Agree on the PARC comment - once I saw that I stopped reading. Apple PAID Xerox for the access to their lab in stock. Xerox was rooting for Apple to succeed and they weren't doing a damn thing with Star, the DLion, or anything else that was making a profit. Except sell more toner.

The intelligent user will know what is wrong.

Nonsense. Read the article: "Sony said last week that it expects a loss of more than $1 billion in the fiscal year through March, in part because of its struggling television business, which has been a thorn in its side for close to a decade. The business has bled red ink because of plunging prices and declining demand."

I think they're charging for bringing in new subscribers, not offering someone else's content. How is this different from the cheap subscriptions repackagers sell for which the publisher gets $0 but the name of a new sucker to send renewal notices to? Most magazines and newspapers sell their wares for the cost of physical publication, and make the money for content and profit from ads. That argues the eventual subscription price will be $0.00 for which Apple's 30% cut will not be an issue.

Film at 11. Oh wait...

Parse that for me will you? Isn't fruit (and brains for that matter) hardware? Isn't the software your mind? the notion "fresh fruit" is already bound to both hardware and software. Suggest you work on your metaphors and your case isn't helped by the ad hominim.

...college kids, as much as we love the newest gadget, will more often than not chose functionality over form when it boils down to what saves money."

Ah, that explains the recent breakout in slide rule use!

False yourself. A "dollar" was originally, and in the proverbial grandparent's day, a denotation of an amount of gold. Before fiat money came along, one could exchange gold notes for gold and silver notes for silver, and the amount of gold or silver one exchanged (either way) didn't change with time. Once the link between currency and any kind of backing store was broken, the "value" of the money was no longer fixed. An hour of labor, a pencil, or whatever, no longer had some common measure (or they did, but the paper money devalued).

Legality may not be the same as morality, but every legal system is a moral system (moral means "customary" not "right" in any absolute sense). Arguing that something is or is not moral comes down to a "community values" argument.

So, Apple can ask the 8 ball if it should approve the 8 ball itself. If it says "no", then apple should approve it, and if it says "yes" then they shouldn't.

Even staunch libertarians don't condone fraud.

I kind of agree with Microsoft's solution, but applied to companies that supply OSes that connect to the internet, not individual users. Key is to make sure the licensing cost is borne by the developer as a progressive tax on sales, and requirements are sufficiently onerous (e.g. your OS must be formally validated to prove it cannot ever allow a computer to send spam meaning it has to be reimplemented from the ground up in a formal language) to cause general panic and Microsoft spreading a lot of money and free software around to help the whole idea go away.