I think this is one of the best analyses that I've read. Ever. The only think that I would add is that it's now election season here in the US. To extradite Assange here would cause a lot of attention to focus on an "Assange event" which would detract from the election messages and dilute the effectiveness of both the Obama and Romney campaigns. And as Snap said so well "You don't want that".

Don't say silly things that are beyond your understanding. Of course you don't sell your shares now. Do a dividend discount model with a constantly increasing dividend. You hold your shares now.

The problem is that Steve Ballmer is Dick Fuld. Incompetent beyond any metric but aggressive and intimidating within a corporate structure.

How quaint. Your 10=35 aphorism reminds me of the years I spent IT consulting for a very large software outfit that, as it happens, employed boatloads of H1B's while trying not to hire Americans. The many times that I was told by the Indians that Indians were preferred because of their higher intelligence and how breathtakingly smart they were. The final straw came when I was told by an Indian that all important mathematical theorems, lemmas, advances etc. were discovered by Indians. At this point, I quite boisterously pointed out that Gauss was not an Indian as was not Legendre, Laplace, Lebesque ad infinitum. He became quite quiet and wouldn't speak to me anymore. Maybe I was too harsh on the guy. Or maybe his brainwashing had hit cognitive dissonance at a resonant frequency.

Succinctly said and right on the money ! Word was an abortion when it first arrived and is still a pile of crap. What ever happened to Interleaf ? Now that was a word processor ! But Latex is still a divine gift from above (once you've gotten past the learning curve).

The reason that we Americans shrug our shoulders is simple. You can't argue with Eurotrash, they're intellectually challenged. The vast majority of continental Europeans have become smug automatons, content to lie in their intellectual desert that passes there as an oasis. I'm sure you are satisfied with your available choices. The government if not the EU has granted you these opportunities in order to keep you happy at a somewhat proletariat level. Other options, that are disdained by your government and your subservient press, are reserved solely for the your patricians. In short, what Eric Fromm propounded many years ago has become the norm in continental Europe. Before you post again on socio-economic matters, it might behoove you to pay a visit to the US; not as a tourist but as a traveler. After you have met, here in the US, as many illegal Dutch aliens and legal Dutch transplants as I have, your mental capacities may grow to understand why Americans just shrug their shoulders in response to your prepubescent questions.

Umm, you might want to study some naval architecture before you assert the superiority of the Chinese ships v. the ships that Columbus used. Even to the unpracticed eye, I would assert that the Chinese ship would not suffer an ocean storm and would probably break up even in a moderate force 5. When it comes to ships, size is not everything; just ask the Spanish about 1588. Yes, I'm sure their ships could carry a lot of tonnage but I seriously doubt that as a people, the Chinese could even come close to competing with the English or the Dutch when it came to ship design. Oh, to be a geek and pontificate on matters one knows little about !