> This is not an epidemic or pandemic.

Wrong. It is a global pandemic. Here's the WHO pandemic flu update (it's update 71 in case you missed the first 70 of them):
http://www.who.int/csr/don/2009_10_23/en/index.html

>> The Chinese leadership is much, much smarter than the American populace.

you don't set a very high bar. Americans as a group are incredibly willfully ignorant and shortsighted. Electing a willfully ignorant president, twice, is but one example. Pulling children out of PUBLIC schools so they don't get brainwashed by a speech made by the President of the United States is another. Not building nuclear power plants due to irrational fear of radiation is another. Not recognizing that taxes and spending actually have to balance in the long term. Not insisting politicians deal with the structural imbalances of Medicare and Social Security early to minimize the pain.

There are many more examples...

Rabbits eat their poop as part of their digestive process, rather than chewing their cud. If you want to call that ok, go right ahead. Evolutionarily you are correct, they do quite well, but lets not overstate how efficient they are at digesting - everything gets run through twice.

You're wrong. Road damage is correllated to the fourth power of the total axle weight.
This is a very well studied area, both theoretically and empirically, so guessing isn't necessary.
Here's one reference, googling will quickly find others. Binging might too.

http://www.lib.unb.ca/Texts/JFE/bin/get6.cgi?directory=July99/&filename=martin.html

I like how it's done in keyPass - be default all passwords are masked, but you can use a button adjacent to the password box to turn off masking.

I think 8-10 character passwords should be masked to eliminate shoulder surfing issues, but who was the idiot in the Microsoft networking UI team that thought that WPA keys were passwords and decided they needed to be masked? That's just nonsense. Encryption keys are not passwords. They should be long and shoulder surfing is not an issue because you only enter them once. Every time I connect to a wireless network with windows I curse that idiot... I'm sure I'm not the only one.

Clearly Intel and their shareholders should be happy you don't run Intel.

Your losing strategy would still be abandoning the entire European market to AMD, giving them much more sales and revenue and profit.

Why? Because countries can control their borders. Nobody in the EU could buy your cpu's because they couldn't IMPORT them until you paid the fine,and/or they'd be slapped with an import duty which would apply to the fine. Your expensive EU fab would sit idle. Your shareholders would fire you for complete incompetence and you'd never work in the industry again (I'm just making up the last bit, incompetent executives never get fired and blackballed - they get hired to run some other company by even stupider management. Check out HomeDepot and Chrysler and see how it works)

Still, the basic truth is that governments can be influenced by companies, but companies cannot "fight" governments. They will lose.

What Intel will really do is delay through the legal process as long as possible, influence the governments as much as possible, and ultimately probably pay a somewhat reduced fine some years in the future.

Damn, should have previewed...

Here's what you're failing to grasp

      The more market share that Linux has, the more support that they should see ...

This is only true if people make choices differently based on Linux support. But you are refusing to do that.
You refuse the suggestions of the quickest most effective way to solve a basic incompatibility problem: use different hardware.

You made the choice to buy an ATI card. YOU, PERSONALLY, made that choice. It's lack of compatibility is YOUR PROBLEM. You clearly made the choice to buy it based on the fact it works with Windows and without any consideration of using it in Linux. You are therefore... stuck with windows. When told how to become unstuck you refuse to move but insist on others accommodating you. From my perspective that appears both lazy and arrogant, and I am clearly not alone in that perception.

And then you publicly criticize the negative feedback you receive...

If you give your money to an uncooperative vendor, even in ignorance, you reward their uncooperative behavior. THE FREE SOFTWARE COMMUNITY WAS HARMED BY YOU. It doesn't owe you a thing and it doesn't care if YOU get value out of their software. You are also confused: the vendor you gave money to is uncooperative, and your criticism of linux is ineffective because it is misplaced. Feedback to the vendor, in the form of a letter explaining why you will be buying your future cards from nvidia/hauppage has actually proven to be effective. Other people doing the right thing may eventually get you what you want, but at least have the awareness to know your actively harmful behavior makes you a less valued citizen of the community than a non-contributing leech.

Here's what you're failing to grasp

The more market share that Linux has, the more support that they should see ...

This is only true if people make choices differently based on Linux support. But you are refusing to do that.
You refuse the suggestions of the quickest most effective way to solve a basic incompatibility problem: use different hardware.

You made the choice to buy an ATI card. YOU, PERSONALLY, made that choice. It's lack of compatibility is YOUR PROBLEM. You clearly made the choice to buy it based on the fact it works with Windows and without any consideration of using it in Linux. You are therefore... stuck with windows. When told how to become unstuck you refuse to move but insist on others accommodating you. From my perspective that appears both lazy and arrogant, and I am clearly not alone in that perception.

And then you publicly criticize the negative feedback you receive...

If you give your money to an uncooperative vendor, even in ignorance, you reward their uncooperative behavior. THE FREE SOFTWARE COMMUNITY WAS HARMED BY YOU. It doesn't owe you a thing and it doesn't care if YOU get value out of their software. You are also confused: the vendor you gave money to is uncooperative, and your criticism of linux is ineffective because it is misplaced. Feedback to the vendor, in the form of a letter explaining why you will be buying your future cards from nvidia/hauppage has actually proven to be effective. Other people doing the right thing may eventually get you what you want, but at least have the awareness to know your actively harmful behavior makes you a less valued citizen of the community than a non-contributing leech.

You mean aside from the sticker on the console and the statement in the manual, right?

At best one person in a household read the manual and peeled off the sticker when unpacking the new device. There is more than one user in most households. The first person may put it in a temporary place the second person didn't like. So it gets moved.

Supporting an incorrect decision to not make the small alteration to engineer around this extremely common destructive failure is simply perverse. Engineering consumer devices is about making them robust to consumers that don't follow directions and don't use them as designed. Nokia knows this, it's one of the things they are really good at.

I wish I had mod points today, well said.

You obviously don't deal with consumers much. If you ever bother to read a modern manual, three-quarters of it discusses ergonomic usage, reasons not to use the product outside in a lighting storm and risks of attempting to stop high speed steel parts with bodily appendages.

There is no reason for a consumer to think that rotating the game system between two acceptable orientations should harm it, since other disc systems are not subject to this sort of collateral damage.
The XBox 360 spins discs extremely fast. It needs extra hardware to prevent disc damage that is normally installed but not included for cost reasons. It should not have been released this way.

Buyer beware applies in this case, which is why as an informed consumer, I'm not buying one.

That's interesting, because my reaction would be to throw away the machine that scratched my $60 game disc, ebay all the rest of the games, and never ever buy a product from that manufacturer again. There is no game that I want to play so much that I'd accept repeatedly trashed discs for the chance to play it. Where's the fun in having your game scratched? Based on some of the internet articles, many hard core gamers do seem to just be sucking up the defects, but I think it limits the market significantly since not everyone is willing to do that, particularly in the current economic climate.

You don't think polluting the goodwill of thousands of customers is a problem? (55,000 complaints were described in the article, and that's people mad enough to complain to the company.)

For the record, my wii has never had any scratched discs in many hours of play, I'm waiting for a PS3 price drop before I get one, and the Xbox 360 won't be on my shopping list until they stop having widely reported recurring hardware defects because I hate dealing with warranty issues.