How about the fact that the whole fucking thing is driven by a touch UI? That it's a thin "shell" that merely exists to assist you in launching apps, as opposed to a full-blown Windows environment? There's more here than just looks. Again, look at the examples of products before the iPad and after the iPad. You can't tell me the only thing that has been copied is the shape and color.

Flamebait taken.

Now thousands of troops will simply die while trying to hold mirrors providing line of sight back to the original light source.

Ahem...

Regardless of the particular patents Apple has chosen to fight with in these battles...

It's certainly not reasonable for Apple to sue any company that makes a device that merely looks similar. But that's not what we're talking about here. We're talking about Apple suing companies who have essentially copied their products and innovations wholesale.

Apple single-handedly made tablets and smartphones into the products you recognize today. Before Apple, we had products like this and this. Suddenly, post-iPhone, we have this and this.

I'm no fan of patents, but this is the exact sort of innovation the patent system was designed to protect in the first place. Regardless of the particular patents Apple has chosen to fight with in these battles, can't reasonable people agree that Apple ought to have some protection on their R&D investments?

Commuters from suburbs impose significant costs when they drive into the city. For instance, traffic planners have determined that the maginal cost of the average person deciding to drive into the Central Business District of Manhattan costs New York City residents $128.

What's absurd is the concept that people whose crappy, selfish lifestyle decisions impose insane costs upon others shouldn't have those costs brought to bear upon them instead. Rising gas prices have barely encouraged people to stop purchasing millions of miniaturized monster trucks — demand-based tolls to access highly-trafficked areas stands a better chance. And it offsets some of the costs back onto the people who impose them in the first place.

UV light != visible light. Go back to high school.

UV light != visible light. Go back to high school.

Irrelevant. I'm replying to the person who lacks a fifth-grade understanding of the term "radiation".

I hate replying to myself, but "radiation" has become the new "chemical". Chemicals are bad. Radiation is bad. This is what we get for de-funding science education.

-1, Idiot

Visible light is a form of radiation. Heat is a form of radiation. Therefore light bulbs cause cancer, right?

What does GIT have over other version management systems? Easier to use? Easier to install?

Not irreparably broken.

To those who are unfamiliar, each commit in Git has a SHA1 hash which is used as an identifier instead of a revision numbers. Unfortunately, they are very unwieldy to communicate to others.

Oh come on. Ctrl+C, Ctrl+V is "unwieldy"?

I have used git exclusively now for over three years, and I completely forgot that incremental version numbers even used to exist. It's a bullshit non-issue..

More to the point, we could simply vaporize every hunk of nuclear waste generated by nuclear power straight into the atmosphere, and it would _still_ be better than coal.

Apple are suing because Samsung smart phones are taking sales away from Apple phones.

Apple is suing because that's how the game is played at this point. Trot out your patents, so does the other guy, and settle on some cross-licensing agreement that (if you've calculated right) puts you in a better position than your competitor. Or encourages your other competitors to follow suit in licensing your patents. You clearly do not understand this level of "business chess". That's alright, but you just really ought to shut up about it until you learn more.

...they've got a lot to lose if phone sales are threatened, namely their astronomical share price.

Share price is an arbitrary value without knowing market cap. If you actually meant "share price", you have no idea how the stock market works. If you actually meant "market cap", you might understand how the market works, but are laughably far from reality. AAPL is currently trading at a 15.92 P/E ratio, compared to a 19.32 P/E for GOOG, an astronomical 2,424.63 P/E for LNKD, and 10.15 P/E for MSFT. However, AAPL has (as of last quarter) nearly 10% of their share price in cold, hard, liquid cash. Assuming a zero growth rate, AAPL will have more cash on hand than its current share price in less than five years.

So tell me, please, how Apple's share price is astronomical.