This is poor reasoning. You are deciding an objective fact (whether someone stole ideas from someone else) with a subjective assessment (whether someone is an amateur or a professional). As Apple themselves have demonstrated with their asinine "look and feel" lawsuits, intellectual property law does not work that way. You cannot blow off the accusation of stealing ideas by just pointing out that the end result sold more in the marketplace. If, tomorrow, I were to invent a novel topping for a hamburger and sell the idea to, say, Sonic drive in who sells a million a day and then McDonalds "copies" it and sells a billion a day that McDonalds is the "great artist". It's bullshit and you know it.

> This is what the netbook should have been - small, lightweight, keyboard ... and Android.

The original netbooks were a lot closer to that than the jokes being sold to fools today. ASUS really screwed the pooch on that one, they practically invented a new form factor that was wildly popular and had all sorts of potential for breaking from the death grip of Microsoft. But instead of forging ahead and building something like Android or iOS, they switched to a castrated version of Windows. As a result the netbook went nowhere and the iPad became the revolution.

100% agreed. I got my first cell phone in 2009 and then only because my wife was having a "high risk" pregnancy so I needed to be able to be in contact wherever I was. Once I got it, however, I dumped the land line because I certainly don't need to pay for two phones.

IBM doesn't patent things to "sit on them". They rake in billions of dollars a year trolling^H^H^H^H licensing their portfolio.

The social safety net is socialism! Taxing the rich fairly is class warfare! It is patriotic to advocate for the destruction of the US government! Oh yeah, and war is peace!

How dare you bring "facts" to yet another slashdot anti-enviromental hit job?

Google could *easily* address these types of concerns by turning Android into a true open source platform. Open up the development and release process to the community, rather than simply throwing months-old code drops over the wall.

Apple did it first.

Schweaty balls of Mars.

Out of curiosity, how many thousand-desktop IT systems do you run?

Then why did they just spend so much money (potentially billions of dollars) purchasing these patents?

Taint all that good.

Yeah, just look at how big a failure the Wii was.

Pretty much all scrutiny (and all anti-trust inquiries) of Microsoft was dropped when George W. Bush took office.

Yup, if they had opened it up immediately and there were any bugs, these same folks would be here bitching and moaning that they should have tested it first.