I have a cheap combination lock that lets me set my own "key". This isn't exactly alien technology, and I think a judge would be able to see the analogy.

Do you also have a fixie? If so, $5 says you're a software engineer at a Bay Area startup.

Ken Thompson had something to say about that. Are you hand-compiling that OS using your own tools and not the vendor-supplied toolchain?

...and are largely from countries with no cultural history of valuing privacy. Now instead of being suspicious of Apple or Microsoft, you have to be suspicious of 100 individual vendors.

...and US court lawsuits. For the first time maybe ever, it seems like the non-geek people around me are starting to get why security is important and are taking it seriously. Apple and MS have a lot more to lose than $RANDOM_CHINESE_VENDOR who can still sell their bad-American-repped $30 phones in developing countries if they're kicked out of America. Take away Apple's North American market and they'd fold overnight. They've been bragging about their security and crypto for a while now to the point of making it a marketing point, and breaking their promise to consumers would likely be catastrophic.

I think standards and APIs are popular/important only while you're trying to achieve dominance, but afterwards you can stop all that. Google (reader) and Netflix can tell you all about that.

Or the email with the link to the page containing a list of URLs pointing at PDF files. Because it's easier to do all that than to read whatever is in the PDF file on a web page somewhere.

Everyone wants that! Good shout!

You could buy all sorts of devices to plug into your phone line, back when we had a clueless government monopoly running the phone system. Some had green stickers saying "this is good" and some had red triangles warning that it could not be connected to your phone system. Absolutely nobody gave a shit about the stickers and plugged whatever they wanted into their phone system. Eventually the stickers went away.

Like basketball, which will suddenly explode in popularity. Or you'll have an elite rowing team picking on freshmen. Perhaps a thug squad of a lacrosse team.

If football were to go away tomorrow, I promise you something would replace it, and quickly.

Yes. Exactly!

On the grand scale of things, I would suggest that evolution *vastly* favours cooperation. No, really. Think about all the cells in your body working together to form a multi-cellular organism. Think about the organelles in symbiosis within those same cells. Think about bacteria sharing plasmids amongst each other, and forming aggregates. Think about ecosystems where different organisms form finely balanced cycles, where no single element ever predominates. Think about the majority of encounters you have with other people in human society, and the large numbers of colony/herd/flock arrangements in wildlife.

There needs to be an "is this person currently capable of driving properly" test. I don't feel any better knowing a loved one died at the hands of someone who's old, or losing their sight etc rather than being under the influence of drink or drugs.

Step one: put barely-thawed turkey breast in crock pot.
Step two: turn it to medium and walk away for 8 hours
Step three: eat a ridiculously moist and tender bird

There are tastier methods, but the marginal gain per effort exerted isn't worth it to me.

I don't get it. Is that supposed to be funny, revealing...what?

I think you're really grasping at straws. Note that Apple is donating all of the proceeds to charity. It's kind of hard to make a profit in volume when you're losing money on each individual sale.