/etc/hosts is still present in Arch, you do not know what you are talking about.

To be frank, deregulation has started in the 80s, with Reagan, Thatcher in the UK, and then continued with Bush senior and Clinton. A key event being the abrogation of the Glass Stingall Act, which separated retail and investment banking. This Act had been put in place after the crisis of 1929, to... avoid a new crisis. Obviously lessons are quickly forgotten when a lot of money are involved. Watch the documentary "Inside Job" for more about this.

Where do you read the word "Apple" in my text? Your reply is idiotic, because I would have said the same for ANY company, including Samsung. But do not let the facts go in your way.

Indeed, "such rights should not be misused". So why granting bogus patents on obvious features that lead to such abuses? They should fix the system, not try workarounds!

As a geneticist, I completely agree. Furthermore, there are mutations that are particularly "troublesome" or completely lethal without affecting splicing! For instance, some muscular distrophies are caused by a single amino-acid replacement in a protein.

True, but this also depends on which class of medicine. There there are also some efficacy data collected with vaccines.

Yes, but only the Gallery application is concerned by the violation. Thus it is not a OS problem, just changing the Gallery in Android 2.3.4 to match the version of Android 3.0. That is most probably trivial.

Because as the court noted, their tablets are already under Android 3.0, and therefore are not affected by the patent. That's what they meant.

Well, they forgot to teach you about the one-time pad.

Now, don't get me wrong..
I think 90% of the tablets out there look like each other; a large screen with a bezel with rounded corners and rounded-corner icons laid out on a straight grid (I so do wish Microsoft would have continued their hexagonal grid, it was refreshing).

But that is the point of these court hearings. Apple does not use patents or copyright, but merely aspect or design. They got an injuction on the basis that they filled a device drawing that is rectangular and black. This existed long before Apple, and should be taken into account in the court. Furthermore, in the German decision, Samsung was not even notified and did not defend their case!

Samsung is now showing to a court in Netherland 20 cases of prior art in tablets, such as this one from 1994: the Knight Rider http://rossdawsonblog.com/weblog/archives/2011/04/tablet-computers-as-seen-from-1994.html As seen on these videos, this looked exactlty like an iPad! You may follow the courtroom debates thanks to Andreas Udo de Haes https://twitter.com/#!/andreasudo and on OsNews: http://www.osnews.com/

This reminds me this excellent book: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simulacron-3

That is a fallacy. The problem is exactly the same for imperial units, e.g. when you want to cut a yard into tens. If you round down, obviously the sum of all parts will not match the size of the whole. Nothing prevents you to cut a meter board into thirds, the same way you can cut a foot into ten pieces. Do you think that buildings are badly adjusted in the rest of the world?

I am sure that with the money they spend in Windows licenses, they could have bought new compatible printers and scanners. Come on, most high grade, networked all-in-one printers and scanners are compatible with Linux.