You can't be charged with "receiving stolen property" or "posession of stolen property" unless you actually knew (or had a reason to suspect) that it was stolen. Otherwise, you're a victim of fraud because you were fraudulently sold goods.

Wrong. You can get the numbers from my previous post, but FY2008 (Bush) was just barely over $1T deficit, and FY2009 (again, Bush) was almost $1.9T. Obama's first deficit (FY2010) was around $1.65T. You are highly misinformed, please attempt to do some actual research before posting numbers.

To clear things up for you, the President submits his budget proposal in February of a year, which takes effect in October of that year, and the name of the budget is for the next year (i.e. a propsal in Feb 2009 taking effect in Oct 2009 is the FY2010 budget). Since Obama took office in Feb 2009, his first budget was the FY2010 budget. He got stuck with the worst budget in history and has reduced it every year since he took office.

You are incorrect. Obama came into office on January 20, 2009. By the first Monday in February, the President must submit his budget request (Congressional Budget Act of 1974). That budget takes effect starting October 1. So FY2009 was already well in effect. The FY2009 Budget was proposed to Congress by George W. Bush on Feb 4, 2008.

According to the Treasury Department, the debt ending Sept 30, 2008 was just over $10T. The debt ending Sept 30, 2009 was just over $11.9T. So the last budget from George W. Bush was almost $1.9T deficit, an increase of over $800B from the previous year. Obama's first budget (FY2010) ending on Sept 30, 2010, gave us an overall debt of just over $13.5T. That means the deficit from his budget was just over $1.65T, which is LESS than the almost $1.9T from Bush. In fact, it was a net reduction in deficit of $233B.

So yes, the GP post was correct that Obama inherited the largest deficit in history, and the deficit has decreased each year since Obama came into office. In fact, someone was nice enough to go through all the data from the Treasury Department website and show a breakdown of the numbers to make it easy to see how the budgets/deficits have changed over time.

No, anti-trust has nothing to do with preventing companies from becoming a monopoly. Being a monopoly is NOT illegal. Using your monopoly power to drive a competitor out of business or to add artificial barriers to entry into a market -- those are illegal. There are also acts that are illegal because they are anti-competitive even if there is no current monopoly. But anti-trust is not anti-monopoly.

So if Iran puts enough mines that it's no longer navigable, does it cease to be called a strait?

You are incorrect. Jury trials (including civil) almost always require unanimous decisions. Some jurisdictions allow for a verdict to be returned even if one, two, or three jurrors dissent. If both sides agree, then the requirement for unanimous verdict can be loosened, but in this case, Microsoft did not agree.

For more reading, see Wikipedia's article on jury trials, in the sections labeled "Civil trial procedure". Also, note that from the original article, "During jury deliberations, Motz [the judge] asked lawyers on both sides whether they would agree to accept a verdict that wasn't unanimous to avoid a mistrial. Microsoft's lawyers refused."

It may not be trillions (plural), but it's $1 trillion over 40 years.

Yep. I do this all the time. My 9-pound Alienware is as light as MacBook Air with the bees!

Again, incorrect. "For profit" or "commercial" is never mentioned in the law. It is "use", straight-forward. That means home users can be sued to prevent the USE of a patented invention. See here:

And see here:

You are mistaken. Patents cover even the USE of an item. Wikipedia has a nice article on patents. Under Law...Effects, this sums it up quite nicely: