That's where you are wrong. In a common law system, which US civil law is largely based on, law is created by the decisions of judges rather than the legislature.

Actually it is the court's job to decide what is and isn't patentable. See the NPR story that was posted earlier today. It was the result of two court rulings in the 90s that allowed the patenting of software.

It cost Oracle $5.6 billion to buy Sun. I guess Google thought it was cheaper to deal with the lawsuit.

Google had no choice. They needed applications to be able to run on different types of hardware.

According to reports, a lightning strike caused the first train to lose power and was subsuequently rear-ended by a second train.

Both the iPhone and Android are marketed towards consumers who don't care about Exchange support. This isn't like the adoption of the PC where businesses bought the machines before consumers did. In fact, it's exactly the opposite and it's also why RIM isn't doing so well.

There were some TV ads last year when WP7 was first announced. I think they went something like, "People use their smartphones too much, we're the phone that is so intuitive that you don't have to use it". There's your brilliant MS phone marketing for you.

The product that Verizon is selling is a monthly data plan contract. It doesn't matter what the phone attached to it is.

Having a strong competitor will do the most amazing things :) I'm so glad that Google didn't let Apple achieve the >75% marketshare that they did with the iPods. Can you imagine the iPhone being the only credible smartphone in the market?

We're not in a debate club and I couldn't care less what Wikipedia says. In the real world, the situation is this: Friedman makes a series of logical arguments based on a set of premises that require considerable time to verify. If the situation is as dire as he makes it out to be, then why is his behavoir inconsistent with his conclusions? The only conclusion is that he doesn't really believe what he says so why should I waste my time trying to verify his premises.

No, it's like this: if you tell me the world is going to end if I don't do X and you don't do it yourself, then I'm going to be inclined to believe that you don't believe your own arguments.

The New York Times ditched its paywall a couple of years ago. Apparently people would rather read Yahoo News.

Insects aren't animals? Wow, I knew vegans were delusional but I didn't realize how much.