Your incentive is that the maker of item B might screw you and others over with the existing device or future devices e.g DRM, locking away your data in proprietary formats, selling your info to advertisers, trying to stop third-party firmware, etc. You have to wonder if their attitude to the GPL is just part of a general pattern of exploitation and corporate arrogance.

No. Your false dichotomy contains a strawman. Net Neutrality is about government regulating Internet connections, so that conflicts of interest don't artificially disadvantage some people (either end users or service providers) based purely on who they're connected through. So that, you know, the network is neutral. It has nothing to do with content and censorship, or anything like that.

Ah yes, sorry. It's not a word I commonly use and I picked the wrong homophone. I usually do better than most, if that's of any value.

Or... a botnet could register the CPU code(s) with a database somewhere and disable the CPU(s) if that node hasn't been seen for a few days. Have a few cases gain public attention, soon the selfish and stupid hoards will be reluctant to get their misbehaving computer seen to by a repair person.

So the option is to either hit a button every time you want the virtual keyboard, or to always have it up, taking space? Neither option is all that great.

How difficult is it to hit the maximize button with a finger tip? And whether maximized or not, how much space is taken up by the title bar? A tablet certainly has more screen real estate than a phone, but it's still pretty valuable.

I think the point is that you have to have different ways of interfacing with a tablet - don't have small elements that could be difficult to hit with a fingertip (especially since you can't 'hover' and fine-tune your position like you can with a mouse) and don't waste screen space.

Well you were trying to raise an issue with the statistics using typical anti-abortion talking-points. Why count aborted foetuses in life expectancy statistics when they haven't been born? My point was to show what a slippery slope your ideas were on and where it led, by asking what else should be counted.

Ok, now I know you're talking from an ideological position. That statement right there is a lie and propaganda. Condoms are *very* effective at stopping the transmission of STD's because they are a physical barrier.

Abstinence and marital fidelity are a *part* of stopping the spread of STD's, but it is naive to think that they are they only solution. It's irresponsible to ignore other solutions and it's downright evil to spread lies about effective forms of stopping the transmission of STDs. Not everyone can abstain (not even priests!) and not everyone can be monogamous in their marriage. Have some flexibility, pragmatism, and most importantly, humanity.

Why should it? Life expectancy is used as a measure of general health of a population and a society (health care, medicine, etc). If a foetus is aborted (as opposed to a miscarriage), this is not due to poor health or health services. And who says it's mostly children of the poor or unhealthy that are aborted? That may be the case in the U.S., but here in the civilised world we have sex education that hasn't been gagged by religious extremists.

And how much lower would it be if you included the billions of people who are never born for whatever reason? What a pointless exercise. Each female human is born with millions of egg cells in her ovaries. Should we count every single one of them as a potential human? Or should we be reasonable and only count the babies that are born?

Tell that to customers of Foxtel - Telstra ran the Cable Internet part of that venture and they dragged their heels moving to the DOCSIS 3.0 standard (providing 100Mbps). The reason? They had no competition. Why spend a huge amount of money providing a desired service when your customers are stuck on your service anyway? Just sit on your arse and keep taking their money!

And Bigpond still had preferential treatment for ADSL service. A bit too far from the exchange? Your chosen ISP said Telstra knocked back your application? Well, just ring up Bigpond and you will get a connection, even if it means they have to put in an extra rack/cabinet/whatever. A friend of my brother's had this happen just recently in a new development - the "rack" was full and nobody in his neighbourhood could get ADSL through other ISP's. Desperate for an Internet connection, he signed up for Bigpond. Suddenly his neighbours could get ADSL because of his sacrifice.

Telstra was a monopoly and abused their position, no doubt about it. I'm glad it's finally being broken up.

CPU architecture doesn't really matter with FOSS - once you have a working compiler, you just compile everything from source. Alright, you need some arch-specific work in the kernel and a few other places too. But by the time you get to end-user applications, all of that is long gone. So I would reply with "almost all Linux software already is for ARM-based CPUs". Or MIPS. Or POWER/PowerPC. Or whatever architecture you want.

And one advantage that ARM's low power/heat could bring is high density. Take a look at the Gumstix boards. Now imagine a "blade server" board with 16 or more processors crammed onto one board. You could easily get at least a few hundred CPU's in a 19 inch rack, with each CPU draining less than a watt of power. Now I'm not really sure what could be done with such a system - either do everything over the network (NFS or ATAoE), or equip each CPU with a good lump of flash storage for data and programs. But it would draw very little power and is something to think about.

IIRC, Linux has favoured interactive processes (those with an attached TTY?) for a while as well.

No it's not. It's about grouping processes ("tasks") to even out the amount of processor time portioned out. So, from the example, you can compile a kernel with "make -j 64" (i.e running 64 parallel compiler processes) and your video/music player will still play fine because each group (your player and the compiler group) is getting about 1/2 of the system CPU time instead of each process (your player and 64 cc1's) getting 1/65.

The fact that Android has very little in common with mainstream GNU/Linux distros i.e those with GNU libc. That includes MeeGo (and its parents, Maemo and Moblin). Beyond the kernel (including drivers), I don't see them being able to share much.

The correct name is " The X Window System ". So yes, you clearly are a newb.

Firstly, perhaps you should learn the difference between codecs (SP, ASP, AVC/h.264, VP8, etc) and container formats. You can put MPEG-1 content into an MP4 or MKV file but it doesn't change what's actually played. Secondly, WebM uses the Matroska container format.