This is exactly the issue I was going to bring up, but you've said it better than I would have.

Right, because the fact that I learned computing on Commodore Pets and Apple IIes has left me and the rest of my generation irredeemably crippled in the modern world. When will this idiotic meme die?

Having been a Nielsen family years ago, I would say that chance is pretty much nil. It's not like they plop a hipster in your living room who not-so-silently judges everything you do.

There is money to be had: by blackmailing Samsung. "Pay up or we brick you customers laptops." How much do you think it would be worth to Samsung to avoid that PR disaster?

I have a solution: the patent office should do a thorough examination of every patent application, in the order that they are received. If that makes the process too slow, then maybe the big dogs with their gigantic patent warchests should try paying their fucking taxes so we can afford to hire more patent examiners!

By generating construction jobs.

Not only that, but thinking that China would be a major market for online classes shows a complete and utter lack of understanding of international students. One of the major reasons Chinese students go to American schools is so they can live in the US for several years. You can't get a student visa to take online classes.

Nope. America is not an armed society in the sense Heinlein meant. Yes, Americans own a lot of guns, but those guns are generally locked up in a safe in their closet. The armed society Heinlein referred to is one where the majority of people have a weapon on them at all times, and that is definitely not how it is in the US.

You're missing a very important point here: the vast majority of Americans AREN'T armed. I won't disagree that being armed gives one a sense of power, but I suggest that the reason it goes to peoples heads is that they can reasonably be 99% certain that the other person is NOT armed.

Ok, now let's see your numbers for fraud committed against private insurance companies. Until you give us some for comparison, and thus actually prove that the private sector solution is more efficient, the rest of your post is just the standard meaningless Randian drivel and handwaving.

Also, I'm pretty sure the GP meant Medicare, not Social Security. Medicare's administrative costs are 2-3%, while Social Security's administrative costs are less than 1%. So that would be a typo, not a straw man.

Right, as long as you ignore all the documented use of fixed wing gliders and various experiments in powered, fixed-wing, heavier than air flight going back as far as 1825.

The Wright brothers certainly did a better job of implementing the technology than anyone else at the time, but they certainly weren't the only one's to come up with any of it.

Sorry, but I don't follow this line of argument. The only things that really differentiate Apple computers from PCs are the design of the case and the OS. Of the two, only the OS is actually relevant to the functionality of the machine. There's certainly nothing stopping other manufacturers from taking the exact same hardware and slapping it into a similar case. As far as I can tell, Apple really is an OS company, they're just doing a fantastic job of hiding it.

What makes you think the rest of the world gives even a single shit about software patents? Most of the world doesn't recognize them as being valid, and a significant portion of the world doesn't even recognize copyrights as being "a thing". In China, Windows is just as free as Linux in the monetary sense.

That functionality existed in professional video servers, which are very similar to a TiVo in every sense that matters for this functionality, long before TiVo existed. See the Tektronix Profile PDR, for example, which first shipped in late 1995, IIRC. Adding that functionality to what is essentially a consumer version of a professional video server would be obvious to anyone familiar with TV or other video production.

Now, how it was actually implemented is not necessarily obvious, and this guy's method could very well be patentable, assuming there wasn't an extant patent sufficiently broad to cover all possible implementations.

I would think that deliberately ignoring jury instructions would fall under contempt, at the very least.

Sad, but true