Are you saying that it is illegal to link to a proxy which allows access to TPB?

Doesn't that include any VPN connection to a network in a foreign non-TBP-blocking country, unless the administrator of that network has blocked access to TPB?

If yes, I guess that a lot of employees of foreign companies could be in trouble when they access the company network through VPN during a travel in The Netherlands.

First-to-file means that the patent system actually accepts that the same invention can be made independently by two companies without being obvious. Otherwise there would not be any reason for having First-to-file.

So yes, the mere existence of First-to-file must mean that the GGP's defence of "it must be obvious if we could invent it too without knowing about the secret patent application" is invalid.

Interesting graph. It shows that the world was a safer place in the early sixties when the Cuban Missile Crisis almost started World War III.

How many simultaneous nuclear power plant failures would it take to end the world in the same way a WW III would have done?

What is the probability of all those failures happening now vs. the probability of a WW III happening in 1962?

The comments here on /. are focused on why robots were not built in advance. But I am wondering why nothing was done in the days after the disaster.

When I heard about the attempts of cooling from the outside using fire trucks, which failed because the radiation was too high for the personnel, my first thought was:
Mythbusters can make a vehicle remote operated for a weekly TV show. The entire nation of Japan can't make a fire truck remote operated after facing a nuclear disaster?

If you want your stories to be believable, you should avoid any mentioning of mythical creatures like unicorns, elves and smart(er) TSA guys.

[...] a definite ethical violation of the GPL, but it is not a legal one when the FSF itself does the distribution. However, it is legally problematic for the redistributors.

So:
1. Write software.
2. Distribute your software under GPL with incomplete source.
3. Wait for someone to redistribute your software.
4. Sue them for violating your copyright.
5. Profit.

Didn't even need the "?" step.

Seems to me that redistributing GPL software can hypothetically be very dangerous if you can be held accountable for the omissions of the original copyright holder.

(I know that the typical "punishment" for violating the GPL is only that you will have to comply in the future. That is why I wrote "hypothetically").

I dusted myself off and thought "how is this place even LEGAL?". I then went over and told my daughter to stay away from there. She, age 4 at the time, just looked at me wide eyed having witnessed my fumble and said "I wasn't going to... that looks really dangerbus"

Good. You have given her the opportunity to learn herself to assess a risk prior to taking it. Your own parents on the other hand...

Well, perhaps nobody in the USA were willing to take the court fight all the way, but here in Denmark someone actually defended himself all the way to the supreme court and won.

Quoted from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McDonald's_legal_cases :

"McAllan (Denmark)

In 1996, McDonald's lost a legal battle at the Danish Supreme Court to force Allan Pedersen, a hotdog vendor, to drop his shop name McAllan.[10] Pedersen had previously visited Scotland on whisky-tasting tours. He named his business after his favorite brand of whisky, MacAllan's, after contacting the distillery to see if they would object. They did not, but McDonald's did. However, the court ruled customers could tell the difference between a one-man vendor and a multi-national chain and ordered McDonald's to pay 40,000 kroner ($6,900) in court costs. The verdict cannot be appealed."

From the summary:
"The offenders? The four labels comprising the Canadian Recording Industry Association â" EMI, Sony Music, Universal Music, and Warner Music."

Oh, yes. Those labels are certainly local Canadian companys with no connection to the US labels whatsoever.

The joke is not that this is public today - but that it was still considered worth keeping secret yesterday.

Identifying sex could be a good thing.

But this was merely about identifying gender.

Everybody knows by now that you can't hide anything in a PDF by putting a black rectangle above the text.
But these people were clever and carefully avoided doing this old stupid mistake which they knew so many people had done before.

Instead, they put the black rectangle BEHIND the black text...

(By the way: I think I have seen somewhere that the black rectangles above the text is actually the way it must be done in USA according to some instructions from the government. Anyone can confirm this?)

The worst part is that 12-14 years ago, IE was actually severely lacking in this area compared to Netscape. Netscape could load the page immediately and fill in the images as they loaded. With IE, you had to wait for all images to be loaded, before the page would show.

Admitted, that was images in the page, not background images. I don't remember how background images loaded in the two browsers back then.

I always find it strange when someone counts support time from the release date of a product.

What if the product is sold for 4 years but only supported 3 years from release date?

Support time should be counted from the date the product is pulled from the market.

I haven't RTFB, but I have RTFS, and it already addresses this:
"a police officer [...] was fined -- not for disclosing confidential police information, but for unlawful use of a 'restricted-access computer system'

What is worrying in the story is that she was not fined for her real, very serious, and I hope very criminal offense, but instead was fined for something which is usually not considered a criminal offense, but merely a breach of contract: Using a service with permission but not complying with the usage policy.

Let us use a car analogy:
A policeman deliberately hits a person with a police car, causing the person to die.
Instead of charging him with murder (or whatever the correct legal term is), he is charged with car theft.

The logic behind:
He had a permission to use the car for police work. He had no permission to use the car for murder. Using a car without permission = car theft.