How does that statement make any sense in light of this situation? The court is throwing out the patent because it can be proven that Apple has "first-discovery" before they "filed". In other words, they're fully acknowledging that the invention is novel and Apple is first, but---oops!---they filled out the paperwork in the wrong order. That doesn't sound like a "better" patent system to me, just stereotypical German.

Agreed---he's being dishonest in some regard. My anecdotal experience with my Honda Insight (an $18k car, BTW) is that I get average 44 mpg on my regular commute, which is stop and go at an average speed of 20 mph. My particular commute, which can include at 5-10 minutes of idling per direction, absolutely kills non-hybrid cars gas mileage. When I do a trip the the airport, with mostly freeway speeds, I can get 55 mpg for an average of the whole trip.

I couldn't agree with you more when you write that "the end is what GPL is about"---and that's the crux of my analogy with communism. GPL works when everything is GPLed (or with a more permissive license). This means that the "end" is an elitist club of software with homogenous licensing. Everyone is open and playing by the same rules, nobody "gets ahead". This is perfectly wonderful ideal and it is, without a shadow of a doubt, an ideal that can only be created by "telling people what they cannot do."

It sounds to me like we agree. Whether it's what "GPL is about" or a "means to an end" is largely irrelevant from a practical perspective.

To be absolutely clear, I'm fine with people wanting to GPL their code, but they shouldn't delude themselves into thinking that they're not being restrictive or imposing rules. For anything that I open source, I think GPL is too restrictive. ge7 said it better than me when he wrote,

Straw man! You responded to what you wish I had said, not what I did say.

Oh BS -- GPL is a pie-in-the-sky communist-like ideal in which you get kicked out of the commune if you actually try to assert some independence. That fine for sitting around and singing Kumbaya, but real open source is definitely closer to a BSD license as stated by the OP. Don't fool yourself into thinking that GPL 'is not about telling people what they cannot do' -- it sure as hell is.

That joke would be way funnier if there were actually a difference between a grizzly bear and a brown bear (they're the same thing). I think you mean black bear...

Uh, I think that was President George W. Bush that reported that in his 2003 State of the Union. But you're absolutely correct, if GWB were reporting this I wouldn't trust it either.

That doesn't answer the question. Obviously that's how you would have to design it. The question is what code would you have to write to accomplish what GCD with blocks allowed.

I mean, programmers execute something on a separate thread and then make notifications on the main the thread all the time. The beauty in GCD with blocks is what little code you have to write to accomplish that task. Having your code stay contextual (like in the wikipedia example) is far better than splitting it across multiple functions. Additionally, that concurrent task was automatically handed to a system-wide load balanced thread pool.

So, to answer the question just show the equivalent code in Java that maintains the same benefits that GCD does.

I think that the usage patterns with GCD are a little bit more broad than you're giving it credit for. Your audio processing example, for example, works just fine with other more primitive parallelization libraries. You could have easily done that with NSOperation before GCD was around. The question is can you do the equivalent to the -analyzeDocument example in this wikipedia article, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Central_Dispatch with your Java API? It's an honest question, BTW.

Oh *snap*! Of course, I'll just steal the content since its not legally available on my Linux version... man, you really got me there!

Oh, that's fantastic! You mean the Linux versions will offer the same books without DRM?

Didn't think so.

I agree completely -- you leave a loaded gun and a three year alone in a room together, what do you think is going to happen? Of course the three year old is going to play with and examine the new object! At that age they are just naive and curious explorers with little fear. The Wii controller has little to do with this.

RTFA. From the THIRD and FOURTH sentences in the article,

They addressed exactly the issue you cite in the fourth comment of the article. From the comment,

That's a really annoying answer, but completely correct.

The math classes aren't just about learning the topics, but learning how to approach a problem. I think your goal should be to have strong enough fundamentals in mathematics that when you encounter a math problem in a topic you haven't seen before, you are comfortable pulling out a book and figuring out how to solve it. It sounds like you're not very comfortable with mathematics, so a good solution is to take enough classes that you do become comfortable.