When would a company not buy out their competitors given the opportunity?

Yes.

It's a consumer society...

I have personally successfully avoided their products.  Not a penny of mine has contributed to their tax-free society, nor will it.

Meanwhile...if you took a minute to read each of the comments in this thread Rinehart has made onemillionandseventyseventhousand dollars in that time....

Aahhhh!  Now I know what i gotta do while I try selling my body to raise the money to be able to afford the new Mac Pro... put a fechin' i in front of it.

Same trouble as me, eh?  Can't afford Apple crap cos you can't feching give it ^ away, much less sell it.

It's like the time I was downtown trying to sell my body to raise the money to buy an iPad, and I figured I'd start low so as not to price myself out of work.

Anyway, this sour old biddy comes up to me - well you didn't think I was gonna attract any young uns, did ya - and she asks: "Well... how much is it, then?"

Feeling a little hesitant I replies: "Um, how's five bucks sound?"

"You gotta be kidding, old boy..." as she she snorts heartily: "I just wanna borrow it for half an hour, not take a feching 6 month lease on it."

Orright, so now everybody knows why I don't got an iPad, but at least I'm not supporting the 'Evil Empire' from ill-gotten gain.

As for the aforementioned bucket of shit... reckon I'd get a refund if i took one into an Apple store and complained the 'i' was defective?

Look, Paul, I get it that you hate Gina Rinehart with a deep-seated and dedicated passion, I really do, but do you have to keep mentioning her name so often here in the forums?  It's not that I mind you expressing your absolute contempt/total disgust for the woman [term very loosely used for the want of a something better to describe it]... but every time you use its name, my lunch, dinner, breakfast, whatever, wants to regurgitate itself with the force of a projectile fired from a canon.  Now I wouldn't mind so much if I weren't trying to really hard to economise on the food bill, but I'm never going to afford that Mac Pro at this rate of mention

Now I don't wanna deprive you of your daily bitch, cos everyone needs one to relieve tension, so I've come up with a few variations that may delay the realisation of who you're speaking of long enough for me to settle enough to keep my breakfast, lunch, dinner, whatever.... so here goes:

Gina Swineherdt

Gina Lollipiggida

Gina Blackheart

Gina Heartless

or Temporary Gina [and that hopefully she kicks the proverbial sometime soon]

Close....

MS did it on purpose just to make sure IE was the only browser out there. And they got in trouble for it as well.

Ah yes.  Microsoft sued over using their own browser in their own operating system.  

Yes, that was inherently wrong.  There 'should' have been no issue with MS providing a web browser with their OS.  Afterall it's pivotal to an OS's functionality...

People like Nutscrape simply got their knickers in a twist and the faction-mad EU jumped on the bandwagon...

Because in general people are naive and uneducated on these type things, and even if they do know and it doesn't directly affect them in any way, they could care less. Another sickness of our society... and there are soooooooooo many.

AND... when the press does not give ample coverage to this type of thing..

Seems it is more important to make a big deal out of something someone said on a reality show than to address REAL issues.

200 million naive and uneducated people.  With enough jack to buy their products.

OK.

PS: Nice pic of Gina.  Thanks for that, Jafo.

Yep, and that's 200 million people that have iTunes accounts with credit cards on file, that doesn't necessarily mean they use them. I had an iTunes account years ago too, but I never used it.

Actually? While posing to be for the underdog (Netscape), the EU thieves were just after their Danegeld.

I don't know if they were dangling or not Doc, but making a gelding out of em would be easier if they were!!

I would've thought Gina Swineherdt might have been the go... oh well, Miss Piggida will do.