Sure, they are not required to. But there are a lot of third party manufacturers that would produce replacement parts, sometimes even better parts than the originals if there was a demand for it. This is simply not an option for Win XP no matter how high the demand is.

This should not be news to anyone making themselves dependent on Microsoft products, but lots of companies are doing it anyway. Guess it would be a bit different if the market was not monopolized.

And we who are the equivalent of amoebas compared to them would know that how?

We can't just assume that advanced civilizations will be nice just because we want it to be like that, there is simply too many unknown factors for us to assume anything. They could just as well have the attitude that there's another little developing planet, blast them quickly before they too invent the Xyz rays and can start to compete with us

The default bootup option should of course be your dummy OS that is passwordless with no personal information in it and a backup job to transmit photos, keylogs etc. to your server.

Protects your real data from getting wiped by tech-challenged thiefs and will also help you getting your laptop back if stolen.

No, they are just ordinary ISP:s and offer no such service as far as I know, but there are of course others who does like http://ipredator.se/

Ouch, you are asking for some serious trouble. Not even the RIAA can reach in the afterlife.

Then it is almost a little sad that they are rebranded products made by other manufacturers like Logitech or Dell.

If the prosecution fails the next step will be even heavier lobbying against politicians, "look what they are doing and they are getting away with it".

There are a few legal changes related to IP law and the operators resposibilities coming up for discussion in the swedish parliament soon. A failed prosecution would likely be used to point out how unfair the content owners are being treated in Sweden compared to other countries.

When Small company deals with Big company Small company often has to sign the deal Big company offers or there will not be any deal at all and perhaps not even a Small company a year from now.

Would his changes then be compatible with changes made by the rest of the world.

I would say probably not.

Speaking of other open games, take a look at this:
http://ufoai.sourceforge.net/

Of course they need to use other platforms in their research lab, it's called R&D on innovative new features you know.

It is open. The reason why Adobe threatened to sue Microsoft seems to be that they would use their monopoly situation to force a certain Adobe product line out of business by offering the "save as PDF" in Office.

Believe it or not, but a lot of companies actually pay money for propriety software used only to convert their documents to PDF format. The lawsuit threat proves it.

The monopoly situation is what allows them to sue. If everyone was using OpenOffice I suppose they could sue Sun(?) for making Adobes business idea irrelevant unless Sun removed the PDF conversion.

So Microsoft actually wanted to do something good and implement an open standard, even if it was probably not out of love for open standards in general. They were stopped by anti-monopoly laws that should be a good idea since monopolies are bad, but which in this case is used to sustain Adobes sales of the same function a few more years just because the customers they would otherwise loose doesn't realize they could get the same thing for free. Their terms for letting Microsoft include the function was that they should charge extra for it and let Adobe in on the revenue. Adobe is just after the money whether it comes from their own products or from getting a piece of the monopoly.

You may consider it good or bad, but the fact is that monopoly regulations doesn't let the market leader compete on even terms featurewise with other products when it comes to functionality that can be seen as a separate business niche.

Now I am sure that Adobes package does a lot more than just convert other documents to PDF and some customers actually need that extra functionality, but Adobe still considers the conversion alone important enough for their business model to go to court over so that alone is the important feature here.

And this is of course why you should avoid getting locked in with a proprietary file format in the first place.

The geeks have already installed Firefox on their grandmoms computers and giving the geeks another non-IE option to install would not really help decrease the IE marketshare. So it would make sense for Google to primarily try and reach the remaining IE users by other means than the geek install squad.

Making it the default browser with OEM sales would really be the killing blow. I am not sure what it takes to do that, but can imagine Google having both the means and the motivation.