 WS-Temp-Variables-Rec.
03 WS-Data-1 Pic X(100).
...
03 WS-Working-Balance Pic s9(18)v99 Comp-3.
....

Followed by somewhere in the code:

*> Initialise working rec
MOVE SPACES TO WS-TEMP-VARIABLES-REC
...
*> Update the balance
ADD WS-CURRENT-AMOUNT TO WS-WORKING-BALANCE

Seen it done and seen the results far too many times...

"There is no professional-grade COBOL available for Linux so that they must convert to another language"

I think Microfocus might disagree with you there. It's not cheap, but it's definitely used at enterprise level.

Could be a while before anybody says 'yes'...