It is considered "Fair Use" as defined in Sony v Universal (the Betamax decision). Because it's private use, and is only considered "place shifting", there is no copyright infringement to be found unless you redistribute the shifted media.

They don't even need better lawyers. They need one paralegal that can search American Law Review, where this was already decided in 1999 in the case of RIAA v Diamond Multimedia - the landmark case that makes all portable MP3 players legal under the "space shifting" provision of the Audio Home Recording Act.

There's a reason why the RIAA hasn't tried this shit since that decision - they already failed in circuit court, and on appeal. Does anyone really think they didn't want a piece of the iPod market?

Not time shifting, but space shifting; which was upheld by the Ninth Circuit in RIAA v Diamond Multimedia like 15 years ago.

They'll have no problem knocking this down whatsoever.

Then your bank is fucking you big time. I locked a 3.3% 15-year earlier this month.

Or, pricing the same system from Lenovo (or as close as you can get - they use Nvidia Quadro rather than AMD FirePro, and you have to go with a SATA SSD rather than PCI-E that performs >30% better) is $4200, in a much bigger and louder package.

I can't speak to your "bumped up specs to be a useful animation/artist box", but it seems that every single one that Apple has made since December has been happily sold to professionals that care only about getting their work done as quickly and accurately as possible, so Apple must be doing something right.

Which, coincidentally, is the same price you would pay for an "ideal server" from any other OEM.

Or, here's another look.

You are a massive semiconductor manufacturer, as well as a manufacturer of smartphone handsets. You've grown your phone business to being #1 in a market segment (Android) and you're one of the few making a profit, and people are actually buying in on your marketing. You've managed to do something that very few other companies ever get done, especially in a rapidly shifting tech marketplace.

But you are completely reliant on another company for your operating system, and they don't take their marching orders from you because they need to maintain relationships with your competitors.

We've seen this before (PC hardware), and we've seen what happens (Microsoft). Samsung is making a play to keep some leverage on Google - you fuck around with us, and we walk away taking half your market with us. The money spent on Tizen is simply for leverage on Google, to make sure that Google doesn't jerk their chain too much.

I'd like to temper the last bit of your post with the following addendum:

It's not surprising that Beats Audio is getting sued for this all of a sudden, now that they are about to have some very deep pockets for a potential settlement.

Oh, and Beats has had noise canceling tech shipping for at least a year, so this seems very much like Bose waiting until they could extract a nice cash settlement rather than actually working to protect a competitive technical advantage.

Yeah, because Apple has commented on this somewhere?

You do realize that Apple doesn't even own Beats Audio yet, right? And that this legal action, in no way resembles Bose making an opportunistic money grab now that it looks like Beats will be gaining some very deep pockets in the next few weeks, right?

Why didn't they sue months / years ago when Beats first put noise canceling products on the market?

It depends on the features being added. In particular, the feature being added for Windows 8 is that they are leveraging EFI booting in a way that isn't completely fucked up, and they've jettisoned a heap of code for backwards compatibility with hardware nobody uses any more.

Net effect: much more stable and efficient software.

Yeah, because nobody would ever gripe at Apple about version n+1 not being supported on their precious 3 year old phone.

Oh wait, everyone gripes about that when they have done that in the past.

Oh noes, anonymous coward thinks someone looks like a "stupid dipshit moron" for buying a 2011-model tablet that actually worked, and has been useful for years.

Is this the part where I say that the previous AC looks like an idiot for using three words in a row that basically mean the same thing? Or is he saying that the GP poster should have bought a Motorola Xoom instead, being the chief competitor to the iPad 2? How'd that work out for all those customers? Maybe a BlackBerry PlayBook or an HP TouchPad? Because anyone who bought those products are still using them today?

Sorry, AC, but while the GP might "look" like a "stupid dipshit moron", you actually are one.

Well, reason #1 would probably be a massive class action lawsuit that would destroy the coveted relationship that these companies have with their user base.

Yes, I said that right - they won't give a shit about the monetary damages because they are doing laps in Scrooge McDuck-style money bins; but as soon as you get a reputation for creating shit devices that don't work 6 months after purchase, you become Motorola Mobility - a company that makes halfway decent hardware now, but can't sell it because of all the TERRIBLE PRODUCTS that you made before and never bothered to update.

A bluetooth keyboard?

Just say'in.