> And it would be trivial to do so with a system WITH DRM restrictions.

false. The way DRM works is that the content is cryptographically encrypted. And only the vendor has the decryption key.

> Say, what percentage of MP3 players support Ogg and FLAC? Just curious.

pretty much all of them.

> I have no presence in the US, not having lived or worked there for 20 years. However, because I haven't (yet) handed back my US passport, the US thinks I ought to be subject to income tax. No other developed country claims the right to tax people who neither live nor work in the country.

I already explained that this is completely backwards. This rule should apply to corporations, not individuals.

> The US already does that for personal income tax, but surely you can see the issues:

Yes, it does and this is completely backwards. Individual US citizens (who have presence in only one country at a time) have to pay taxes on their entire income, even if it was made outside US. Corporations (who have presence in multiple countries at the same time) can segregate their income by country, which allows for these accounting tricks.

> And you will happily pay personal income tax to the USA and the UK and France and Germany and Japan, right? When they declare you owe them for whatever reason?

1. UK, France, Germany, etc. cannot declare that I owe them anything because I have no presence there.

2. All of the countries you listed have tax treaties, meaning that tax paid in one country is deductible from the tax due to another country. The result of that is that you do NOT pay US tax + UK tax + France tax + ..., but rather max(US tax, UK tax, France tax, ...). This does create a question of how to fairly allocate taxes among the different countries, but that can be worked out with international agreement.

The reason these loopholes work is that multinational corporations can allocated their costs to high-tax countries and profits to low-tax countries. For example, a US operation "licenses" some software from a subsidiary in Cayman Islands or pays for "consulting services" that end up eating up all of the profits. Through these tricks a US corporation ends up with near-zero taxable income, while all the profits are transferred to tax havens.

The solution is to tax ALL profits, regardless of which country they were supposedly "earned" in. That way, transferring profits to Bermuda or Luxembourg will have no effect.

You are either stupid or you are being deliberately misleading. I can see 7 i3's launched all the way back in... Q3 2012. Nothing before that, and no mainstream i5/i7's. All the other Core CPUs in that list are for laptops (sockets BGA1288 and FCBGA1023).

In contrast, every single one of the AMD CPUs supports ECC and that has been the case since AMD64 launched.

As Dawkins himself points out, evolution is quite good at optimizing away traits that are detrimental to survival. Therefore, there must be some advantage to religion.

Humans are no longer subject to traditional evolutionary pressures (starvation & predation). We are the apex predator. The only animals we have to compete against are other humans.

There are only two ways one group of humans can outcompete another group:
1. increase their birth rate
2. destroy the other group
All successful religions promote both of the above goals. (Or, conversely, a religion is successful to the extent it promotes them).

Here are some of the traits that successful religions encourage:

- improved internal cohesion & loyalty. Religions provide certain rules for dealing with other people. These rules must, at the very least, incorporate reciprocal altruism ("do unto as you would have them do unto you").

- enhanced xenophobia. The hatred of the outsiders (particularly those who believe a different set of fairy tales) is proportional to the internal loyalty. Realistically "love thy neighbor" applies only to the members of the in-group, while the outsiders can face anything from discrimination to turture & death. It's no coincidence that so many wars have a strong religious component.

- increased birth rate. There is a strong positive correlation between religious belief and fertility. This is partially a side-effect of the religious dogma (e.g. ban on contraception, sex education, and, in general, infantile attitude towards sex). It can also be part of deliberate strategy (e.g. Quiverfull movement today, mormons in 19th century, etc.)

- coping mechanism. Turns out religious people are, on average, happier than non-religious. Probably because when something good happens, it's evidence that god loves you, and when something bad happens, it's part of god's plan and he loves you.

This is by no means an exhaustive list. I'm sure you can think of more. But the point is, successful religions encourage believers to have more babies and kill off the non-believers.

That's what this Hogan guys says, but there was no 10 year limit. He made that up. The exact question the judge asked was:

That's why they have transcripts, you know.

FIrst of all, non sequitur. My question was what makes Apple different from every other patent holder? You didn't answer that question.

Second of all, what makes Apple a "once-creative company" that "wants to be a twisted old"?

Is there a problem with Apple's business model? If so, please enlighten me, because for a company to be #1 in market cap, they must be doing something right?

Has Apple stopped creating new products? The iPad came out in 2010, so I'd say the answer is no.

Does Apple have a great, modern technology stack? Among other things, considering that they maintain their own open source C-compiler tools, and they have by far the best consumer desktop operating system, I'd say the answer is yes.

So how is Apple declining? Because you feel their attempts to assert software patents supposedly mask an insecurity about their ability to innovate? Please.

Or they could, you know, innovate, like Microsoft did with the Surface and RIM did with Blackberry 10.

Samsung is a blatant copying machine.

Blame the broken software patent system. Remember, Samsung, Motorola Mobility, Microsoft, etc, are also suing prolifically with mobile patent suits.

Apple (like the other companies mentioned above), is only acting in the interests of their shareholders. That's their legal obligation as a publicly traded corporation.

Fix the software patent laws (or eliminate them altogether) and the problem goes away.

Shouldn't have fed the trolls.

Ad hominem and non sequitur.

"A really shiny Best Buy?" You're kidding, right?

This is a company that makes consumer electronics and computers. It built and maintains two operating systems, including its own browsers, email clients, etc. It contributes to a number of open source projects, and maintains its own C compiler toolchain (which it also open sourced), an IDE. It also maintains a relationship with a certified team of developers, and maintains an ecosystem of online content, including music, movies, books, etc.

Oh yeah, and it also has retail stores, which have by far the best consumer experience of any electronics store.

I can't believe this got modded up +5.

Why would Apple alienate their professional customers, including developers? They're the ones who, along with graphic artists, movie editors, radiologists, etc, who pay top dollar for the most expensive Macs?

If developers can't install Apps like Eclipse, Mac Ports, various command-line tools, etc, then they'll switch platforms. Apple can't afford to lose those sales.

Besides, many game developers don't distribute on the Mac App Store, including EA and Blizzard (and Steam still runs separate from the App Store), not to mention Microsoft and Adobe. Just how can Apple afford to lose Office and Photoshop, among other high profile non-App Store apps?