Because extortion is always ok as long as the victim can afford it, and in no way encourages someone else to try the same trick again once you make known you'd rather pay an fight. Right?

But if I bought the TV at Best Buy, paid the man in the blue shirt at the register and got a receipt for it, you can't realistically charge me with receiving stolen property if it turns out the cashier was manipulating the register on his day off and just pocketed the money.

Apple isn't claiming they bought it off the back of a truck from some guy, they claim to have done due dilligence and they did actually buy it from a company that should have had legal rights to transfer the rights in several jurisdictions. Proview Taiwan and Proview PRC aren't two companies with the same name, there's a real corporate link between the two.

Either Proview Taiwan fraudulently misrepresented the fact they had been empowered to sell on behalf of their parent company, or once Proview realized who really bought the trademark they figured they let it go too cheap and could extort a bit more money for it.

Only if you're operating under IFR. If you're under visual flight rules, the FAA doesn't have to have a record of the flight.

OTOH, a manned plane under VFR rules must have the N-number registration painted on both sides, and that publicly links back to the registered owner. If you can read the tail number, you can figure out who owns it. Theoretically, a drone in shared airspace and heavy enough to be a collision hazard should have the same registration and markings, but the FAA regs may not say that.

Boycott them entirely instead. Find and support entertainment that isn't their product.

Using this as an excuse to pirate even more just gives them more ammunition for the next round. Having sales fall off a cliff and not being able to blame it on piracy sends a better message, particularly if it means other artists find and thrive on more sustainable means to still earn a living.

It'd also be useful in cases where people have two chargers. Some people keep a charger / docking station / cinema display plugged in on the desk at work or home, and a spare charger in the bag for traveling. That way you don't have to unplug and pack the one at work every day, or worry about accidentally forgetting it one day.

IIRC, the 1st gen TiVos were PPC running at a whopping 50 MHz, about the time Intel was hitting 500 MHz with the Pentium III. The system was designed so the encoder or satellite tuners and video decoder could bus master to and from the IDE interface directly, the main CPU never touched the video stream.

You want to make consumers prefer open systems? Outreach and PR shouldn't be your first priorities. Your priorities should be (a) make it usable and accessible to everyone, and (b) make it cost competitive.

The rest of the world wants tools that help them get whatever they want to get done with a minimum of fuss, and get the hell out of the way the rest of the time.

I own several computers I can program. I write code for a living in my day job. I also own an iPad and an iPhone, because some times I don't feel like arguing with technology. And I don't have a guilty conscience that buying those somehow contributes to "Right to Read" becoming a prophecy instead of a bad sci-fi story.

There's always going to be someone starting the next big thing in their garage, but setting that argument aside, "garage hackers" are also important because kids that get exposed to STEM in their childhood, including computers, turn into people who pursue those fields as an adult.

The whole information economy is intertwined. All those big shops still need developers from somewhere, and most of them know their own roots enough to know any proposal along those lines would devastate the pipeline of computer science graduates in this country, and everyone's got to hire new talent from somewhere from time to time.

On top of that, most of the people working as software developers in the US aren't writing commercial apps, they're writing and maintaining in-house business applications for the company they work for; the corollary is that almost every company of more than a few hundred employees has some amount of internal software they depend on, even when software or SaaS isn't their actual product. Restricting the ability of anyone to maintain or run in-house code would kill most companies overnight, let alone the damage it would do to all the IT vendors who sell general purpose hardware. IBM / HP / Dell etc. make way too much money selling computers to run their customer's workloads to ever allow that market to get closed off.

There's nothing legal or technical preventing someone from buying a handful chips from any of a half-dozen ARM licensees and fabricating the rest of a system around it, either for personal or commercial use. Etching and populating a multi-layer board with SMT components has been a bit of a stumbling block in the past, but there's several rapid-turn, small-order board fabricators online now that can handle that.

There's no 300 MHz ARM system with 128 MB of RAM being mass-produced and marketed, because there's historically no market for one as an Intel competitor. Raspberry Pi seems to think that ARM has matured enough and there's a large enough niche market to give it a go though.

No, it doesn't prove his point. What would prove his point is someone proposing legislation that made manufacturing, selling, or owning a device that allowed the user to compile and run their own code illegal.