Many of those companies are based in the Silicon Valley (particularly Santa Clara, North San Jose, Sunnyvale and Mountain View) where your cost of living is very high.

If you were in Washington State or Texas (Dallas), your cost of living maybe only half of what it is Silicon Valley. When I was living in Dallas, I was paying less than half of what I now pay for an apartment in San Jose. There is state tax too. Juniper is relatively small.

What was surprising to me was to see Walmart, but I don't know their Software Engineering group size or location.

This is my simple version:

Motorola/Google demands $4B for use of use of some H.264 & Wifi patents by MSFT in XBOX and other devices

MSFT disagrees, will pay the license but at RAND rate since Motorola participated in the standards

The case goes to court in Seattle to determine what the rate should be

Motorola sues MSFT in Germany, trying to get an injunction to prevent XBOX sale in Germany.

Seattle court says the case is already in review and German court cannot make a judgement

Seatle court determines that the license should be just over $1M

MSFT sues Motorola/Google for breach of contract

Jury agrees with MSFT and gives them $14M

I am sure a loaded gun was not held at the head of Motorola to participitate in the various Standards Bodies. Large corps such as Motorola/Google, MS, Apple, Sony, Sansung etc participate in these standards and want their IP included is to direct and leverage to develop products earlier than their competitors, and somethings that would interoperate with other (competing) products.

Rules are very simple, you disclose the IP you hold in the area, agree to RAND if you participate in creating the standards.

Here is the list of 300 companies with numbers of patents granted in 2012. Google is now #23, up nearly 60% from last year with 1151 patents granted in 2012.

http://www.ipo.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/Top-300_6.23.13.pdf[ipo.org]

But even then their action does not make sense, because the subject in this case is not a muslim. His name would suggest that he is a Hindu Bengali from west Bengal, India. So the logic being employed is

brown skinned -> some muslim are brown skinned -> "there are muslim terrorists" -> "all muslims are terrorists" -> "this guy might be a muslim! Break down his door!"

there would appear to be some major flow in their passenger profiling

Aditya Mukerjee is certainly not a Muslin or Arab name. Its a Hindu Bengali name, most probably from West Bengal, India.

try again ;-)

There are other more reasonable reasons why hardware may cost more in the EU than USA. For example, in USA, hardware typically only comes with a 6 months warranty. In Europe, your consumer protection is much much better; for example, it is not limited to month or even 1 year, but can be over a reasonable lifetime of the product, which maybe 3-4 years. Many consumer do not understand this and take out additional insurance covers which are usually unnecessary.

I certainly will be buying a XBOXONE. I think the price difference for having the Kinect will pay off very well. Because this is integral part of the device, it will have applications developed using its capabilities. It will enhance and enable many new genre of games.

Also, the 24h license check can work out great for me (its not always internet connected). If this allows me to share my library, loan games with my kids and friends who live across the country - this is great feature. This DRM is way more friendly than what you find with Apple store, Google play or indeed Steam (whom many in this forum will also praise).

OK, like in UK, where surveillance cameras suddenly fail to operate when its convenient to the police.

I'm all for the video cameras on the police, provide the camera is "sealed" from tampering and the police are compelled to produce the video evidence else the prosecution fails and the courts charges the police for contempt.

Why would Intel care about raw CPU performance. They have no competition from AMD in CPU performance. The GPU performance may not be as good as A10, but it has improved and that's what matters for Intel.

Intel for a little while has correctly perceived that their risk to business is from shift in computing to mobile devices and they are addressing this issue. One thing Intel has always been very good at, and I'm a great admirer of them for that, when they perceive a risk, they are extremely good at steering their giant ship very rapidly into the headwind and tackle that threat. Their process technology lead also gives them a huge advantage.

Over the next couple of years, the battle front will be the mobile and server devices, the desktop processors will become a second class citizen. Maybe this will give some lifeline to AMD, but AMD is so far behind on performance.

I think a lot of people at the time of the purchase did raise that the price was too high. From other sources, who were also interested in the Motorola IP, the IP valuation I was hearing was ~$3B. Was the rest of Motorola worth $9B?

I think the consequence of this decision will be two fold: (1) the cost of books overseas may go up significantly, and (2) books will be more localized (ie some portions translated to local language - already happens for Chinese market, but India teaching is in English).

But for me, more importantly whether this changes the earlier cases, where retailers such as Costco could not buy in the grey market and resale them in the US (Omega watches).

Can you post a reference to this "Marx quote"? You are either trolling or ignorant AC.

Physics should be mandatory for a doctor... My son probably would have preferred a joint Physics/Medicine degree, rather than studying Medicine at undergrad, but the workload is really heavy for a medic student as it is.