I don't know about you, but as somebody who holds some Apple stock in my retirement investments, I'm happy if Apple is actually able to keep that $50. It means my investment, and that of millions of middle-class people like me, is worth more. Regardless, though, Apple still operates in a competitive environment even if you can differentiate their products from everybody else's. They sell more when prices go down. As a result, they'll keep some of that $50, and some of it will go into reduced prices.

That's a bit extreme. Of course some people still have jobs -- at minimum, you still need people to operate the machinery. The difference, though, is that the person who does this has far higher skills than the people who were sitting on an assembly line tightening the same bolt or screw day after day. And, you need people designing those machines; you need accountants, marketing people, operations specialists and . . . The fact that the act of manufacturing doesn't employ nearly as many people doesn't mean that there's no employment. It does mean that people will have to improve their skills if they want to find a job, because the jobs of tightening the same bolt day after day are all gone.

I can guarantee that the Swiss planned out their system in more than 2 days.

That would be more convincing if the pricing hadn't been set BEFORE the FCC told them that tethering had to be free. Typically, effects happen AFTER their causes, not before.

In answer to your first question, a lot of summer activities for students are staffed by college students, who do it for their summer job. That doesn't work well in, say, February. That's just one reason. There are lots of complications. On the last, you have a good point. And, in fact, many year-round school actually run their kids on multiple schedules (it helps maximize school usage -- run 4 different schedules of students, and have 1/4 of them on break at any given time.) You do still run into problems of "My son Johnny is in district A and has these 3 weeks off; his cousin Jimmy has a different 3 weeks off, so we can't schedule a family vacation together."

YMCA camps Seagull and Seafarer come to mind (google them if you like) There are also "Summer at Sea" type things and Summer abroad, where students spend a month in a foreign country. My point is that there's a lot going on during the summer which would be foreclosed by year-round schools. Plus, if there's only a 3-week gap in the middle of the summer when kids can go to camp, (i) most summer camps would have to close, and (ii) those that don't are going to have absurdly high demand.

Unfortunately, that's a popular but incorrect myth. What does it mean to "Work in the fields?" Largely, it means planting, which generally happens in the spring, and harvesting, which happens in the fall. Summer isn't the time of greatest need on the farm. If you look back at the history of public education, you see that when we were more agricultural, schools had a summer and a winter session for this very reason. Instead, the traditional school calendar evolved as a coordination mechanism. It means that families could move from place to place without the children missing school on either end. It means that families can plan vacations together and that organizations which target activities for kids have a big chunk of time when they know that students won't be in school.

Eh.... The school system in Wake County, NC (the 12th largest in the US) has a number of year-round schools and the results are not as positive as you're painting them. For one thing, the on-again, off-again nature of the year-round system makes finding childcare harder. Secondly, we haven't seen the academic benefits that were supposed to happen. And, thirdly, the country is organized around the traditional school calendar -- want to send your kid to a 4-week summer camp? If you're on a year-round schedule, you can't do it.

If we can bring back a species that has become extinct, then do we have to worry nearly as much about keeping them from becoming extinct in the first place?

Cavemen used to carry their fire around with them, because if it went away, they had no way of recreating it. When they could create it whenever they wanted, they stopped worry about whether it should go away. Why shouldn't that be our approach to species?

If I had a dollar for every cockamamie topic for a law student's obligatory note in a law journal, I'd be rich.

Um... Osama Bin Laden . . . Taliban . . . Tora Bora . . . any of this ringing a bell? No coincidence that he was found in nearby Pakistan. You can make an argument that 9/11 didn't justify the war in Afghanistan, but you can't reasonably claim that Afghanistan had "nothing to do with 9/11."

Well, actually, I'm more wondering about the side of people USING the API. Oracle is suing google for implementing the API.

The API is only the interface. Why would it be copyright infringement to code to one side of the interface, but not to the other?

What is an API? It's basically an agreement about the ordering and identification of arguments either in memory or in series of network messages. If the judge actually finds that the API itself is copyrightable, then any computer program that writes to a standard interface is completely screwed. Write your own SMTP client? Sorry, that interface is copyright. Your own web server? Ditto.

APIs are the most functional part of computer programming -- they tell you 'this is how you communicate between parts A and B.' Yet, copyright is intended to only protect expression, not 'how' you do anything -- that's the realm of patent law. And while Oracle has patent claims mixed in here, Oracle isn't claiming a patent on the Java API.

Absolutely. The US people, through their elected representatives, have decided what the tax code is. Along the way, there were horse-trade made: "Well, I don't want X taxed, and you don't want Y taxed, so let's tax neither," "We want to encourage people to do Z, so let's not tax it," etc. . . It is absolutely moral to pay exactly what the country has agreed is appropriate.

Now, it may be that there's a consensus on changing the law. If so, exercise that consensus and change the law. If your congressman stands in the way, you're in luck -- it's an election year.