Not the "American company" argument again...

Microsoft had a binding contract with the EU comission, and they broke it.
If they hadn't, the browser ballot would bee a thing of the past in a few months and nobody would care about it anymore.

But Microsoft fucked up, and now they have to face the music for breaking a contract.

And the EU doesn't treat American companies any different from European companies. Ask Gaz du France and E.on whether they liked their fines of half a billion Euro each for collusion: http://ec.europa.eu/competition/elojade/isef/case_details.cfm?proc_code=1_39401

Microsoft was found in violation of monopoly laws because they have a near monopoly on desktop OS' and abused that position.

As much as I dislike Apples business practices: They have neither a (near) monoply on the phone market nor the tablet market. They are a very big player in both, but there is actual competition.

Wrong.
They direct millions and millions of people to the websites of those publishers.
And the publishers want those hits. Otherwise they could easily stop Google from doing so by using the robots.txt.

What actually happens is that the publishers want BOTH: Google redirecting people to their sites and getting money from Google for doing so.

Borderline untrue.
Being German I can tell from own experience that it depends on context. In our school books, museums, TV (documentaries as well as entertainment) you can find swastikas and other Nazi symbols.

The English Wikipedia entry on swastikas unfortunately doesn't go into details, the German entry for Hakenkreuz (use Google translate) explains that education, art, documentations, research and a few more field are excempt from the prohibition.

Hacking into systems you don't have official access to is illegal in the UK just as much as it is in the US.
So he didn't need to know the laws of another country to know that what he did was illegal.

And that he wasn't in the US when he commited a crime in the US is a weak argument too.
If you stand on the French-German border on the French side and I on the German side and I shoot you, wouldn't I have commited a crime in France (as well as in Germany, of course)?

He has Asperger's Syndrome. That doesn't stop him from knowing right from wrong or how laws work.

So if I break into your house because you have crappy locks it's not that bad?
Also, the costs probably are not only about upgrading the security system but also analysing what data he accessed and whether he changed anything, copied any codes that need to be changed etc.

With Apple and Google being to other big (or coming) players in this market you don't need to worry to much about Amazon succeding.

For Amazon selling books is a main part of their business. So they can not sell books below price for too long.
For Apple and Google selling books is just one small part of their portfolio. They could survive a lot longer subsidising book sales then Amazon could.

This money doesn't come from Amazon.
It's from the publishing houses that colluded on price issues following Apples demand.
Amazon is just delivering the settlement money to its customers as Amazon knows who bought what.

On average, you drive longer distances in cars then on a bike, so the stats may be true and yet you don't hear about that many deaths while cycling. Especially if less people use a bike than a car.

That is the same crowd of ten thousands that financed a bunch of games vie Kickstarter in the last few months.

Why should a company no cater to a crowd of tens of thousands that are willing to pay for games that they like?

Your wrong.

re: subject

This isn't about Samsung.

So "copy somebody else, just not Apple"?
The question is not whether it would have been possible to design a device that looks completely different from Apples products, but whether Apple can claim ownership to design principles that have been around before and that are (one) logical solution for a given problem.

Except for the logo, the different form factor and all the other little differences, that create a completely different picture.

MP3 was around and widely used before the iPod came about, so Apple HAD to support it.
And where you're wrong in regards to AAC others wrote already.

Apple doesn't seem to be behind it.
So they will likely try to block Opus being used.

If they have some patents that cover Opus, on the other hand, they might be willing to start an OPUS-LA and cash in.

You seem to miss the fact that licence costs are alse important for any commercial program that is suppost do encode data using the codec, as it is important for manufacturers of devices that are expected to use the codec.
If a company has to pay licence fees for each smartphone or tablet it builds a new format will not take off. If it is free adoption is only a matter of programming to include the codec in the own product.