Apparently you're only allowed to make it on locked-down hardware these days, and you should be proud if paying so much.

If you look at many of the lists of 'best Apple apps', Google apps frequently dominate the lists.

Nice to actually be able to see the damn source though, isn't it?

The ubiquity of the internet with the general public is probably an order of magnitude greater as well, although admittedly, a potion of that probably came about because of FaceBook.

The applause is only until they do something the government doesn't like, but they generally don't realize that.

They've already stated that they've used it for squashing dissent and blackmail against "extremists" of some sort haven't they? The term "extremists" can be very flexible as well.

No, he's still pretty much an asshole, but he was also the victim of some fairly serious abuse of process, involving governments across at least two continents. As with many laws, you have to defend people you don't like.

It's true, the recent changes were not completely bad, although they removed some fair use and made digital lock circumvention illegal.

Care to point out a case where Google has actively used patents to sue a competitor without being sued first? Please don't include Motorola suits from before they were purchased.

I've actually had reference sites blocked by a filter because they were classified as 'hacking' sites.

It most definitely can make it more readable in many cases. Have you ever tried to debug Perl written by an 'expert'. The rules are all there, but the meaning is quite obsfuscated. Breaking it up and adding characters helps a lot. I'm not saying it would definitely herlp here as I don't know the new syntax, but it's quite conceivable.

More lines does not neccessarily mean more complexity.

Which means that you could proibably come up with something to do this yourself. I'm sure quite a few people would be interested in it.

They also seem to have an interest in power (as in electrical), probably because of their huge power requirements. The Nest thing is kind of similar to what they were doing with home power monitoring, or at least it's in the ball park.

The convenience factor does enter into it as well. It's pain taking stuff in for repairs. Apple makes decent hardware, but they do seem to have at least as many lemons as anyone else. From what I've seen it's more, perhaps because of the size of the laptops. Most people I know with MacBooks have had at least one repair in the first couple of years. A couple have had machines that had to be replaced as they kept having problems. The good news is that they were replaced free. It's still a pain though.