I am ready to bet the reason for the divisions lack of lifetime profit is that they were hiding the initial losses on Windows Phone there for several years.

I was thinking exactly this. In addition the news about the Lumia 1020 price drop precedes the news about the MS deal.

This is factually wrong. MS did negotiate. In fact the judge sent the parties to negotiate but obviously Google did not want money from MS but for MS to stop suing Android manufacturers. In this case they were expecting MS to trade patents worth millions for patents worth pennies (you may not agree with patents but this is the current law).

By force of contract signed by the owner of the patent. You know the patent owner has a monopoly over the patent which includes the right to sign an agreement to license it under FRAND terms.

Because they have not committed to a FRAND agreement obviously.

As it turns out the courts care.

The original article is also wrong on this one.

It is largely accepted that SC is the competitive game with the highest skill ceiling and also the most unforgiving (qualities competitive gamers put under the word "hard") although I can argue that Quake is "harder".

Then you may be interested in the bonuses for people who support the project (signed DVD's etc.)

In other news the independent movie Radio Free Albemuth is having a kickstarter campaign to fund theatrical release. Why don't we get news about this?
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/elizabethkarr/radio-free-albemuth-theatrical-release/

Every society that can be destroyed by social media should be.

Windows Mobile lost to the less capable OSs (iOS and Android) because of terrible user experience. Capabilities do not matter to anyone but hardcore geeks. It is user experience that matters.

Motorola are the only one fighting and I think we all know why. If Google pays it will be equivalent to them telling everyone who uses Android that they should pay Microsoft. Not that it is not the case already. BTW claiming that behemoths like Samsung can't defend themselves if they think Microsoft do not have anything real is absurd.

And Google act as if their decision makers learn about the industry from /. comments. The result is they lose all battles in court.

I can't blame them for playing the game. They pay other companies tons of money for patents why wouldn't they take tons of money for their patents? In addition Microsoft are company that produces actual products with the patents they own.