Still, it was more or less in line to what the top guy wanted to hear :-)

With that mind-set, he would probably also have succeeded in the GWB administration...

That was really the line of thinking in large parts of the US-government for a while.
Best expressed by no one else than Harry S Truman, who, when a member of the congress complained about the huge amounts of former Nazis in the new intelligence agency the US was building up in post-war Germany (nowadays known as BND), simply replied: "I don't care if this Gehlen guy [first head of the agency, a former Nazi-general] is fucking goats - as long as he's helping us, we'll use him".

During the 2nd world-war, if you played your cards well in Germany, you could achieve a lot. Some people early on realized this and built a career on it that often continued after the war. If you had the support of "the system", you had almost unlimited resources at your disposal.
Von Braun used these resources because he had a vision, a dream - and he was crazy and ruthless enough to sacrifice anything to make his dream come true.
Like the above mentioned Gehlen, he was also bold enough to change sides when the right time had come - knowing that the work he had done and the ideas in his head were more interesting to the Allies than the rest of what had happened during the war.

People from the UK (where V2 rockets hit mostly) are usually furious when you mention the name - they'd have probably wanted to put him up for trial in Nuremberg and seen him hanging - but his work, his men and he himself were already too important by the time the court was setup - and the cold-war had already started.

so I can use http://www.freshports.org/
I have subscriptions for the stuff that I use, build, or that I'm generally interested in (I run my on own build-server and build about 1200 packages these days) and I get an email every evening (local time) that lists all the updates to these projects.
It will sometimes take a longer time for a port to be updated (for various reasons) - but it works well enough.
In these cases, other news-portals often carry the news of a new release (like it's the case for PHP).
In contrast to freshmeat, freshport's mail-summaries contain much more and better information.

Virtualization does not save you anything, once you run a big enough infrastructure.
In fact, it will just generate useless overhead (unless you use a light-weight "virtualization" like FreeBSD Jails, LXC, Solaris Containers).

It would rather make sense to license OS X for certain IBM-servers, which incidentally already carry the "X"-tag.
Apple had not much use for their own servers back when they discontinued them. That certainly hasn't changed.

So you gave the devices in an incomplete setup-state to your users and later complain that they locked you out?

In any case, you just keep a share of the last salary until they return all your property. Problem solved (unless you pay them peanuts and the iDevice is worth more than a month's salary).

Host it e.g. in Switzerland.
I work at a Swiss hosting company - few corporate entities from the US go as far as getting a court-order from a Swiss judge (which we require before we do anything).
We get tons of bogus "Hi, I work for .... , we represent this-and-that large company and so-and-so infringes on our client's copyright etc." emails.
We all tell them to come back when they've got a court-order signed by a Swiss judge. Registered mail.
But of course, unless you also live in Switzerland, the lawyers will eventually just target you directly.
It helps to filter out all the "noise", though - I admit.

Additionally, you've got to choose a hosting-provider that has no US ties - else they just go via the US HQ and then you're back at square one...

On FreeBSD, we have http://www.freshports.org./

I've subscribed to all the ports that interest me or that we're actively using and every time one get's an update, I get an email at the end of the day.
It's really handy.

Does that mean I also don't get email-updates from freshmeat anymore?

Maybe you and some of your friends would roll back.
But that doesn't mean that half of the people who got upgraded to 7 would downgrade to 6 in an instant. That assumption is totally unfounded.
Do you think that the customer satisfaction statistics that show 90%+ results of ipad/iphone would look as good if people hated iOS7 en masse?

For me, having watched the keynote, it was quite clear that it was meant as a light-hearted joke - why anybody would get riled-up about it is beyond me.
Also, I doubt that Apple would be able to achieve and exceed their sales and profit growth targets with only fanbois buying - the number of those is pretty limited and can be counted by counting the number of people who line-up when a new i-device is on sale for the first day.
So, there must be a quite significant number of switchers. And for some, it was indeed a "mistake" to buy an Android phone in the first place.

You're new here, right?

Have they thought about how they could get back the data from amazon, if they decided to switch back or if amazon raises prices?
If you spent 100m/y on hosting - couldn't you do that cheaper yourself?

When this was still in the decision-phase and the City of Munich solicited offers, Microsoft started to offer big discounts. As the "Linux-option" became more and more credible, the discounts got even bigger.
This, in turn, angered high-level officials because the realized, perhaps for the first time, how much they had overpaid for the last decade.

He was going to die. And he knew it. So he was able to take risks that no one else was going to take.
Because he knew: whatever he did (short of doing an OJ-Simpson style stupidity), he would only be judged by his achievements, the products he created.
Nobody remembers Charlie Chaplin for his three teenager-wifes and pre-marriage pregnancies - even though it was a major scandal even back then.
What lives on are his works.

You are correct, you are not their target-demographic.
Their target-demographic doesn't even know what a GPU ist (or like myself, doesn't game at all and thus it doesn't matter as long as it can drive a 30" display).
But the number of people like you is actually decreasing. That's why Samsung has trouble making their numbers every quarter: the top-product they sell appears attractive only to a small number of people (geeks, people who like to tinker).
They can sell a lot of products that don't make much money, though - to people who are unlikely to spend further money.
I've got technically savvy co-workers who have disabled even the finger-print scanner on their iPhone 5S - simply because they don't want to have the slight delay.
Do you think Samsung can sell those people a phone with all those pseudo-features like eye-tracking and what else they built into their everything-and-the-kitchen-sink model?

Apple is still the king in the "less is more"-department, simply by guessing correctly the stuff people really don't want to have.

That said, I have an iPhone 4S and I've got trouble justifying the expense that is an iPhone 5S - but then, people spend much more on cars and motorbikes that depreciate to near zero after 10 years. And an iPhone is good for at least four years of solid use, if you take care of it well.

If people think Android is better value for money, they might actually be correct - but only for their definition of value.