it is a free web based service. they are not required to publish anything regarding their algorithm, let alone making it understandable by non CS folk. Google search does not ship with any OS, nor does it insert itself as the default search engine, browsers do that. If people dont like it, use Bing or whatever. The argument of * most people *choose* to use Google, they need not * therefore Google must supply all necessary informtion that we ask of them so that we can tune our product to rank higher makes no sense, and I wonder if any law can uphold this. The "Italian competition authorities" will have a tough time justifying how a free service with no coersion of any sort to force a user to use their product can be anti-competitive

according to the BBC. Apple has denied any legitimate claims about the battery exploding, and has said ""The iPhones with broken glass that we have analysed to date show that in all cases the glass cracked due to an external force that was applied to the iPhone.". And the fact that they used an "s" in "analysed" proves that its the BBC. Move on people, and lets see a post about the kidnapped 11 year old found after 18 years

> Last year, the program crashed at least four times and was plagued by errors that led to botched schedules, an overcount of students and mistakes on report cards Maybe the units are wrong.

The queues are long enough at the gas station already without having to wait for people to get EVERY LITTLE SEED out before pumping their cars full..

It seems that if we managed this 40 years ago, we should be able to do it again without making it sound so difficult

If you're the manager responsible for the overall system infrastructure, look at this as a big red waving flag. Your company has reached a stage where there is a definite need for an IT specialist, and the networking infrastructure, file server needs etc are already beginning to outgrow the current capability. This would be a good time to have a Systems Administrator in-house, since this position is very often overlooked in the context of a small company, who has a limited budget for "immediate needs" in your domain (biotech, wireless, web, whatever). Assuming that your company intends to grow, not shrink, so will the IT needs and demands upon the infrastructure. Before you know it, adding more people, getting more projects. will spill over into increases storage requirements (SANs etc), failover policies, daily, weekly, monthly backups and tape archival issues, fileserver issues, remote access to employees, etc etc just for starters. This person may or may not become the eventual lead of your Systems team, but they will go a long way towards solving major and minor IT problems, and eventually a team can be built around/over/under that person when you become a 100 person mid-size company. Im working in one now, and a smart move would be to start putting the systems administrator position on your next budget. And this has nothing to do with IP or looking at proprietary data, though having an in-house person would deal with it for sure. The external company would be bound by NDA/CDAs, and the contract to not divulge any proprietary information, thats a basic line in any contract between 2 companies in a collaboration. This has to do with planning for the IT needs of your company in advance, and not ignoring this need as a "nice to have". It's not, you need to have someone who can support you and the other employees fulltime.

is required to upgrade to 3.0. While its not a big deal for individual computers, in an office environment its not as trivial..another one of Apples (not so) subtle schemes to get you using a particular software version whether you like it or not? And the "new" features are pretty pathetic really, more like they should have been in the 2.0 version of the software.

It takes me for ever to just get their customer service to figure out my iPhone plan, and to walk me through the details of other existing plans so I can make an informed decision, and they expect me to trust them with upto $1000 of my money? And I can only imagine how much more their customer service will suck after we include the complication of handling live money via bank accounts and credit cards, Not to mention that this is certainly not a free service, and Canadian providers have been widely slammed by Canadian consumers for having exorbitantly priced plans to begin with. While this is a cool idea, it will take a LOT of convincing to get decently savvy customers like myself to trust what they say anymore. Maybe my 6 GB plan will include this feature!

I really think this is such bullsh**. What law is this breaking? This "monopoly" law that I keep hearing over and over, what defines a monopoly? Over 50.1% of the overall market share? Im interested to know what happens say 5 years from now if Apple takes over from Microsoft as the "monopoly" holder for desktops, and MS sues Apple over their bundling of Safari. Now does that mean that Apple will have to allow the Windows versions of all Microsoft products to run on their hardware? Or even better, allow MacOSX to be installed on non-Mac hardware? I think the MS bashing, while great fun to watch, is getting a bit ridiculous, and MS should sue the EC for unfair business practices.

I may be well behind on my law knowledge, but what law is this breaking? I mean I understand if MS prevented other browsers from being installed on Windows, but is this not similar to, for example, having a default terminal in Ubuntu that ships with the distribution, and the user has a choice to use their own any time they choose?

Theres goes its practicality in Vancouver....

if the plan is to take the news headlines, irrespective of technical content or applicability to /. themes, and paste them in here?

applications rather than "gamers and hobbyists" whatever that means, and make significant progress towards manycore architectures. Whether or not they have a Larrabee type x86 architecture in the pipeline, or whether they focus on GPGPU based architectures with FireStream, I think that's where their main focus will lie in the years to come. That, along with improving the programming model for these architectures.