The authors stance is how can I make Apple look better so facts be damned. This is the typical Apple puff piece designed to get people to buy more Apple stock. How else do you think Apple's stock is going to hit the target of $900/share.

Yes, supply and demand is important, but you may remember that a few other things happened in late 2008? Things that might have had a little more impact on the supply and demand balance than the piddling amount of oil that offshore drilling might produce.

Rubbish.

Storing large quantities of oil is very expensive, unlike, say, gold or diamonds. You can't hoard the stuff. Ultimately, the stuff has to be sold to consumers, and if high prices drive demand down (and demand for fuel is elastic, despite a lot of nonsense to the contrary) speculators will lose their shirt.

The reason why oil are prices are at historicallly high levels, and have been for the past few years, is that global demand has not kept up with global supply, mostly because China and to a lesser extent other parts of the developing world is buying more of it. Incidentally, this is exactly the same reason why a bunch of other commodities, including other fossil fuels, metals, and agricultural products, have gone up in price.

I don't think I'd set anyone up for doing something they wouldn't already do. A responsible person would take the laptop to the owner/register at the coffee shop and report that they havent seen the owner for a while. A non-honest person would walk in, quickly grab it, and scurry off. Use of hidden cameras could easily show which a person was being- responsible, or malicious.

That's the thing though- from what I've seen (from my friends that have had their laptops stolen and they were able to recover) is that laptop thieves aren't very smart. Just as you or I might if we stole a car, immediately drive it into a faraday cage to prevent it phoning home, and then carefully going over it, swapping VIN numbers with legit-seeming ones, swapping any electronic ignition and keys, making sure there were no tracking devices, removing the license plate and anything immediately identifiable like a bumper sticker - a huge number of car thieves do nothing of the sort.

Some teens that stole one of my friend's Vespa scooters were in their front yard with a chistle and a large hammer trying to bash the ignition column apart, and then all scattered when a cop just drove by on patrol- and easy catch for the cop.

Most of the people who steal laptops first and foremost log into their email and Facebook... and if you have a key logger and a way to capture their face on camera, that's a pretty strong way of identifying who stole it almost instantly.

Recently I had an extra laptop. I had the idea (but didn't execute on it) to go to coffee shops with it, with tracking software installed in the background. I would then leave the laptop frequently while "going to the bathroom". Eventually in theory the laptop would be stolen, I would be able to trace it, track the person down, call the authorities and get it back. One less laptop thief running around (or at least unknown to police) and a fun time. Unfortunately, I didn't follow through on it.

As in many areas, perhaps the United States doesn't need to invent anything radically new, just copy what works elsewhere.