This is changing. The local airfield where my son is taking flying lessons just installed required security gates, and access now must be verified by cardkey or going past an attendant.

And yet, on balance, he has done a lot of good. Consumers like his products. They are selling faster than Apple can make them in many cases. The majority of Apple's revenue comes from products that didn't exist 5 years ago at all. I can't say that my life is any worse for my Macbook Pro, my iPad and my Mac Mini which runs my media center. In fact, I'd say it's better. I don't have an iPhone - I think the Nexus One is an all-around better phone. But the other stuff? Rocks. All of it. Better than anything the competitors make.

Our educational system is designed to foster corporatism, mediocrity, and blind submission to authority. Creative thinking and action are purposely suppressed and individualism is held out to be evil. The real question is, why would anyone be surprised?

Summary judgment is not automatic and can be appealed. And that costs money.

Which does NOT preclude Tetris from suing Google. I was personally involved in a lawsuit where AT&T, Yahoo and others claimed immunity. The person suing disputed the immunity. They spent a lot of money, all they way through the US Court oF Appeals to defend their immunity. Immunity is from LIABILITY, not from being sued. Anyone can sue over anything in the US.

Maybe to avoid liability, but it doesn't keep you from being sued. Anyone can sue anyone. Winning such a suit might be impossible for Tetris, but does Google really want to waste time and money defending a lawsuit? Not much upside and a big moneynsink on the downside.

There is NOTHING unmanageable about Google. Their management and board are doing just fine, thanks. Breaking up a company for being successful is INSANE. The entire claims appear to be predicated on a wrong understanding of what the law says. Being a monopoly is not, in and of itself illegal. Anti-competitive practices ARE illegal. Google is not, from what I can see, doing anything other than being very good at what they do.

Barriers to entry are limited to having servers and a search algorithm. I can have a web-crawer running tomorrow and a search engine in short order. If I do bette than Google, people will come to me. If I don't, I don't get to whine to the government because I am not competent enough to do a better job!

The stock trades higher when the street thinks that the bids are too low. Nobody is going to tender their shares @ $5.75 when they can get a better price by selling at market. If the above the offer price is sustained, then either the bid will have to be increased or withdrawn. This happens all the time, and is a normal function of a stock market. The value of a company may be more or less after it is taken over - the goal of the bidder is to bid as low as possible. The goal of shareholders is to get the highest bid possible. The goal of management is to maximize shareholder value, which can involve sale, profit improvement, or a host of other things.

Fast Attack is better. At least you get into port now and again. :-) They even have email that can be sent from the sub (my son emails me from his deployments from time to time while at sea on the USS Albany).

Except that juries are empowered to be the judges of facts. Which means they can use their knowledge to make such judgments. There is no escaping this fact. Even in your example, the lawyers are relying on the jury forming opinions. Given that opinions and judgments of facts are, by their very nature, based on personal knowledge, emotions, beliefs, it's disingenuous to suggest that using knowledge of everyday physics or computers or any other thing won't figure in.

That's what voir dire is for - lawyers have a chance to exclude individuals that they think might have some prejudicial belief or knowledge. If the lawyer doesn't exclude someone, they get that person with all their knowledge, beliefs, prejudices etc.

Bottom line - juries judge facts and do so by weighing the evidence with their personal knowledge of how things work in the world, including their judgment of the truthfulness of a witness' statement or the accuracy of any evidence presented.

As a juror I get to decide the value of the evidence presented, and whether or not said evidence meets the necessary conditions for conviction (criminal) or judgment (civl). No matter what is done, this is based on my personal knowledge and opinions, including, but not limited to, my trust of a witness, my trust of a lawyer, my trust of the police, my knowledge of human nature and a host of other things.

That's the point of the jury system - the juror is empowered to make a judgment call. How the heck can you do that without using your own judgment??? I'm not talking about reading excluded evidence, but if one witness says that "water runs uphill" and another says "water runs downhill" then I can use my own knowledge of gravity to determine that the 2nd witness is more than likely telling the truth. This applies to ALL forms of knowledge that I might have, not just the laws of physics or hydrodynamics.

The principle that you are proposing would exclude a juror from doing ANYTHING at all, since everything is a judgment based on their knowledge!

Every juror gets to express their opinion. That is how it works! I am free to say that "I don't believe X is telling the truth because...." or "The government didn't prove the case because..." and say any damn thing I want!

Following your principle, there would be no deliberation, simply a vote. But that's not how it works. In other words, you are wrong.

Exactly. If by some nearly impossible set of circumstances they allowed me to sit on a jury for a trial that revolved around computers (e.g. log files, ip tracing, etc), you can be darn sure I'm going to try to explain to the jurors what's either right or wrong with what each side said. Of course, if the attorney for one side or the other is afraid of this, they'll find a way to get rid of me in voir dire.

I've had solid luck with getting items removed. When I filed in small claims court over such a thing in the past, I asked, as part of the judgment, that the court issue an order against reporting the debt AND an order removing the items. Both were granted.