I salute you sir; nicely done. Although the disturbing thought did occur to me that perhaps the GP was in fact calling for the reinstatement of nineteenth century judges to adjudicate these newfangled matters.

As this excellent piece by Thomas Friedman points out, manufacturing is rapidly becoming a global commodity. The real value resides with the creators of a product, the designers, engineers, marketers, etc. Factories are just big machines into which you plug your designs, and they can be swapped in and out of your logistics chains if necessary.

The "big machine" analogy is even more apt as manufacturing eventually shifts more and more to automation. How many workers does a robotic factory need? If you've ever seen videos of the Lego factory in Denmark, the answer could be as few as none, and it operates 24/7, 364 days a year (down one day for maintenance). Jobs was right to tell Obama that manufacturing jobs aren't coming back to the U.S.

Apple is merely acknowledging the fact that the "Designed in" sticker is coming to mean a hell of a lot more than the "Made in" sticker.

It's a pleasant surprise that Intel is offering this option at all, and you're calling them assholes because they're not offering it for all CPU's? I bet you're also pissed that this optional protection plan isn't free either. You arrogant, entitled jackass.

That's closer to the truth than you think, except that I personally don't believe that they have the slightest interrest in monetary compensation. The feeling I get is that Apple started the patent litigation ball rolling for the express purpose of doing as much damage to Android as possible, not for the potential of licensing fees or financial relief.

By raising the specter of lawsuits among hardware manufacturers, with the attendant legal costs, as well as the massive wastes of time and resources, Apple may well be gambling that a lot of manufacturers, especially smaller ones with limited resources, wouldn't be willing to take on the huge headaches of tackling a well-funded, utterly ruthless titan like Apple. Apple seems to me to be far more interested in chilling, or better yet killing, the adoption of Android than collecting money, a la Microsoft.

I agree with you completely, and it could get much, much worse for the people who have to defend against these weapons if they are deployed from the launch tubes of attack submarines. Then defenders will be faced with a hypersonic weapon that suddenly pops up thousands of miles closer to an intended target than expected than if they were land based. The warning window will be much smaller, and the direction of attack may be completely unexpected.

Interestingly, the political value of this weapon system may far outweigh its military utility. Just knowing that the US has these weapons, especially sub-launched versions, will force potential adversaries to rethink their entire defensive strategy, possibly futilely. They'd have to extend their radar coverage and air defenses to all possible avenues of approach to lucrative targets, or relocate those high-value assets, or both, along with the necessary extensions of command and control infrastructure, and swallow the concomitant expense associated with any of those decisions. The very existence of such a system could force an adversary to the realization that a viable defense against it is neither militarily nor economically feasible.

When Page took over as CEO from Eric Schmidt, he asked Steve Jobs for advice. After initial reservations, given the competitive animosity between Apple and Google, Jobs told him in so many words that Google's product strategy was all over the place, and they needed to stop releasing half-baked products and to concentrate on just five. He said that Google needed to focus on just a few things, and to polish them into world-beaters before releasing them.

And Jobs was absolutely correct. Google's "throw-it-at-the-wall-and-see-what-sticks" strategy is causing serious damage to their brand, and by killing off products which don't gain traction immediately they're sending the message that they weren't too committed to their success in the first place.

Jobs was many things, a significant number of which were downright despicable, but the one quality of his I really admired was his ability to say no to the multitudes of ideas percolating up to him, and to focus on just a few that he felt could be brought to fruition in a reasonable time frame. Google's attitude appears to be the diametrical opposite: the impression I get, and it's just an impression, is that Google treats all good ideas with equal priority, which ensures that the ones that actually have a chance of succeeding don't get the attention they need. They need to get out of the "engineer's playground" mentality and focus on a rational and sustainable product philosophy.

The only possible explanation for that statement is that it was posted by Iris.

Dammit! Where are my mod points?

Agreed. Those are trademark, not patent issues, but the core of Apple's complaint against Samsung cites the latter's "slavish copying" of Apple's designs, and those two examples do nothing to deflect the criticism. It may have been nothing more than oversights by the graphics department, but Apple's counsels could argue that they demonstrate a pattern on Samsung's part. The stakes for Samsung are extremely high, and one would have thought they would have been much more circumspect. They appear to be doing the best they can to undermine their own defense.

Are they in effect admitting that their previous Android phones were ignoring Apple's patents? Samsung has not been doing themselves any favors recently, what with the "app wall" in their store display in Rome featuring icons from iOS, and the webpage for the Galaxy Player 50 (since removed) that showed a 2008 screenshot of the iPhone's Maps app.