1995 was 17 years ago. Why did it take 17 years to start the suits? It's not like any of this was hidden in those 17 years. Google's been around since 1998. Amazon was from 1995. Yahoo was from 1995. What part of these companies took 14-17 years to finally bring a suit to? Until I see that, he's a damn dirty patent troll taking advantage of the status quo.
Child porn is how .au passed their censorship stuff and it has quickly expanded. Child porn is already illegal and, in my opinion, doesn't need deep cutting censorship bills to combat.
"So if a company starts infringing trademarks, polluting search engines en masse, tricking people into buying their rubbish"
eBay? also, already illegal based on trademarks, copyright, etc etc.
"What about people who DDoS attack you? Is that fine? No need to have any recourse there?" "How about those that hack DNS to dupe people into visiting their site etc"
already illegal
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from my understanding, SOPA is more about removing due process than making bad things illegal
I think your battery might be defective. My WakeMate loses about 19-20% battery life each night. I was using the original black charger... looks like I'll be using the real brick from Apple now.
The company was going to be nationalized, essentially stolen from him, anyway. Thus, investors didn't matter in his decision to give the nation nothing in return for stealing his company.
I'd argue that Jobs is more of a "Randian hero", by far, since it seems that Apple refuses to release hacks, only good and solid code, products, etc. It also has infinitely better customer service than Microsoft, which can be seen on Consumerist.com as well as just interacting with the company.
I also get the feeling that Gates falls more to the altruistic side of things.
That's for you to decide, based on your other values.
Some people value adventure and risk-taking in order to bring about new rewards and feel proud of them. They accept the risks which could shorten their life.
Other people want to live a long time and see a lot of things. They would not be risk-takers and thus would be happier with a longer life.