Wasted time reading this article due to the poor title. Should have been "How To Line a Thermonuclear Fusion Reactor"

For awhile, the company I worked for had an office in an office park but the road on which the building was located was not in any map database. So every map system would direct people to the wrong place. Limo drivers would often call to get directions. Secretaries had to tell people to disregard the directions from online map systems like Mapquest or Google Maps. I checked and saw that the Google maps for our office were (at least at the time) copyright Navteq. So I went to the Navteq website, found the "report a problem" page, took a screen shot of the bad map with the missing road, and went into a paint program and drew the missing road and added the proper location of our building's address and submitted the report. Then several months later (maybe as many as six) I received an email reply from Navteq the their people had verified my submission (they didn't say if it was via drive-by or satellite photo inspection) and that their map info was updated -- but that it might take awhile to appear in the systems that utilize their data. I think it took another 3-6 months to percolate into Google. I just checked the address in Google maps, and the "missing road" is still there, but the street address location, while close, is no longer correct (and it's a "different" incorrect place than before). The map data copyright is no longer Navteq -- and not Teleatlas either. It's Google. There is a handy "report a problem" link right there by the map data copyright that wasn't there in the Navteq days.

Sounds nice but is completely incorrect. A huge percentage of the present US economy is based on intellectual property: computer software, television shows, movies, music, the designs of complex things (computer chips, etc.).

The only way to generate money from IP is to use governments to create and enforce laws. Otherwise, people will just make free copies of things.

Now, note that if you want to say that this is OK, that is fine, but it's a completely different argument. You would be destroying the present US economy and our present bad economic situation and huge US debt would be made much, much worse. The argument at hand is the /. author's comment of whether IP should be part of a free trade agreement, and the answer is an unequivocal "yes." Since one of the biggest things the US exports ("trades") is IP, it can only be "yes."

Also note that there are different flavors of IP: trademarks, copyrights, patents. Mostly what we're talking about here is copyright, so let's not get into the software patent quagmire.

If you look closely at the video, there were TWO versions of the app demo'd. Neither were on Windows Mobile. One was an iPhone app. The other was a Palm Pre / webOS app. Alas, the guy who demo'd the webOS version didn't have a microphone and you can't hear him talk in the video. Also, instead of using a live Palm Pre, he used the free Palm Pre emulator environment (running on a MacOS laptop), employing the Pre / webOS emulator which uses Sun's (Oracle's) VirtualBox platform. But it's not an iPhone-only app. They have a webOS version. Not a Windows Mobile version, though.

Wrong question. In fact, that's not even a real question; it's just two sides of the same coin. The real question is whether the Linux driver performs better because it's coded better than the Windows driver, or whether it's because of some deficiencies in the Windows driver architecture, Windows graphics stack or the Windows OS itself. In other words, is this truly a case where Linux is better than Windows? Or is this just a case of one driver being better than another. If it's the latter (as the "question" above implies), they could just write a better Windows driver. Not all that interesting in that case.

In the deep, distant past, I don't think you could bind macros to keys in vi. So it's an old argument that's no longer valid.

You're failing to consider the following: VIM (and Emacs, but I'm a vi person) have very powerful built-in capabilities that allow you to do things like make very specific global changes, using regular expressions, etc. Most basic text editors lack this. I frequently watch people doing silly things like putting pound-sign (#) characters as comments at the beginning of, say, 10 lines to comment out a section of a script or config file. They're doing it in Windows Notepad or something similar one line at a time. Come on; that's trivial in vi to do very quickly. And that's just the beginning of what you can do. Such a complete waste of time and productivity due to poor tools (provided natively) and poor choices (not getting and learning better tools).

As for Kate -- that exmplifies another thing you've failed to consider. Kate's not available everywhere. In fact, since my present personal website server runs Ubuntu under Gnome, I've never seen Kate to my knowledge. Meanwhile, VIM (or vi) is available everywhere. It's navtive to all versions of Unix and Linux. So if you're a Unix / Linux system admin, it's available on HP-UX, Solaris, AIX, Red Hat, Ubuntu, SuSe, etc. No matter where you end up, it's there, and it works and it's powerful. Plus, VIM/GVIM can be easily added to other systems like Windows. And it's free.

Another important aspect, as others have pointed out, is that vi is not required to run as a GUI (though GVIM is available if you want it); you can run it in a terminal window like ssh or telnet. Kate can't do that. Period.

The vi learning curve admittedly sucks. But I was forced to deal with that in 1985 on systems where that was the only real choice. Since I'm over the hump, it's not an issue for me.

None of that boring old electrical current for them.