I can't say that I've thought it through that much yet, but if Robot-Nixon had the nose I'd have to think about it.

It really depends on the robot on political office. If it was like Data from a TNG episode where he played the role of a judge between Picard and a romulan pretending to be a demon he stated that he must follow the rules and laws of the people of the planet to the letter. Picard also points out that he also couldn't be swayed or intimidated. Yes, you could still run into troubles with a robot politician like that, but I could live with that as opposed to the politicians that change what they say based on who is donating to them.

Sure it might create a ton of bureaucracy, but because of it there should be simpler laws, and less ambiguous laws that are too open to interpretation.

I have an Apple fanboy friend that I recently talked to about his thoughts on the iPhone 4 problems, and he is a true to the kool-aid follower and replied that it wasn't a real problem just a bunch of isolated incidents. He has not yet upgraded though since he waits for the initial bugs to get worked out before jumping in on a new technology. So anyway he was trying to argue that the iPhones didn't have a real problem and that getting the protector was an adequate fix, that Apple shouldn't have to pay for it.

I'm not a mechanic but tried to make a car comparison. What if some company sold a car and shortly after they sold millions of that car they found that a wheel would fall off whenever you made a left turn. Instead of fixing the problem, the car company said everyone needed to buy a giant bumper that fit around the car that would hold the tire in place when they turn left, but the trade off is that the car is not a little bigger, might not fit in the garage or parking places quite right, etc...

People would demand that the car company fix the car itself and not offer a workaround which covers the real problem. Its like treating the symptoms of an illness instead of the illness itself. You can drink all the chicken soup or take all the cough syrup you want but that isn't going to cure Pneumonia. Apple currently has a defective product, it is their responsibility to fix their product's defect, not the consumer's to buy a protective shield, not Apple's to give all users a shield either. They need to FIX their problem at the source. If it takes a redesign to protect the antenna and recall/replace all of them in circulation, so be it. For some reason people are giving Apple a free ride over a critical flaw in one of their major products when they've gone after other companies in other industries for much less serious flaws in their related products.

If/when the iPhone moves to Verizon it won't create a large increase of new iPhone customers. I'd be surprised if the customer base increases 10%. Most people that really want an iPhone already switched to AT&T to get one and I don't really think that the Verizon carrier holdouts are that many.

What will happen though is that Apple will make a ton of money because everyone that is dissatisfied with AT&T will jump ship over to Verizon. Verizon sales will jump because of it, and AT&T might drop a position in the cell phone carriers rankings. Apple will probably release press statements about how they are the world's awesomest phone because they sold 1.x million new phones on Verizon in addition to what they have on AT&T, but fail to report the 1.x million-y that they lost from AT&T because they switched to Verizon and the "official numbers have not been determined yet."

A coworker of mine has a similar issue with her cell phone at her house. When she gets within 2 blocks of her home her phone loses its signal, and she has confirmed with her neighbors that also have the same carrier that they have the same problem. She recently got a new phone thinking that it was a problem with the phone, but the problem continues. Other people with the same carrier can come over and their phones on the same network work with a full signal, but everyone that lives there continues to have trouble. She and her neighbors have called the carrier, done the tower update codes and everything else that they make you do and the carrier continues to claim that there is no problem and they have to live with it.

How about an option for "Met by accident and GTFO ASAP"?

I think first contact would more likely be a ship that had to (crash) land for repairs, after being discovered by whatever local government and the initial standoff, they would (try to) repair their ship and get the heck out of here faster than they crashed because of how stupid they find out we are.

Lets face it, religious nuts would decry them to be the devil and encourage people to kill them, governments would want to capture/kill them for either political clout or to study, science would want to capture/kill them for obtaining knowledge either passed on by the aliens or by dissecting them, in pretty much every case (except for the hostile alien invaders) things would end up bad for the aliens. Even for the aliens were invaders (which is the next likely case) everything I mentioned would apply for trying to stop them.

If Adobe was really upset with how Apple is conducting themselves, maybe they'll start dropping support (or seriously delaying it) for their products on Apple platforms. Granted it could backfire and cause webmasters to rewrite their sites to drop flash, but think about the other programs? Other than switching to MS, to get apps like Photoshop or CS, what would Mac users do? Anyone arguing that alternate apps exist that do just as good of a job, why haven't they run Photoshop a run for their money? I'm looking at GIMP as an example.

What would be the backlash if after the next OS X/Safari update, Adobe announced no more Mac support for PDF, Flash, Photoshop, CS, etc... Throw in the mobile support for flash that is supposed to be coming to most other big name non-Apple mobile devices this year, they can try to hurt Apple where it would hurt the most, their users.

But like I said, it could completely backfire, and Adobe might come back with their tail between their legs and ask Steve Jobs for forgiveness.

I was reading something on this topic a few months ago and the way that I remember it is that under the current laws the volume of the commercials cannot exceed the highest decibel level of the program it is with. There is no restriction on what portion of the program the "loud" commercials are aired with, they can't be louder than the loudest part of the show. So if you are watching a movie that ends in a loud explosion at the end, you get to hear Billy Mays yelling at you every commercial break. I'm on satellite TV and have an older pre-digital conversion television, and I have to say that FX is one of the worst offenders of this. Most channels that I watch I can comfortably have the volume set at just under the 50% marker at a level of 22-25. If I watch anything on FX I need to turn the volume up to at least 30 to make the program hearable at the same level as the other channels, but when a commercial comes on I need to drop the volume back down otherwise it is insanely loud. Its almost like FX airs the show at the lowest decibel of their commercials, then air their commercials at the normal level.

Just wait for someone to realize that they are missing a huge advertising market by not advertising on mobile (phone) browsers. Lots of sites these days are making their "mobile" page as a "watered down" version of their main pages, and as far as I can tell that primarily means removing lots of ads. There are some sites that I actually like better in their mobile versions than the real versions and change my User Agent in FireFox to a mobile browser to get that page. I'm not a trendsetter so I know that if I'm doing this there are others doing this as well, and once the developers catch on it is only a matter of time before we start seeing more ads on our mobile phones when we're browsing. Better hope you have an unlimited data plan when this happens.