Your post proves again that sufficiently advanced sarcasm is indistinguishable from genuine stupidity.

You're arguing about the rounding error on his poverty line value?

A more than 50% increase is hardly a "rounding error".

People who cannot afford to live without government assistance seems like a pretty good definition of "poor" to me.

Well, then Obama wants us all to be poor and keep us poor, given that he keeps telling us that without government assistance, we can do nothing. Just look at his "Julia".

WebOS was dead before it even reached the market and beset with technical problems.

My parents saved for a decade before they bought their house, in the suburbs, and waited with kids until they bought a house. I saved for a decade before I bought mine. And you expect to be able to just plunk down money, move into a house in the city, and have kids right away? What kind of fantasy world do you live in? Furthermore, home ownership rates have actually increased significantly since the 60's.

You don't pay taxes if you're near the poverty line.

~$600 on a $20,000+ figure is within standard deviation.

How is the difference between $23000 (4 persons) and $11139 (one person) only $600?

It does not matter if USA poverty rates were higher than the typical wage of another nation. The relative cost of living differs greatly

Which part of "purchasing power parity" do you not understand?

Relative poverty levels are all that matters;

Relative levels (i.e., relative to other earners) are irrelevant. What matters is how you live: how big your house is, how much food you have, what transportation and education options you have, and those depend on purchasing power parity (PPP).

I can't imagine that piracy makes more than a few percent of potential Android purchases; most people just don't have the time, and the prices are too low to make it worth it. I suspect this is a marketing gimmick. As I recall from the reviews, this game already used to be free, but was constantly bugging people about in-app purchases.

That calculation is bogus, starting with the fact that the poverty level for a family of 4 is $23000.

In addition, people with that kind of income level qualify for food stamps, housing assistance, and numerous other programs.

In 1960 a college graduate could own a home and support a family on one full time salary. In 2012, positions like that are vanishingly rare.

You can easily buy an home that's the size and style of the 1960's and furnish it with 1960's-level furniture and technology: a phone, a TV receiving three channels, and not much else.

If you want two cars, modern health care, iphones, cable, Internet, large screen TVs, video game consoles, two garages, 2500 sq ft, all close to the highway, coast, and a major urban center, however, then it's going to cost you more.

Your choice.

I think that what ultimately killed Palm (and Blackberry) was all of the iPhone knock-offs running Android.

No, take it from a long-time Palm user: Palm failed because it was an obsolete and buggy p.o.s. That's why the Android founders left Palm and... founded Android.

Palm could have competed with Apple's limited, and somewhat pricey, product line

No, they couldn't. Palm had been resting on their laurels, Apple had ripped off all the best features of Palm, and Palm had no way of competing with that. Since Android has been released, Apple has been ripping off feature after feature from Android, that is, when Apple isn't ripping off features from small software developers.

Apple and Steve Jobs were evil rip-off artist, but that's OK; that's business competition and it caused Palm and RIM to disappear from the market, which they well deserved.

Where I draw the line is if Apple tries to claim ownership of other people's inventions.

That kind of "poverty" is relative poverty; it's just another way of saying that the income distribution is skewed in the US and is really just a bad version of the Gini index. It has nothing to do with actual, absolute poverty. You can be absolutely rich and relatively poor, or absolutely poor but relatively rich.

Look at it in international comparisons. In 2007, US poverty level for a family of three was $17000/year, and median household income was about $31000. In terms of purchasing power parity (PPP), in the same year, median family income in Germany was about $21000, Japan was about $19000, in Italy $17000, in Israel about $14000. EU median is about $15000.

So if you apply US poverty measures, more than half of EU citizens, and a large part of even rich countries like Germany and Japan, live "in poverty", and it gets worse if you consider all of continental Europe and if you consider that PPP doesn't account for a lot of taxes and expenses.

But if you really think that Europeans are doing so much better economically, it's easy to get a work permit for Europe and move there.

I quoted you the section from the very start of the statue, "useful improvement".

The statute says "NEW AND useful method etc." and "NEW AND useful improvement thereof". It needs to be both "useful" and "NEW".

Besides, Apple isn't claiming a patent on the iPhone, so whether you think the combination is "new" and patent-worthy doesn't matter. Apple is claiming trademarks and "design patents", and those criteria are different.

Most of the stuff Apple actually tried to patent (e.g. sliding unlock) fails the novelty test.

Apple is abusing intellectual property and trying to claim as theirs what isn't theirs.

And yet none of the companies that had experimented with touch screen phones had had particularly great success with them. Seems like Apple must have added something to produce the iPhone's runaway success, much faster than the growth of the market.

Palm OS had been very successful with its touch screen PDAs and phones. They were having problems because they had a 16bit OS and were fumbling the 32bit replacement. Apple's iPhone was a rip-off of Palm and the other platforms, but based on a better 32bit platform. iPhone succeeded was because Palm, Nokia, and Microsoft fumbled on execution and were mired in backwards compatibility issues, and because Android was delayed due to Google's purchase. iPhone's success was temporary (and limited), and within a year, Android came out and started running rings around iOS on technology, including in the all-important touch screen keyboard input (otherwise, many people including me would want RIM-style keyboards; I can't stand Apple's piss-poor keyboard).

No, I infer that nobody else had the courage or vision to make the investment and take the risk to enter the market with a phone of that design.

Oh, cut the myth making. Apple wasn't some lone company with a vision that nobody else had; Apple saw a fast-growing market in smartphones, copied the best features of their competitors, and produced a good product. And now they are trying to keep competitors out by underhanded tricks.

And I believe that it would be a good thing if the patent system rewarded companies with courage and vision to take risks that ultimately advance design and benefit consumers.

The patent system is there to encourage the sharing of technological innovation, nothing else. And as one of the biggest and richest companies, Apple hardly needs any more rewards anyway.