Unlike copyrights, patents disregard provenance. This means that even someone who does fund his own research and development could end up independently reaching the same solutions* that Microsoft engineers reached. This would run the risk of having production shut down by Microsoft's legal department.

One thing that stops them is the exclusive license granted by national radio regulators to cellular network operators. All cellular network operators holding substantial spectrum leases have chosen to require the use of patented protocols to communicate with their networks.

* "Same" here shall be interpreted in accordance with the doctrine of equivalents.

Unless you mean Rare as in the trade name of a Twycross-based video game developer that Microsoft acquired, I'm not sure where you're getting the idea that software patents are so uncommon. See All businesses have software patent risk.

Not on removable media.

But how would the device make Ext drivers available to the computer to which it is connected without 1. presenting a patented file system on which the driver installer is stored and 2. waiting for an administrator to be present to authorize the installation?

If you want to claim SD[HX}C support

Keyword: "if". No device maker is forced to include an SD card slot. They could go with a USB port or CF slot instead and use UDF.

Have the patents on VFAT (long file names in FAT16 and FAT32) expired yet?

If most home users stop buying PCs in favor of tablets running iOS or Android, won't that cause PCs to become more expensive because businesses are willing to pay more?

By employees of established media production companies that can continue to afford PCs even after they become specialty products marketed only to businesses.

Drivers signed by Microsoft for use with "premium" video are already supposed to disable the API calls needed to record frame buffer when a video is playing through Protected Video Path.

Couldn't you just set your monitor to 1080p (its native resolution) and increase the DPI setting in Windows?

If all my purchases are from the iTunes Store, then for purposes of playing my purchases, iTunes is a better player.

It is if you can convince substantially more publishers to sell through your store than through competing stores.

I wasn't referring to them. I thought we were talking about people who care enough about iTunes to complain about it stopping working. They probably still use iTunes because in the past they have bought something from the iTunes Store.

I think it refers to the fact that not all builds of HandBrake for all variants of all platforms include the DVD and BD decryption code. This page states that Windows users have to install Kodi (formerly XBMC) and dig the CSS library out of that. On which platform are you running HandBrake?

What does Xubuntu 15.04 leak back to Canonical or any other "home base"?

I suffered through Ubuntu Unity on my laptop for one month until I did sudo apt-get install xubuntu-desktop. I wonder what'll break in a year once I upgrade from what amounts to Xubuntu 14.04 LTS to 16.04.

And expensive connections. The going rate for a cellular Internet connection in the United States is $10 per GB uploaded or downloaded.