"I am starting to wonder, are weirdo lawsuits involving companies with nothing much to lose and claims and defenses that seem doomed from the start going to happen to *all* of Microsoftâ(TM)s competitors?"

Am I crazy to suggest that having Mac OS X on generic PCs would surely hurt MS far more than it could possibly hurt Apple?

If I was to try my hand at the art of anti-MS conspiracy theory, I wouldn't suggest Psystar as the MS rube. Rather, I'd have to put my stock in the idea that Apple and MS have some kind of hush-hush agreement to divide up the market. MS certainly doesn't want Apple competing with MS in generic PC land, and Apple is happy with leaving the Mac in its high markup niche that gives it good earnings for its money, ignoring computer games and the oft-touted notion of an Apple game console competing in the traditional game console market where MS now lives, and instead spending most of its development dollars in other consumer products markets that it knows it can win easily via awesome UI and that MS has been toying with for years and couldn't be more mediocre at if it was trying to lose.

Still, I guess MS could be behind Psystar... If it did nothing, antitrust regulators might eventually get a crack at the "Apple-labeled" tied selling business, leaving Apple to reluctantly eat MS' Windows cash cow for breakfast. An airtight knee-jerk lawsuit from Apple to cut down an MS patsy would dispel the generic PC MacOS threat long before this could happen.

I'm starting to develop an "issue"...

They keep coming at me from different directions; from the Internet, from the TV: People claiming to be direct victims, or civillian activists, or ad-hoc experts, telling us about the alarming things they've been seeing... and then waving their ignorance about the subject around like it's some kind of badge of their humanity that I'm supposed to sympathize with.

Or worse, the investigative journalists who put 'em on the screen, but think that if they go beyond cloying emotional appeals and show them talking about the details that we will be confused or uninterested.

I want to sympathize with those people; they have some very very important things to say that no one else is going to say. But all I can think of is "I googled about this for 5 minutes and learned more about this than you appear to have ever learned despite your claim of being involved". I guess I've been reading Slashdot for too long.