Now lots of online businesses peddling second hand goods will spring up in no time.

What about pdf books and eBooks? Can they be traded online or offered free by the legitimate purchaser?

how obvious was it that there would be a huge negative reaction

With Chair-Man in charge of things, MicroSoft's arrogance knows no bounds. They are past caring any more; and seem intent on bringing down as many competitors on their way down to ir-relevance.

In the new markets such as smartphones and tablet devices Microsoft is not even 5% as relevant as in desktops. So now instead of competing on merit on desktops, they are trying to force desktop makers to ensure competing OSes are very difficult if not impossible to install.

the worst influence and bully in the tech industry hits the already much abused PC form factor.

Supercop Oracle: I caught 50 powerful top grade thieves in my neighbourhood!! I am great!!!!

Ordinary cop: Why did you allow 50 scoundrels in the first place?

After Windows95, the operating system gets in my way, when I try to run application programs on it. Still not resolved - in fact it got progressively worse with Vista; reduced somewhat in Windows 7, and is back in full force in Windows 8. Instead of solving the bug, I think the developers have renamed it to 'feature'. Does that count?

Whose laws?
When a country has multiple groups claiming to be the government which set do you follow?

When there is ambiguity on who is in charge, do you think there would be respect for the laws, whomsoever made them?

What about when the government is obviously not legitimate?

Rennard is not a judge, to pass judgment or rule on legitimacy. If he feels threatened operating in a country, legitimate or not, he should pull out his employees. Their security is more important than his desire to make money operating in an obviously illegitimate domain.

if he cannot or is unwilling to operate in a country, as per the laws of said country, it is not his privilege to pass judgment. He can opt to pack all his employees and leave, without risking their lives.

Apple selling Android devices.

This is just an announcement at CES. Doesn't mean shit. Dell stopped shipping Linux tablets... why? Dell makes Linux laptops pricier and more difficult to get than Windows ones...why?

So Dell is planning to 'reinvent' itself on an Android based Rapberry-Pi kind of form factor device; which it hopes people will buy from Dell despite its name rhyming with Hell? Good. I'll believe it when I see it.

First, it's not scapegoating. Scapegoating implies the victim is innocent, somebody else did the crime, and the scapegoat merely gets the label of a criminal.

So if the focus falls on 2 over-zealous prosecutors, and their motives proved to be wrong, and they are made an example of, it does not mean they were scapegoats. It means they fully deserved the focus brought to bear on them.
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"Making example of" is not a 'cheap trick'. Prosecutors do the same. Judges do the same. RIAA/MPAA do the same. They do not prosecute every allegedly guilty party. They make an example of a few, to make it a sufficient deterrent for the rest.

So if two players are indicted for gaming the system for their personal goals, caring little for justice, they should be made an example of. Countless other prosecutors would think 100 times before following the same path.

If a company misrepresents their product (e.g. made in USA when in fact it's made in China),

Two problems:

1. With so many Chinese living and working in the USA, but still not citizens.... with so many Americans living in China as well... do these "Made in the USA" tags have any significance?

2. If misrepresenting is such a big crime, I am sure Verizon is guilty of it several times in their "unlimited" data plans, bandwidth calculations, etc. etc. This incident is such small fry.

1. Programmers in the US are worth the money corporations spend on them.
2. China and India are full of crappy programmers who can't understand specs, cannot correspond in English, let alone produce quality code.
3. The value of the US currency is a true measure of its worth in global markets.
4. US corporations are killing US jobs despite the fact outsourcing produces lesser quality goods and services.

I know the plural of anecdote is not data, but still...

I can't help but laugh at the infantile levels of thinking and planning which goes into building secure infrastructure systems. Here's how I would do it:

1. First, insulate critical infrastructure systems from the rest of the World. Don't install 'secure' routers or 'secure' firewalls. Simply insulate them. End of.

2. Do not install any software (OS, database or application) that needs to be activated from the outside, or auto-updated from the outside.

3. Do not ALLOW any USB based access to any of the networked machines, ever. If at all, the USB drive needs to be connected to a Linux machine, that does not auto-mount or run any auto-magic stuff. Then, any files that need to be sent to the server need to be quarantined prior to updating.

4. Same goes for WiFi. Only allow mahcines with known, registered MAC addresses, after pre-auditing and authorising them.

Dealing with the aftermath of such insecure architecture, without Solving them once and for all, is a criminal offence by the IT admins and must be prosecuted as such. Irrespective of the outcome or lack of any infections despite insecure architecture.

you can install NoScript. I find that it works well.

Does NoScript protect from sites that use Javascript? Or sites that use Java?

If a tool protects from java applets, ideally it should be named Java-Block or NoJava. The tools that blocks Flash is called FlashBlock.

So please clarify: Does NoScript help against java applets at all? Or only Javascript?

But there are still sites that want to provide a richer GUI than you can get from CSS, JavaScript/Ajax, for example for interactive vector graphic simulations.

Thanks for the explanation. Any examples of such sites, if they are popular?

Java is a plug-in published by Oracle that plays applets written in Java,

Yes, I understood that bit, which is why I asked the final question: Is the Java plugin downloaded so often, to run on browsers? (alternately)

Is Java plug-in bundled with browsers without the need for separate downloading?