Piddly as in what Microsoft faced in 2006? Admittedly, that situation was different but that kind of fines are not what I think of as "piddly".

How come Google are bending over backwards to follow chinese censoring laws? Google is based in US too and by your argument the should not have to care about those laws at all - yet they do.

Agreed - and that is indeed why I do not have a Facebook login.

There goes your excuse for calling the umpire an idiot.

Here

That should at least give you:

• Private offices
• A good catering arrangement
• Decent computer stuff to work with

Actually , the Patent Office does have crecibility in a few places. Unfortunately, courts of law are among them...

I used OS/2 for a while. When I set up shop as an independent contractor in early 1995, I needed an OS that was:

• Multitasking
• Capable of running Windows and DOS programs
• Capable of running on hardware I could afford
• Available

At that time there was exactly one candidate.

I got a chess set when I was about ten. I learned the moves and when a chess-club was created at school, I joined immediately. Here I got an opponent that was a couple of years older and who beat ten times out of ten. This is not very enjoyable when you are ten years old so I dropped out and have not played chess since.

Lego on the other hand... I got my first Lego bricks when I was about three years old and I played with Lego at times almost daily until I was about sixteen. I built anything from Lego: planes, spacecraft, cars, you name it. I still have all my Lego from back then and I'm at it again at the ripe age of 54 - I've got two Lego Mindstorms sets.

This is not to belittle chess, which is indeed a very challenging game. But you run the risk of putting the kid in a situation where he loses all the time which is not very good for that kid's self confidence.

But in doing that, they impose American morals and standards on the rest of the world. There is a Danish tabloid newspaper (Ekstrabladet) that has had to censor their iPhone app in order to get it approved. This paper has for last thirty years or so published a picture of a very lightly dressed girl on page nine in every issue (known as "the page nine girl") and no one in Denmark takes offense of that. But you won't find a "page nine girl" in their iPhone app - because Cupertino doesn't like that.

The real question is: what will Apple block next? Unfavorable descriptions of Apple products? Articles that are critical of US politics?

I'd say that you Americans should be worried about how Apple may limit your free speech - because in my opinion, they are well on their way.

Amen! Someone, mod this up (preferably as "Insightful") because this exactly what is needed.

Easy. David Lorge Parnas.

It must be fun, otherwise he won't continue doing it. And building robots and making them do things is fun. But there is of course a price to pay - literally.