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I would like Microsoft to crawl off in a corner and die alone.

barnyard porn!

Comcast has many more congressmen than TuCows.

this is just the tip of the iceberg.

I remember an account of one case where as adults, both men had (among other similarities) chosen identical belt buckles Show a study of at least several hundred monozygotic twins where similar choices in fashion were dictated by twin genetics and we can talk. Until then, you're just repeating freak stories. Look hard enough and you will find two twins with this sort of thing, but your confirmation bias is preventing you from registering all the twins without the genetic fashion imperative.

...they fuck off and die the better.

Designing a machine to invisibly spy on schizophrenics. What could possibly go wrong? On the Origin of the "Influencing Machine" in Schizophrenia

The schizophrenic influencing machine is a machine of mystical nature. The patients are able to give only vague hints of its construction. It consists of boxes, cranks, levers, wheels, buttons, wires, batteries, and the like. Patients endeavor to discover the construction of the apparatus by means of their technical knowledge, and it appears that with the progressive popularization of the sciences, all the forces known to technology are utilized to explain the functioning of the apparatus. All the discoveries of mankind, however, are regarded as inadequate to explain the marvelous powers of this machine, by which the patients feel themselves persecuted.

I'd do what I did in 2005. Install linux and never look back.

Altering permissions after install is standard on iOS. And of course there is no bundled spyware.

1) iOS permission request handling is crude, not granular, and accepts as default and not presented certain basics such as net access. As usual, you are stuck with what Apple deigns to expose to the user.

2) As for the latter, what do you call advertising frameworks and analytics?

I tried to install flashlight app but the top 5 or 10 all wanted egregious access to my phonecalls, instant messages, or full network access. I gave up.

Permissions Manager LBE is the kind of thing Apple would never allow on iOS. You can fine-tune any app's permissions *after* install, and even autoblock bundled spyware.

Except that when pancreatic cancer manifests itself, it's already too late.

Except Jobs didn't have a standard "pancreatic cancer", that is, usually an exocrine adenocarcinoma . He had a neuroendocrine insulinoma. That's a quite atypical variant, indolent, localised, and eminently resectable with a much lower probability of mets if caught early when compared with an adenocarcinoma.

you cannot volunteer your technology to become part of a standard and then later hold the industry (or competitors in the industry) to ransom by selectively refusing to license that technology on FRAND terms

You're got it backwards. It's Samsung that has "essential" patents and demanding payment but it's Apple that's refusing to pay anything for them. So ironically, thanks to the US's obvious native-company favouritism, a company with essential patents (like Samsung's) can't get money or redress, while a company with trivial, obvious patents (like Apple with rounded corners, hyperlinks, search bars, etc) can sue, and sue, and sue, and sue till the sun dies. Basically, Apple gets to pirate Samsung's essential patents in the US, thanks to govt protectionism.

Apple wants a royalty rate of $24 per unit from Samsung for its alleged use of Apple's design patent, the notorious tablet shape with rounded corners ... when Samsung asked Apple for a much lower amount per unit that everybody else in the market pays for Samsung's standards patents, Apple refused, offered no counter-offer, and sued instead. To date, it's paid nothing at all for those patents or for the other regular patents Samsung is accusing Apple of infringing. In its trial brief, Apple states in one header:
        To The Extent That Samsung Is Entitled To Any Remedy, its FRAND Damages Cannot Exceed $0.0049 Per Unit for Each Infringed Patent
        Less than a penny should be Samsung's lot for patents that are essential to even be in the mobile phone business, but Apple wants Samsung to pay $24 for rounded corners, plus from $2.02 and up to $3.10 per unit for its utility patents.

The Commission also found that Apple had failed to argue other FRAND-based defenses, such as promissory estoppel, laches or fraud. Finally, the Commission determined that even if Apple had offered evidence of the proper interpretation of ETSI’s IPR policy and had shown that the patents at issue were actually necessary to practice the standard, that the FRAND declaration was a legally enforceable obligation, and that Samsung was required to grant irrevocable licenses under FRAND terms to any party, it still would not have found in Apple’s favor, because the parties’ final offers were sufficiently close to each other that Samsung did not violate its obligation to negotiate in good faith.

No reason is required to shit on Microsoft. Microsoft *is* shit, coated in a frothy shit frosting, with shit sprinkles liberally dusted on top of that shit. Clearly, you don't know shit when you see it.

Oh yes I do. I strip the DRM and keep copies on my computer. Easy as pie. I bought 'em, they are MINE.

"Rome" persisted for 1,500 years after their discovery of concrete, until it's final fall in 1453. Along the way, it saw off the tax-averse Germans that immigrated into the West, Persians, Arabs, Kievan Russians, the Germano-Franks returning again as "Crusaders", and diverted the Mongols into attacking the Slavs and Islam. Not bad, and not really indicative of anything to do with concrete. Or lead.