If they did it for a day, that might annoy Apple and Microsoft. If they did it for longer, people would just move away from Google and go somewhere else. If people wanting to buy iPads or Surfaces or look up Windows APIs or whatever can't find their answers on Google, they'll stop going to google to find Thai restaurants and art supply stores too. It's kind of like shutting the government down to force negotiation over a particular law. You better be REALLY sure that the people affected by the shutdown feel as strongly as you do about the particular law before you do it.

It isn't ironic. The reason they took those actions and the reasons we are discussing it is because it gives them a legal monopoly. It's not like they banded together to buy these patents and then were later surprised when it occurred them that this allowed them to sue their competitors for competing with them.

But the Macbook Air is a specialist laptop specifically designed to be smaller, thinner and lighter. Apple has lots of laptops with 2560x1600 resolution, you just chose one designed for a different purpose.

In the US, people refer to university and college are interchangeable terms. Normally, when we say "straight out of college" we mean graduating with a bachelor's degree.

That's the joke.

Well, your brother married someone with documented psychosis, multiple suicide attempts and a known history of violent behavior. Can you really be sure his judgement is that much better?

Another possibility, as the summary implies, they might be trying to get the defendant to provide the key just to prove that the defendant knew how to decrypt the hard drive and had access to the contents. That is a classic 5th amendment protection.

iPads are officially 3 years old now. They certainly might still fizzle out -- netbooks were pretty much replaced by tablets, and tablets could be replaced by something else.You need some kind of rationalization beyond just saying they'll fizzle out, though. There is obviously a market for them (and netbooks before them) that traditional PCs don't fill. Something's going to fill that niche.

Lots of discussion here about why a 6' tall 200 pound person (who would be technically overweight, definitely not skinny) wouldn't expect to pay as much as a 5' tall 200 pound person (who would definitely be obese).

Planes have a limited amount of lift (and can only lift so much weight), but before you hit that limit you'd hit another bottleneck -- planes have limited numbers of seats. Assuming that you can only fit x people on the plane and that planes will always be full to capacity (they all seem to be these days), and assuming their weight/fare formula guarantees that each extra pound is profitable for the airline, it's the to airline's advantage to carry non-obese people.

If you have 300 seats, you can fill them with the 6' tall 200 pound people, 1 per seat. If you try to fill it with 5' tall 200 pound people, they will take up more than one seat each. You will make less money filling a plane with the obese people than the overweight people who still fit in one seat.

No one questioned why Christian parents freak out. It was merely used as anecdotal evidence that the number of Christians is not exactly the same as the number of children Christian couples have.

I never claimed that gold WAS in a bubble, and I never suggested that the value of gold should be related to the dollar. All I did was quote one line and reply to that line. Everything else you think you read (and thought was "interesting, interesting,") came from your own mind, not from my text.

Assume for a minute that the Dow is a perfect way of tracking what it's intended to track, with no flaws. So it perfectly mirrors the US economy. The reason you buy gold -- rather than invest in the stock market or anything else dependent on a money economy -- is because you assume the money economy may either completely collapse, or at least develop another great depression or something similar. In those cases, even if the Dow reduced to zero, gold should still maintain its value, because it has value that isn't derived from the value of the dollar, unlike the Dow.

So my point is that expecting the Dow to mirror the US economy (or the Dow) on the way up is ludicrous, since the whole reason to invest in gold is because it WON'T MIRROR THE DOW on the way down. The two derive value from completely different things, and in fact, that's the only reason people buy gold.

If you think through your own argument (that the dollar is an arbitrary measure of value), you'll realize you agree with me. The Dow is much more closely tied to the dollar than gold is. If gold is growing at the same rate as the Dow, it has somehow become tied to the value of the dollar and the size of the US economy. That would make it a gold bubble, which is specifically what my post said.

That's not really a reasonable comparison. First, the Dow is a bit arbitrary -- it follows only a specific group of 30 companies that are supposed to represent the US economy. Here are a couple of articles at different times about what would have happened if Apple had been added:
when apple was up: http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/money/perfi/stocks/story/2012-02-15/apple-stock-dow-jones-industrial-average/53109426/1
when apple went down: http://blogs.marketwatch.com/thetell/2013/03/05/apples-not-in-the-dow-thank-goodness/

Basically, that would completely change the value of the Dow and we would all be panicking right now, as the down dropped with Apple stock. On the other hand, around the election, people would have been crowing about the stock market hitting all-time highs.

So apart from comparing an historically trackable value, like gold, to an arbitrary measurement like the Dow, they also track different things. You're comparing gold's value to something which is trying to track the overall US economy. And the US economy is MUCH bigger than it was at the turn of the last century. Gold shouldn't mirror the US economy. If it did, THAT would be a definite bubble.

If I read your post correctly, you should be fine. You're saying you don't do business with Paypal. Then why should you care if Paypal is charged higher fees? I also didn't see anything in the article about anyone suing anyone (though I wouldn't rule that out).

What does it even mean to post a copy online and then "take your machines down?" Where are you posting it, Reddit? Even without any DRM you still need a server to be able sell it online. For instance, Apple doesn't have any DRM on music they sell, and I assume Amazon doesn't either. But they still spend quite a bit on software development, servers, network bandwidth and vendor contracts to be ABLE to sell it. It doesn't cost them $1 per song to sell it, but it's not $0.

Check out the link on the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons in the summary:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Association_of_American_Physicians_and_Surgeons

Among other things, their official positions include that the HIV virus doesn't cause AIDS, human activity hasn't contributed to climate change, the FDA is unconstitutional, that medicare is "evil", and that people are conspiring to replace creationism with evolution. (also, that requiring mandatory immunizations is wrong. They aren't a medical advocacy group, they are a political advocacy group. If they quote peer-reviewed research that shows immunizations aren't effective (and not from their journal) then it will deserve a citation in response. Until then, they are just making stuff up.