It seems inaccurate to call this theft. I think in these 51%+ cases, the currency is working as designed and whoever thought this wouldn't happen lacks imagination. Is it theft if someone figures out a way to predict lottery numbers (e.g. time travel)? Only where there are laws.
You are not thinking innocuous enough. In Utah it is easier than that. Get caught buying coffee or tea at the local grocery store and you are not a true Mormon. I vaguely remember a scandal involving a Udall (Mormon) politician, where the bigger scandal was not that he supposedly shoplifted, but that it was alcohol.
It would just be nice if it worked, at all. Call me unlucky, but after having three installs of 11.4 on different, relatively current display hardware fail to produce a reliably working UI on any of them, and having experienced extreme difficulty with the gnome option as well on these distributions, I reverted to 10.10 or 10.4 everywhere I run it, and am migrating to Debian Squeeze. When all new application windows are invisible, how can you blame that on the hardware, and the forums seemed filled mostly with devs denying the problems. I don't doubt it works for some people, but I stopped recommending to friends.
Ubuntu seems to have really underestimated the difficulty of delivering new functionality like a desktop or just decided they do not care.
In their behavior with respect to browser (and other standards), yes. Despite the supposed one company one vote model, generally every other company can be moving forward and if Microsoft signals thumbs down, it will come to a grinding halt.
If Microsoft stops browser development, the w3c takes that as a sure sign that browsers are no longer important to anyone, which is fine, as long as w3 doesn't value the other memberships.
whatwg was taken over by w3c as a desperate move on Microsoft's behalf and immediately put under a Microsoft chair despite their long history, and slowed down by years.
I think they will be served just fine by improving their own compliance where it counts, which as I interpret these and other tests, is already better than IE's.
Why go to great lengths to prop up such a sagging organization (w3c, Microsoft, take your pick)? It has never been beneficial in the past to do so. Microsoft has only historically materially supported browser standards at w3c when they were so severely behind they could not use their other monopolistic behaviors to destroy the browser market.
w3c has to value the contribution other companies besides Microsoft in their real plans rather than just being Microsoft's rescue vehicle one year and their sword in the backs of the competition the next when they suddenly lose interest in open standards again and shut everything down because w3c thinks if Microsoft no longer thinks it is important no one else should either.
Get back to me when IE passes a significant battery of Firefox-submitted tests. W3C is owned by Microsoft at a time when Microsoft has lost all right to call themselves a browser vendor for any purpose other than to harm the browser market.
Get back to me when IE 9 runs on any of the thousands of machines in my company, where Windows Vista/7 is a non-starter at least for the next two years. Get back to me when it is able to run on any machine I have at home. It never will. With the possible exception of Safari, every other browser tested runs everywhere required, I think.
I like free software, too. That's why I have avoided apple consumer devices for years. I was offered one at work, but turned it down for something I could run software from any source on.
Maybe this is a hard choice if VLC is the only free software you have seen that you want to run on your device, or if the freedom part of the equation is less important to you than just what software you have. For me, the attitude of Steve Jobs makes it a no-brainer.
You really have the gall yourself to say that in a world where you can't as much as sing Happy Birthday to your child without violating copyright.
You would put fish into a tank with barbed or poisoned food and blame them for dying not sticking to the safe food.
You might have a point if I had a reasonable choice of not sending my children to a public school which teaches them the poisoned memes, eliminating free broadcasts of corrupt (aka copyrighted) content, etc. fighting the poison in other ways, but in America, corporatism is God, so it only works the other way, doing whatever it takes to hook our children on corrupt themes that will make money for the corporations even if free alternatives would have done just as well.
If you are going to spout naiveté, then the opposite extreme sounds more attractive. If they didn't want it copied, why did they broadcast it in the first place. If they don't publish it, then no one will "take" it.
But you want to have it both ways, on the one hand use public ideas with just a twist that you can poison with copyright and use to make money, make it popular and embed it into everyone's public spaces and minds, and on the other hand, retain tight control over what these people who have been polluted with it can do with it, when it has become part of them and their thought processes.
This is corruption, pure and simple. There should be no place for governmental policing of thought in America just to satisfy corporate greed.
It may be obvious to you, but not to me so why not? If you can find a way to get it to land on earth without burning too much in the atmosphere, isn't that better than mining it in space?