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Don't confuse Apple with its lawyers. Apple gets sued regularly over frivolous bullshit like Paystar's, so the the company's legal team is a ravenous bunch of sharks.

The Wired sensationalism about lawyers' overstated legalese asking not to get unsolicited idea submissions outside of the "sign away your rights" web form for feedback is to prevent a case where somebody sends in an idea Apple is already working on, sort of like sending the violated IP to a clean room team. Of course they don't want to get sued, and lawyers overreact to protect their assets.

Microsoft isn't "evil" for bundling software, it violated its consent decree (its agreement with the judge in a legal case) in order to destroy competition. Apple has no consent decree to violate, and has not been charged by the US with anti-competitive behaviors. So you're grasping at straws.

Jobs does not own the RIAA's music, so he can only do what they allow him to do. He replaced strong Windows Media DRM from Microsoft with FairPlay DRM that end users can strip off themselves using iTunes burn function. So again, you are being ridiculous.

Apple does not have a moral obligation to hand its IP over to Microsoft just because it did once already in the mid 80s. The "little guy" you are rooting for here is a convicted monopolist. It's like you're complaining about Bernhard Goetz being criminal.

Apple never "forced the installation of Safari," it presented it as a software update. Microsoft presents new versions of its own browser as a software update, on both the Mac (when it did) and Windows. Again, you are being wildly disingenuous.

Linking to Leander Kahney's wildly problematic rant/ad for his book doesn't help your case, because Kahney has a loose grasp of reality and contradicts himself repeatedly.

As John Gruber noted (and thank God, as it spared me from explaining exactly why Kahney is so full of himself):

"Kahney's central premise, insofar as there is a premise, is that Apple has succeeded either despite or because it operates in ways that are contrary to conventional wisdom. [... Kahney says Apple is] "Irredeemably evilâ. Because they're secretive and develop closed platforms. Think about that."
[...]
"One can argue (as I would) that Apple's product secrecy is worth tens of millions of dollars in publicity every year. Or, one can argue that Apple spitefully pissed away even more valuable publicity by shutting down Think Secret. (You'd be wrong, but you can reasonably argue that.) But Kahney, in the course of seven paragraphs in a single article, argues both."
[...]
"So this is the sort of logic, research, and insight that passes for a Wired cover story today. Does anyone at Wired even read this shit before publishing it?"

Perhaps you should base your world view on facts rather than emotional tirades from Apple's critics to somehow defend why it is that Apple owes you its technology in a subsidized PC in addition to the subsidized iPhone you can already get.

How Leander Kahney Got Everything Wrong by Being an Irredeemable Jackass

Is Apple's MobileMe Secure?

Then explain to me why Apple is making iLife, OS X, iPhone OS, iTunes, etc.

Riiiight, like you know how MS managed to go bankrupt after IBM PC compatible clones came on the market.

Apple can live on the iPod, iPhone, and the Macs. Sure, some people will go buy OS X and install it on a normal computer, that still makes money for Apple you act as if OS X is somehow some radically new OS. It isn't. It is BSD with a nice GUI and Coco, etc. All the various versions of OS X do is change up the GUI, fix some bugs and add in a couple of new features. Charging $100 for an OS is enough money to keep development of it going. You act as if Apple sells OS X as a loss, which they clearly don't.

If Apple was a software company, then they wouldn't be losing money. Since Apple sells complete packages and makes most of their money on hardware sales, if Psystar wins, it could spell the end of Apple. Without Apple, no more OS X development. Parasites are never beneficial to anything but themselves.

It was removed temporarily:
http://android-developers.blogspot.com/2008/08/some-information-on-apis-removed-in.html

Now imagine WoW with 20 years of hardware and software progress, as well as a direct neural interface ;-)

Try reading anything written by William Gibson, Neal Stephenson, and the Tad Williams series "Otherland" for starters.

Then watch some obscure TV shows and movies. I recommend a very rare and seldom seen movie called The Matrix starring a virtually unknown actor name Keanu something....

On a less sarcastic note, it IS rather nice to see some real progress starting to happen in implementing these ideas. I really hope we don't piss around for another 20 years before we get full-immersion VR, we have the technology to do this in less than 10.

Zaphod Beeblebrox writes "After several years in the making, the modern remake of the popular classic Sierra adventure "Quest for Glory II: Trial by Fire" was finally released. It can be downloaded for free in the AGD Interactive website.

http://www.agdinteractive.com/"

http://callpod.com/ I think they're a bit pricey, but definitely worth it if you've got a ton of gadgets. Two cellphones qualifies... :)

fixed.

This leaves me wondering if an object from the Oort cloud may have met a fateful ending with what is now the objects that form the Asteroid Belt. There has long been the notion that the debris that makes up this particular region of our solar system was once a planet that may have been destroyed early in the formation of our star system. At some point a major solar system even took place some time during the mid stages of the planet formation. The scarring of the Moon, Mars, and other inner planets indicate such an event took place.

I'm willing to go as far as to say it was one of these objects that was responsible for the destruction of a now ghost planet between Mars and Jupiter.

Mac OSX is useless for multitasking, the global menu bar alone means that you can realistically only work on one app at a time. Plus its a pain to resize windows and I am yet to see a "tile windows Horizontally/Vertically" function like you get in windows (this is a great help when taking info from one program into another or when reading response messages in real-time as you make changes). lack of a task bar means I cant tell what programs I have open and if any of them require my attention (under Windows the task bar item flashes), under Mac OSX I need to alt tab or do that F11 thing to figure out what's open which takes my full attention away from what I am doing.

Mac OS X displays everything in icons with no text, it takes the human mind 2 to 5 times as long to decipher icons (pictures, hieroglyphics, etc..) than it does to read text, also icons under OS X take up more room (we gave up on hieroglyphs and started using a letter based alphabet for a good reason), lack of a proper file tree under the default file browser makes browsing for multiple files under different directories a pain (search takes longer when I already know what I am looking for). All of this increases information overload (too much information being displayed at once making it difficult to maintain attention), this kicks in under OS X long before Windows and Windows is nowhere near as efficient at displaying information as Linux (I find text based configs far more ergonomic than the GUI pop ups under Windows and OSX, the downside is that you need to know the commands and syntax). Linux has the advantage of having multiple desktops for separating out works, IM/Email client and browser in one desktop, some logs "tail -f"ing in another, text editors and terminals in the other two. Having everything on screen at once is not a good thing as this just leads to information overload, grouping work items work items increases the amount of information that can be readily accessed. After I make a change and restart a service I just move to the desktop with the logs already set up in a way that is easy to read, at this time the logs require my full attention and I don't want a IM client or browser to annoy me.

On a 30" display at work I can have IM, email, code, debugger, everything visible at once. Good luck doing that on windows.

If you have trouble doing that on windows I suggest you unplug your computer and return it to the store, IT is not for you. on a screen that size managing windows will be easy, its when you are working on a 19" is where it gets difficult (except when using multiple desktops, see the Linux point above). Every time I use OS X I get the impression it was never designed for anyone to do more than one thing at a time.

The physics of the teleportation are pretty boring, but the fact that you can see through the portals and have an object go halfway through a portal are unusual.

I don't care enough about programming games to RTFA, but that could be something worth talking about. Chances are it's not what they're talking about, though.

If Psystar wins, it'll be a pyrrhic victory.

Apple will just kill retail sales of OS X upgrades, and do it all through the iTunes store. Won't prevent hackintoshes but it'll kill Psystar's ability to ride Apple's development efforts.

No, a Mac is a PC now.

PC is a term for a computer that descends from the IBM PC family and is destined for a single person to use in a home or office, which is basically an Intel/x86-based computer. It has nothing to do with the OS as Windows wasn't the only OS that ran on an IBM PC.

Macs are just PC's running some fancy bling software.

Not the good looking, sweet smelling, celebrity vagina.

Having seen (or been subjected to), as we all have, to upskirts of Britney, Paris, etc, I gotta say that "celebrity vagina" is by no means universally "good looking, sweet smelling"...

You can be sued for anything, but that doesn't mean it'll stick.