chadbag

I am surprised that the patent for the hidden email bit was granted.  Such technology (or similar) can basically be had through simple email forwarding setups, which have been around forever.  

I have my private Email, [email protected] and want to keep it hidden.   So I subscribe to an email service that sells forwarding addresses and buy [email protected] and have it forwarded to my private email.  I set my email client to have the from set to the forwarded address and voila.  

Tech for that has been around for a long time. 

My wife is Japanese Korean (born and raised in Japan, but with Korean citizenship [at the time] as her grandparents went to Japan from Korea before the war — she is a US citizen now).  She thinks that SK is being dumb and reneging — Japan made big payments/loans decades ago in reparations and SK keeps digging up issues to try and pry more out of Japan.  This won’t end well for SK.  

Piece of technical nit-pickerey 

It did not run MacOS 6.  There was no such thing.   It was "System 6".    Version 7 was, I believe, "OS 7".  The term MacOS did not come about until 8 or 9 iirc.  

On the 802.11/g-n upgrade that Apple charged for.   The reason that they charged was due to accounting rules (at least at the time) that required them to charge as it was a new functionality that the device was not sold "with" and they had to account for the value added vs the recognition of the revenue or something like that.  You can search for it on the internet to read the reason why.

Back to your regularly scheduled flame fest 

Small claims court is great for things where you don't get the correct answers from a big corporation.  In most cases, the company won't appear and will settle.  It is just not worth it for them to send someone to the court for a $500 or $1500 claim.

I took Compaq to small claims twice (over the same product).   First time they just settled.  I was not that happy with the settlement but did it to just be done with it.  But then I noticed that the agreement we all signed on the first settlement was screwed up and so told them they owed me a new computer.  They said no, we settled with you.  I said, read the agreement and pointed out the part about the new computer.    They said to take a flying hike.  I filed another small claim and this time they showed up with their lawyer.  (This was in New Hampshire and they had recently bought DEC, so had a whole office of lawyers down in Mass.)  We showed up, I stated my case, and the judge asked to see the document.  He said that the document did not make sense (it strongly implied what I was claiming but was not 100% clear cut) and asked who had drafted the document.  The Compaq lawyer said that a lawyer in the Texas office had drafted it.   He said that he needed THAT lawyer in the chambers so that they could be deposed on what it was supposed to mean, answer questions, etc.  He adjourned the case for 30 days.  Needless to say, Compaq was willing to settle when I suggested we settle since it was certainly not worth their effort to fly that lawyer to NH from Texas.  They offered me another $500. I took it to be done and it made up for what I was not happy with in the original settlement.    (The issue was they had done a quick and very lousy copy/paste job on the doc and had a bunch of stuff that was not supposed to be there -- since I felt the original settlement was not really fair I took advantage of it).

I also took Amazon to small claims court.  I used to sell stuff on Amazon.  They kicked me off claiming I had tried to collude with other sellers on price (which is not true).  They then froze my account and would not release the funds they owed me from legit sales I had made previous to their action.  I did not contest their action of closing my account -- that was their business and ended up being a blessing in disguise as it pushed me to get back into SW engineering instead of selling cr*p -- but did contest the 6 month freeze on my funds as I needed the money to pay my vendors and stuff.   They would not release but as soon as they got notice of my small claim (was like $17xx) they sent me documentation to settle if I would agree to not sue them over it. I signed and they sent me my money right away.

I don't know about Ohio law but small claims court does not require a lawyer on either party's side, though you certainly can bring one (at least in those states I have done a claim).   Small claims court is a good venue when you feel you have a legitimate complaint against a big company who won't do the right thing.   Just prepare your case, lay it out logically and with as much evidence as possible, and see what happens.  Most of the time they (big companies) will just settle without actually going to court in my experience (personal and with talking to others).  (Cases against other individuals and small companies are more likely to go to court --e specially if they are local to you -- my advice deals with large companies; especially ones not local to you where the cost of showing up is not worth it).