Ah, so when Steve Jobs said "I'm going to destroy Android! I'm going thermonuclear on them, I will spend every last cent of Apple's $40b in the bank to destroy Android!", he actually meant something more like:

"Ah, jolly good chaps those Google folk, helping us sell our devices by making fantastic apps!"

I'm glad we have you to clarify that. Then again, I'm not quite sure your theory maps completely onto reality.

If you believe in any of the basic tenets of democracy, the case to answer is always for the "why" side not the "why not" when it comes to censorship. Simply asking "hey, why not just introduce a repressive censorship regime?" is not valid by itself if you want to call your country a democracy.

They won't come crawling back to Google. They will crawl to their legislators to mandate that Google include them its index, thus forcing Google to index them AND pay money to do it.

He spends half the article complaining about supposed misreporting of "rounded corners" as an issue and then admits that in fact the jury did decide in favor of Apple's design patent on the rounded corners (qualified by equally dumb things like a "flat surface", and a "grid of icons", but that hardly makes the reporting of it sensationalist).

Good point. If Google is at fault here, why is Apple not also for offering a feature that claims to block 3rd party cookies and then actually allows them? Google can claim that they simply rely on the browser's stated features to actually work, and they can't be responsible for every possible bug in any browser in existence that might ignore the user's wishes and give Google more information than they should have. Personally, I think that if Google is investigated, so too should Apple be - they left this hole for a reason - presumably financially driven reasons just like Google. If Apple made the judgement that their user's convenience or their own tracking mechanisms were more important than privacy then why is Google blamed for making the same assumption?

The other question is, if this is actually prosecuted, what is going to happen to the hundreds or thousands of major web sites that are routinely doing this? Are we going to investigate them all?

Yeah, that statement doesn't really capture it very well. Google wanted (actually, needed) Java to be open source under a permissive license, not GPL. This trial is in an interesting way, an examination of the difference between the GPL and Apache licenses and how incredibly important they are. However both of them certainly qualify as open source.

That would have been silly because Google started working on Android when Apple was a company that made portable music players and pretty much nothing else. But even so, he did in fact recuse himself from all discussions involving the iPhone and resigned not long after its release. Since Google purchasing Android was very publicly known there is no excuse for the rest of the board for not removing him if they thought it was a problem. There was absolutely nothing secret about it, so if it was a problem as you seem to believe then that is a testament to incredible stupidity of the Apple board room and not much else.

Google released everything they created as open source, so they can hardly be anti open source. They released it under a far more liberal license than Oracle did as well. Oracle can freely copy anything they want back from Google's implementation into OpenJDK - but not the other way around.

TFA:
> The Windows 7 desktop just plain can’t be rented

I guess it's not precisely Windows 7, but I seem to be able to rent full Windows instances from EC2 for .12 / hour.

I think the current state of knowledge is that there will be no access to non-Metro apps at all on ARM. ie. if you are using a tablet you will most certainly be forced into the walled garden. Of course you can just not buy a tablet, but you could also not buy a computer ... it's not the solution we're looking for.

Utter rubbish. Apple is using every kind of patent imaginable from how to make a touch screen to how a scrolling list should bounce. You'd have to be pro-every-kind-of-possible-patent to agree with what Apple are doing.

Twitter has shown that you can run a successful service without demanding real names.

I think a huge mistake for G+ was that they didn't make it clear up front that the real name policy was going to be enforced. It wasn't even clear to me that policy existed up front. It looked like they got greedy when they saw the early popularity and decided to take advantage of it by changing the rules. It ruined a huge part of G+'s selling point. They came out of the gate saying "We have better privacy than FB". Everyone cheered. Then Google said "But for reasons we won't explain very well and which were never stated up front we are now making everyone who uses it tell us their real names". All the privacy advocates who were cheering stopped and started booing. Dumb move Google, dumb, dumb dumb.

Even if they did announce the real name policy up front it still is a huge issue because that does not exist the rest of Google services. That means a large number of people who happily go by any moniker they like on Google services, GMail, etc. suddenly find they can't use Google+. They either have to expose their real name on an account that has years of history that they might wish to remain disconnected from their real name or they have to make a separate account for G+. Google wants its cake (people using real names) and to eat it too (connect G+ to everyone's existing Google services). Unfortunately for Google these things conflict.

Google seems to be making an art form of screwing up this kind of thing.

One is outputting numerous products and competing quality and satisfying consumers. The other makes hardly any products, updates them just once every 18 months or so but while doing nothing with their own products spends huge on lawyers to use dodgy tactics to delay competitors.

This sort of abstract economics bugs me. Yes in theory in a perfect world and a closed system with perfect frictionless economics you might be right. In practice, the system is not closed and not frictionless. When those jobs go they a) may exit the closed system (eg: disappear from the US and appear in China, India or elsewhere) or b) if they do reappear there may be a tremendous cost associated with that (people losing jobs, defaulting on their loans, marriages breaking up, children scarred by trauma of financial hardship ...). There's no fundamental law that guarantees the net positives will outweigh the net negatives of any given event like this that happens. You can have your theory about the general market and how overall it moves humanity forward and also an opinion that an individual transaction is destructive and a net negative and be totally consistent.

Except that by some metrics now they are bigger, and arguably far more powerful since they've escaped virtually any regulatory control. Microsoft is now truly a tamed beast, while Apple is a like Godzilla on the loose stomping all over the place.