There is a difference between "getting money back" and starting a class action suit for 5m.

Giving your little daughter an iPhone with the password to the corresponding account is wrong on so many levels that there shouldn't even be a question wether this is bad parenting or not. I do not give my 3 years old son a sharp kitchen knife either. That's just common sense ... which apparently isn't so common as it seems.

If he wants his money back he could simply file for a charge back and that's it. He wants to make a profit off it - and that's something that I despise.

I like that the iPhone display is smaller than the gigantic Android displays. My hands are not the biggest and I can use the iPhone with one hand. No longer if the screen is getting significantly bigger.

Sure, technically they sold more. But have a look at the wide variety of phones Samsung sells http://www.samsung.com/us/mobile/cell-phones/all-products and then you'll easily see that lots of the so called smartphones are rather cheap upgrades of standard phones and do not even remotely offer the functionality an iPhone has.

Well, I wouldn't be happy if anyone would take my telephone number, no matter if available publicly or not, and distribute it at will. The pure existence of public information doesn't really justify free re-usage in my opinion.

And I already live in a country that doesn't do stuff like this. I just couldn't believe that such a practice is indeed legal.

It's one thing if my picture/address/whatever is available on the internet. It's a different thing if this information is taken and widely advertised on said internet without my consent or combined with demands that I have to pay money for the involved company not to do this.

Is it just me or does that sound like classic blackmail? How can stuff like this be legal?

It was the intend to protect those that invented something new.

Nowadays it's usually used to block competition, even if the holder of the patent is in fact the user of it.

The whole patent system is absurd because it achieves the quite opposite of what was intended. In fact only huge, really huge companies are fairly safe due to their immense arsenal of patents that they can use to fight other patent holders. A small company, starting new has pretty much no chance at all to enter really innovative areas because the likeliness to get sued to oblivion is far to big.

We are working hard to change that! Barely a month passes without some idiot endorsing the idea to introduce software patents or the like.

Seriously, I'm sick and tired of this.

I'm absolutely convinced that we suffer way greater from all the damage those patent trolls cause and the general barrier that the pure existence of patents pose than the potential issues of a total removal of patents would cause. I have yet to see any conclusive argumentation why we actually need (in the meaning of: the society as a whole) patents. There might be slight issues with innovation in certain areas during the transition but I'm sure that this wouldn't outweigh the benefits of not having to employ hordes of lawyers or being afraid to get sued to hell and back all the time.

Maybe you didn't have any problems - neither did I when upgrading from Snow Leopard to Lion.

There are certainly reports of people having problems on Ubuntu upgrades as well. Considering that more than 1 mio. people grabbed Lion just yesterday I'd say the reports of problems that show up account for only a very small percentage and lots of them are just minor issues, not real problems in the meaning "upgrade failed". In fact the worst I have seen are a few reports that people couldn't upgrade (usually because of some Bootcamp problems) - but that left them with a perfectly fine Snow Leopard system.

So saying that Lion is troublesome to install is greatly exaggerated.

Maybe because there is a huge difference between a kernel and an operating system?
Additionally the step from the latest release candidate to the release is so minor that it can barely count as a kernel update on its own.

Compare an update from CentOS 5 to CentOS 6 with the update of Snow Leopard to Lion, or Windows Vista to Windows 7 if you like.

Did you even read what I wrote before you posted? Germany doesn't even need to save energy (which it actually intends to do) to reach the goal without adding coal plants. All it needs to do is to up the renewable sector as outlined (and which shouldn't be a problem given the current performance) and stop to export as much electricity as we did in the past. That's it.

Why should they benefit if their share is rising because the total sum is shrinking? They won't gain anything by that because the total amount of energy produced from coal will not change. Besides this the total amount will probably shrink by less than 10%. That will theoretically up the amount of coal (relatively) to maybe 47% - still less than most other countries and especially all those that are yelling so loud now.

So yes, I'll stick to my "think, then post"-attitude.

Are just pulling this out of thin air or why are people spreading complete crap here? Just because Germany has such machinery it doesn't mean most of the electricity is from coal.

Here that's last year's energy mix in Germany: https://docs.google.com/viewer?url=http%3A%2F%2Fupload.wikimedia.org%2Fwikipedia%2Fcommons%2F7%2F74%2FStrommix-D-2010.svg

Yes, that's 43% coal in total, but not the majority. It's a huge share, too huge if you ask me. But it won't increase significantly next years. The coal plants that are planned to be build until 2022 are mostly replacements for the old, aging and really dirty plants that are currently running. They were planned to be build either way, no matter if we shut down the nuclear power plants or not. So that share won't be affected.

What will be affected is the 22% nuclear energy share (it will drop to 0 by 2022) and the renewable energy share (currently around 17% if I calculated right) which is supposed to exceed 30% by 2022. Calculate in the saving by not exporting as much electricity and you'll see that there is no need to produce more electricity from coal.

Now put that into perspective with China (78% coal, 2% renewable energy) and the US (50% coal, 9% renewable energy) and then you'll see that you better think twice before telling anyone how to produce electricity.