How is this countersuing or fighting back? This is an outright offensive move. The only "consensus" otherwise is among Slashdot posters who are STILL trying to portray Google's acquisition of Motorola as purely defensive. For some reason, Google can absolutely do no wrong here, whatsoever, at all, ever. Why? Because they use Linux?

That would be a more convincing statement if every Apple competitor wasn't copying the designs of their products. Now all the laptops are aping the MacBook Air. It's ridiculous.

Huh? The most popular tablet operating system is iOS. Android has very little presence in the tablet market. Having smartphone market share won't mean much if Google doesn't make money from Android, according to their own quarterlies.

That search result display is actually really cool. I'd love to see that in other browsers (including desktop browsers). The problem is Yahoo's track record is poor when it comes to updating their products. For instance, Yahoo Mail is embarrassingly behind other web mail services. If Yahoo treats this like they treat their other products, I can't help wondering if it will just become another obsolete Yahoo thing.

This condescending attitude toward non-techies is off-putting and needs to die. You don't have some unique brain power that others lack. You just choose to spend your free time on computers. Other people choose to spend their time on other things that you lack knowledge in.

This is a security issue. Non-techies don't care about "browser choice". They do care about their phone not getting hacked. Just because IE6 was terrible doesn't automatically mean that a restricted browser platform is bad...it just means IE6 was bad and insecure. If you want fast JIT, WebGL, etc. then expect security restrictions.

Vendors are trying to avoid the mistakes of the past (IE6) by providing secure, restricted platforms for running web code. If they didn't and became infested with exploits, techies would be shitting all over them for THAT.

Choose one: a secure platform with a fast built-in browser that executes JIT and accesses hardware drivers but with third-party restrictions, or an insecure platform with lots of browser choice but increased opportunity for malicious exploits.

I agree Facebook was way overpriced, but I wouldn't dismiss it as a "social chit chat and picture website". It has replaced email and even the web for many people. Its value is in advertising, and Zuckerberg's goal is to replace Google as the internet's #1 advertiser. One of Facebook's problems is that mobile advertising doesn't perform as well as web advertising (which itself is on a downward trend), which is why they lowered their revenue forecast.

Another move of the goalpost. You started out by saying Apple provided hosting services for non-paid developers, and that was wrong. Now you're talking about how you can't use the APIs if you aren't approved through the store, which is incidental to the fact that you still need a paid developer membership to use the APIs in the first place, complete with signed entitlements.

You're so out of it that you don't even realize that bringing up the app store refutes your earlier argument--which you've suddenly abandoned--about users paying for iCloud's sync services through the purchase of extra disk space, because being on the app store means that not only do you have to be a paid developer, but Apple gets a cut of any purchase price. Hey, it's almost as if that money goes toward the services the app is using.

In your quest for a foothold, you've decided you're going to latch on the app store, an argument you weren't even making before. Nothing you're saying refutes the fact that one must be a paid developer to use the iCloud APIs. Whether or not the developer actually uses them is irrelevant.

That puppetmaster reveal is coming any moment now!

You're bad at this. Next.