Seems like you're leading the parade of assholes into 2012.

Lets just take the suffering of millions of people and throw in a Steve Jobs joke just because you don't like the guy (or Apple). You're not funny, just makes you another asshole the world really could do without.

Oh bullshit,

They dispute his age because it was alleged he was born a year earlier than reported in Siberia while his family had been exiled.

Dick Smith, Harvey Norman & Bing Lee all sell last-generation electronics including laptops. It's how Harvey Norman are able to offer two-for-one deals on their netbook/notebook range.

I can also attest to the fact that while stocks of netbooks are high, they certainly aren't moving off the shelves. As I said before laptops are far lighter and smaller than they've traditionally been and more recently this new lighter form-factor has not cost the system performance, between those laptops and tablet computers (Not just the iPad) sales have all but ground to a halt with netbooks. To the point where those retailers you mentioned are discounting them to below cost just to move their stock.

While true, this only tells part of the story.

The iPad cannibalized the technologically-naive market that had begun to gravitate towards netbooks as a cheap, portable web-surfing laptop by providing a much simpler web-surfing product that was more portable and (arguably) easier to use. Though the recent advent of ultrabooks will be the killing blow for netbooks as they cannibalisde the ultra-portable computing market that netbooks were also marketed towards.

Based off of what Apple does.

There's a media executive somewhere in the US who's blaming Europe's economic crisis on this realistic, rational approach to copyright law.

I can also see them signing all of their letters with their name and the slogan: Fuck facts, I'm rich.

You would probably find that media companies use modelling based from growth periods during the 70's and 80's where media sales were growing at their most aggressive rates. It's bullshit, but not surprising bullshit from the egotistical suits that work in big media.

Apple is the new Microsoft.

Samsung > Apple and thus Samsung

Ignore all the articles! and say Apple are trying to copyright a rectangle.

I heard they don't get phone reception on skull island.

Probably just threw it in there without bothering with a license from the Iranian government.

Given Yahoo's foray into the media business, I seriously wonder what the benefit to Microsoft is?

Somehow I don't see Microsoft getting into the media business and while their online services have been hit-and-miss in the past, it isn't like Yahoo is going to bring anything of value to their online platform.

In the words of Steve Jobs, Ballmer is a Bozo.

Gates is undoubtedly brilliant, a brilliant software engineer and a great person at heart. No matter your opinion on Microsoft you can't deny that Gates did a lot of good (and bad I suppose) for the industry, he knew his craft and knew very well how Windows fit into the personal computing marketplace and how it should go forward.
Ballmer on the other hand has seemingly played a CEO who doesn't know how Microsoft's products fit into the market and doesn't know how to push them forward, really he should be some pleb buried in a do-nothing middle-management position rather than leading the ship. His business strategy (or lack thereof), vision for the company and it's products and how Microsoft should grow comes across in all facets of Microsoft. From the half-and-half approach that the SDK has taken in recent years, Windows Vista looked like a project Ballmer oversaw and even the failure of product lines like the Kin & Zune. It's taken the rest of the industry to pull Microsoft forward and the result is a Microsoft that instead of leading the industries it does best in, is now following the competition and occasionally trying to be different for the sake of being different.

The solution is one that's apparent of everyone except the the stakeholders of Microsoft itself, even their employees and possibly Gates himself (I'm guessing here) have deluded themselves into thinking that Ballmer is at all capable of running Microsoft.

At times I'm surprised how much insight Bill Gates has on economics. A tax such as this could completely replace a sales tax and shift the tax burden from the individual to companies, really this should be just one policy in a portfolio of legislative & financial changes that should be implemented to change the complete failure of top-down policies that have stalled the American economy.

The government should not be looking at new taxes, but rather replacing economically prohibitive taxes (Prohibitive to both consumption & production) with effective taxes that target the largely untaxed, unregulated practices that businesses engage in that skew the distribution of wealth and bring unnecessary risk to the economy.

Ignoring ASLR, Sandboxing & the security that naturally comes from a more closed-off (walled) solution.

All this development does is contribute to the mess that GNOME has become.

Unity is crap, it's a step backwards for usability and another barrier for people migrating to Ubuntu. Labelling the end-users as a group of complainers only shows how out-of-touch and pig-headed the developers have become. Developing for GNOME has become a chore more than anything, the reason why is easy to understand when you start using the barely functional API. Most importantly and it's become so bloated with superfluous visual effects and useless applications that the form-factor unity was designed for (Small screen netbooks) can barely run it, forget about trying to put a recent Ubuntu install on an aging computer.

GNOME need to cut this bullshit of trying to change the desktop UI for the sake of being different and focus on the end-user, otherwise given their current attitude GNOME will become completely irrelevant in a couple of years.