I dont know about the Kaiser case, but I know about the IBM case first hand...

In California no clause is valid that restricts your rights to sue.

Ask IBM about this. In the early 2000's they went through and laid off a large group of workers. Many of the employees felt they unfairly were fired or forced to retire early. Many of these people had families and no other source of income. IBM offered severances to these employees but required them each to sign a waiver signing away their rights to sue the company.

Some of these employees had no choice and signed the agreement and took the meager pittance offered by IBM.

Now for the fun part, someone figured out that in California the law protects people from having their rights revoked. Those same employees joined together and sued IBM. The case lasted a couple of years. IBM even petitioned for dismissal on the grounds the former disgruntled employees signed waivers and received concessions (far below what that deserved). The California courts rejected IBM's petition and ordered them to pay up to a much higher level for all former employees. Those that had received the lower payouts received the difference.

What Sony is trying to do would be non-binding in California.

And sometimes its fully justified... Let me explain while I will never purchase another Samsung drive...

A few years back I was still working as an IT consultant and a client in San Francisco, a billion dollar a year organization, purchased 40 new workstations. All came with Samsung hard drives. Within 6 months half of the drives had failed.

The client called their sales manager rather irrate after the 18th or 19th drive had failed. The sales manager assured them that it was bad luck and that they had gotten a bad batch of drives. Not to worry, its been sorted out. Still the client demanded new harddrives for all of the systems.

A few days later a shipment of Samsung drives arrive. We install them into every machine...

And within another six months, another 1/3rd of the "new" drives had failed as well.

That client went as far as to state in all new pc acquisitions that Samsung drives NOT be used.

I have seen a fair number of home user Samsung drives fail too. So I will never touch one myself. In fact I now carry that mindset over to all Samsung products. If two batches of bad drives can come out over the span of a year, then I have to question their Quality Control on ALL of their product lines.

This story sounds like more propaganda spin.

The GPS network satelites broadcast two signals:
Encrpyted - Used by the US Military
Unencrypted - Everyone one else (Including pilots, car navigation, your hand held gps...)

The Accuracy of the encrypted signal is much higher than the unencrypted signal. In fact the Military has the ability to vary the degree of accuracy and drift of the unencrypted gps signal. They use to vary it daily to keep enemys from using it against us. A practice that has subsided now that air travel and other services rely so heavily on GPS. Yet the Military still maintains and excerts the ability to manipulate the gps accuracy in any zone.

Its much more difficult to "spoof" an encrypted signal.

And images of the bird show damage to the wing indicating it smashed into something hard enough to dent and tear the carbon composite outer skin.

Oh come on, everyone knows Gamers never shower.... Now getting enough Mountain Dew and Hot Pockets to feed them all, that might be a logistical nightmare.

So wait, he is charging people tens and hundreds of thousands of dollars for a urine treatment? Hell, I'll piss on ya for free...

These snake-oil sales men prey on vulnerable people that are grasping at straws hoping to save their loved ones. These are the people that need to be locked up and the key tossed away.

And from the Articles, the Marc guy that sends threatening letters to 17 years olds, if he is a real person, should really be careful what he says to people. You can face charges for portraying yourself as a lawyer when you arent one. And he does try to come off sounding like one. Though woefully inadaquately. Anyone of those people they tried to threaten or intimidate could turn around and press charges on them.

Hollywood has already made this movie a hundred times...

The contract states that it must be physically destroyed. Depending on what kind of business you are in, the government will only accept physical destruction of a drive if classified data was ever on it.
You will need to adhere to the contract and destroy and replace drives or the Government will rake your company over the coals during an audit. They will also then demand monies paid back, tack on a huge fine, and possibly criminal charges on anyone that failed to properly dispose of and destroy the data per the contract.

I did computer networking in the Marines, was on the spearhead of a lot of new technologies back in that time. Yet when I got out in 1999 a lot of companies didn't want the Military guy with 9 years experience, they wanted the recent college graduate with a piece of paper. Time and Time again i was told they could get the college grad cheaper than my 9 years of Experience. I kept telling the prospective employeers that I was coming from a job where I effectively made $1.67/hr. They could pay me the same as a college grad and I'd be happy. But it was always, "HR wont let us"...

I finally gave up and went into consulting and made a good living through. Ironically 3 of the 10 or so companies I applied for later hired me as a contractor for 1 to 3 months to come in and fix up what the college grads screwed up or to show their teams how to update their technology.

The problem is, as I learned from a former client that was a head hunter, most HR people don't know how to relate military experiance to real world applications and training. The Military gives you a stack of papers with how your various training relates to the real world, but even those definitions fall short of anything a civilian world HR person will understand.

I was going to say the same thing... I have the Samsung Epic, a 1 year old phone... And it fully supports Voice commands and Voice Searching via google. I can write emails and texts via voice as well... Shouldnt the article really say, Apple had to buy another company to get where Google was last year?