You can easily run something that didn't come from the app store. It works the same way as the iPhone, allowing for ad hoc installation of software, and even management of software for enterprise customers. You do need to sign up as a developer to do so and to get the tools to do so. It’s primarily intended as a way to distribute beta/prerelease versions of applications, or for organizations who develop applications for internal use. How do you think developers get their apps-in-progress onto iOS devices for testing? Dev's are limited to 100 users, enterprise customers are not.

For casual users buying and selling on eBay, especially selling at less thn first paid, I would agree with not paying taxes. This is targeting people operating ongoing online businesses that compete with offline businesses, yet pay no state, federal, local or sales taxes. Either all reselling should be tax free, or all taxed - what's going on now is unfair to businesses that do pay taxes & duties.

There is no infringement until Android software is applied to some hardware and sold. It is the combination of the two that creates the infringement. Google is covered in this, except possibly taking a hit for enabling infringement. You cannot patent an idea, only a method. You build a mousetrap, you cannot patent "mousetraps"; you can however patent the method by which your mousetrap works. Others can build mousetraps, but to avoid infringing your patent, they would have to come up with a different method of trapping mice.

You can't patent an idea like "Conserving power by reducing voltage supplied to an instruction-processing portion of a processor", but you can patent a method for doing it. Other companies are free to develop other methods of implementing the idea, but Apple has a patent on their particular method.

http://daringfireball.net/2010/01/apple_adobe_flash

If Apple were "blocking" Flash and Silverlight simply to preserve their media sales, they would be blocking any kind of streaming media, including HTML 5/ H.264.

Since they are not, it makes more sense that they really don't want any single company to "own" the delivery mechansim, especially if it is buggy, crash prone, or a resource hog.

What matters more - unit share of a market or dollar share of a market? Gross sales or net revenue?

This is exactly the position Nokia is finding itself in in another market - making most of the "units" sold, but getting a tiny share of the profits (if any).

Chasing unit sales at the expense of profitability is a good way to bankrupt a company.

However, IF Adobe made CS4 for Linux, and IF you P2P downloaded it and installed it, you too could have this Trojan on Linux.

Most Open Source downloads offer checksum validation - I wonder how many people actually validate what they download?

If all you compare is processor speed and RAM&HD size only, perhaps ... however the Dell is either missing or has lesser quality Processor: Celeron vs Core2 Graphics: nVidia 9400M vs intel X3100 RAM: DDR3/1066 vs DDR2/667 FireWire 800 vs MIA DVI/DisplayPort vs VGA Wireless N vs MIA Bluetooth vs MIA GB Ethernet vs Fast Ethernet Form Factor Power Consumption iLife Software

I don't believe any company has lost as much money as Apple due to not having proper patents and enforcing them. Microsoft alone built a large part of their business courtesy of Apple's prior ineffective enforcement, from Windows to QuickTime and a lot in between.

The fact is, if Apple had not done multitouch first, they would have nothing to patent.

Since they had the vision, did the R&D, bought a few companies and released an actual product incorporating the technology, it would seem they are entitled to a patent on that work. If there is nothing unique or prior art in the patent, it will not stand anyway.

:Would you buy a Macbook to do some hardcore multichannel audio processing anyway? I know I wouldn't.

You can do this with FireWire, as it is not CPU dependent - trying to do pro av with USB requires turning off all nonessential services, screensavers etc as USB throughput is entirely CPU dependent.

The data flow in FireWire is around the CPU, not through it.