Fortunately there are specific laws saying that your money is still yours when you store it in a bank. But apparently the DOJ thinks that the same principle doesn't apply to data unless there's a law specifically saying so.

I'm not familiar with phone technology, but codecs (which came up in the Moto-MS case) are indeed licensed as a fixed fee per unit. AFAIK this is considered FRAND.

Moto's patents may be legit, but they're asking a very high price for them. If 50 companies each ask for 2.25% royalties, it doesn't leave much...

TI has no modern fabs; they decided to get out of the fab business a few years ago.

Bitcoin is for crypto-goldbugs who don't believe in fractional reserve, so yeah, you need to have BTC before you can spend it. There's also no point in putting BTC in a bank since the "banks" aren't insured and don't pay interest (the ones that claim to pay interest are scams).

Yes, trading is going on. http://bitcoincharts.com/markets/mtgoxUSD.html

A different analysis showed that around 2M BTC have never been spent even once after being mined. Many of these unspent block rewards are from the early days so it's not clear whether they're lost or hoarded. Given the very low exchange rate at the time, it wouldn't be surprising if they were simply discarded.

By "mess" I guess you mean "ships more units in one year than desktop Linux did in 15 years".

Android developers don't care about desktop Linux and are willing to fork anything that gets in their way. They've done it before.

Android will end up with 3D that works fine; it will just be based on different APIs than desktop Linux.

Oh, you want Optimus documentation? Here, have some documentation! ... for Tegra ... 2D.

MIPS is still big in networking; see Cavium and Raza/NetLogic/Broadcom.

For some reason I looked at the MIPS Web site the other day and they have no 64-bit cores. It looks like they've completely abandoned 64-bit.

You (and Geekbench) may not be taking turbo mode into account. Quad-cores generally turbo to the same frequency as duals when you're only using one core.

IIRC Thumper had 48 drives in 4U but Facebook's new hinged storage server has 15 drives per U, so it's even denser.

Google doesn't do things the cheapest way because they're thinking long-term. They want to have everything in house. They may (accidentally, I'm sure) destroy some of the companies you mentioned, so Google doesn't want to be their customer when that day comes. Google also thinks (rightly or wrongly) that at scale they can always design something cheaper than anyone else.