What w'ere really talking about is a standard accounting practice in the purchase of ANY business. The asset and liabilities columns have to total to the same in any balance sheet. When the purchase price exceeds assets, an imaginary asset called goodwill is added. There is nothing unusual in any way at all about this.

Agree, in fact anyone doing under 70, or under 85 in the left hand lane should be summarily executed

No one gets a law degree in IP--that sounds like you don't know what you are talking about.

Except when they do. It took me less than a minute to find a law degree from a very legitimate university with a concentration in IP law
http://earlemacklaw.drexel.edu/academics/concentrations/intellectual_property/
I'm sure with a little more time, it would be no challenge to find others.

Except this isn't a medical device. Its practice management and it isn't FDA certified, nor does it require certification

A huge waste of time. He has 6 servers. 6. It would be far simpler, and probably cheaper to boot, to just host them, at Rackspace or some other hosting facility that is not in a disaster prone area. The workstations should not contain data and so can be safely abandoned. If you wish to pack them up and move, unless they're quite high end, laptops and docking stations solve this problem quite easily as well.

Did she make it clear in her initial call that she was returning it for a hardware defect,

Sadly it doesn't seem to matter. I recently got the exact same explanation when they refused the RMA of a motherboard. ASUS had already determined that it was defective. I had the ASUS case number and provided it. We can't resell it, therefore we won't accept it. A quick call to American Express to challenge the charge solved the problem, but NewEgg Customer Service sucks.

Oracle still needs to show damages, they have none, or that Google created by virtue of this copying, a commercial advantage. Again there is none. End result, they copied a trivial function rather than spending 5 minutes writing it. Its a non-issue.

In what way? Oracle is the 2nd biggest software house on the planet, the clear leader in several verticals and makes and/or sells literally hundreds of products. Which of these things in even a remote way, describes SCO?

Where do you find a $400 42U rack? All I see new are over $1000.

Craigslist. You can find used good condition cabinets from major manufacturers for 200.00 or so pretty much any time you look.

I'll skip the Python/Ruby/Java/Whatever debate, and throw in my 2 cents for the head first series of books. They have a ton of them for every common language as well as a variety of other topics. They're written at a beginner level, aren't insulting and are really alot of fun. The combine all sorts of exercises and gimicky little games to make a more immersive experience, and it really does work.
They're published by Oreilly which gives them all the credibility they should need, but they are written at a level that a novice, even a child can learn from and have enough content, that an experienced reader can likewise expect to learn something

Don't people use photocopiers anymore?
no, they grab a torrent of the PDF of the book. I can find and download most textbooks in less time that it take you to walk to the copier. Most students can do it faster than that.

there are distribution channels and contracts that prevent someone in

This isn't a contractual issue. This is a copyright issue. No one is claiming breach of contract. Furthermore, the defendant in this case never entered into any sort of contract with the publisher. He purchased books on the open market and resold them on the open market. The plaintiffs are claiming copyright infringement. This should be a clear cut example of the first sale doctrine, and should have never gotten beyond a district court.

Um, gambling IS illegal. Unless you're in Las Vegas. Or an Indian Tribe or a state running lotteries (which really pay a tiny pittance to schools.)

Or you know, any other state except Utah. 49 of the 50 states have some form of legalized gambling including 19 that allow commercial casinos, and many others that have reservation casinos.

You're missing the point

The most common reason for needing a restore, is accidental deletion.

It is, but the most common use for tape is compliance, Many companies, and all public companies have compliance issues, SarBox, HIPAA, GLB, etc. Most require data retention of many years. In some medical settings as much as 21 years. Do you want to keep that all on spinning disks? or on CHEAP tape sitting in a box at Iron Mountain? In my environment, and that of many large companies, we no longer measure terrabytes, except at the individual database level. We manage several petabytes.

disk based solutions are operationally ideal. Thats why products like Avamar and Data Domain do so well. But for large, long term, low access, storage, tape is still king.

Congratulations you just discovered a LoJack transmitter in your car.