A baker cannot refuse to do business with a person because of that person's protected status, like gender, race, etc etc.

A baker _can_ refuse to do business with a person that he dislikes, for example with a supporter of a football club that the baker dislikes, or with a person that has caused trouble in the store before.

Banks can refuse to do business for the same reasons. Now the bank manager will not refuse service to a person that he dislikes, not because it would be illegal (it isn't) but because his bank doesn't like losing business. But he will refuse service to a person or company that will cause the bank trouble.

Since they know or should know that most of the people accessing that site haven't done anything wrong, that could get them into deep trouble. And Uber has deep pockets filled with a billion dollars of investor's money, and some lawyer will take them on and make a mint.

Well, wouldn't that be in absolute contradiction to the Fifth commandment?

As far as I understand it, this didn't just allow hackers to create a man-in-the-middle attack. Your Lenovo computer with the hardware would actively perform a man-in-the-middle attack against the user to analyse any encrypted traffic to https websites. For example when you enter a credit card number on the website of a reputable company using https, the adware could read what you posted.

This is plainly unforgivable.

ARM just renamed their chips X3000, X5000, and X7000 :-)

Come to Germany. Your plumber is licensed, and has done at least 3 years training before he is allowed to appear at your home without a supervisor who has the necessary license. Same for the painter, interior decorator, or nurse. Electricians the same, but they can get into deep legal trouble for shoddy works. Doctors and lawyers are _really_ licensed.

There is the remote possibility that such a patent wasn't obvious many years back when it was granted. There are now new rules, where combining existing prior art is obvious and cannot be patented, unless the effect of the combination is something unexpected.

If you think that a patent should be valid for a shorter time than normal if the general progress in knowledge has made it obvious, then I would agree.

Most software isn't one bit innovative. Not in the sense that is patent worthy. Do you think anything in the operation of Facebook is worth a patent? I don't think so. Now start cloning and see where you get.

Apple makes more profit selling desktop and laptop computers than all their competitors together. Is any of that due to patents? No. There is copyright protection for their operating system and their other software, but there isn't anything special in their hardware that could be patented. So start cloning.

Your argument just doesn't work.

Software patents are not the problem. They are just a symptom, and to many people reading Slashdot obvious software patents look obvious, while obvious patents about building refrigerators don't look obvious to us.

The problem is that the purpose of the patent system has been lost. The reason for granting patents is that instead of an inventor keeping an invention secret to exploit it to avoid others copying it, the inventor is given a time-limited monopoly on the patent, but has to publish it. That way, others can read the patent, improve on it, and society benefits.

Now if an invention is so clever that only one person could have invented it, that makes sense. But if I invent something and 100 other people are clever enough to invent the same thing if they feel the need to solve the same problem, then nobody benefits from me publishing the patent. If anyone needed to solve the problem, they would just do it. Instead they lose time and money by having to fight the patent system.

The problem isn't software patents. If I had a software problem that I couldn't solve and my colleagues couldn't solve and I found that someone had a patented solution, then I wouldn't see any reason why my company shouldn't pay for a license. The problem is that patents are granted for things that hundreds of programmers could easily figure out in a short time. There are patents for things that I would ask as interview questions and expect you to answer.

Well, absolutely. Google is good and Apple is evil. Therefore any patents that Google uses are to fight evil and therefore good, while any patents that Apple uses are evil. That's the logic, isn't it?

Now explain to me the four billion dollar lawsuit that Google lost against Microsoft. Was that defensive?

On the other hand, it was Samsung who was threatened by the EU with a 13 BILLION dollar fine if they didn't stop patent trolling.

And it was Google through their purchase of Motorola who demanded 4 BILLION dollars from Microsoft for two MP3 related patents (I think they ended up paying Microsoft, as patent trolls should do).

Who says it uses asymmetric encryption through everything? It makes up a symmetric key, and encrypts only that key with the public keys of all recipients.

I don't think Apple Pay needs any WiFi or 3G service to work. Obviously the terminal might, but if that has no connection, then nothing will work.

They are not confused. But your credit score is around minus a gazillion :-)

You forgot the part where GT didn't actually manage to produce the Sapphire Crystal displays that they had promised they could deliver. And you forgot the part where GT management lined their pockets with stock options, making sure that they made their money, no matter whether the company did well or not.