Activision did not acquire Vivendi. The merged company retained the ATVI stock listing, and Bobby Kotick is running the company, true; but VU got more board seats than Activision. If anything, VU bought Activision.

You want legal forms generated by Phil Grognard from his basement? No thanks - I trust Phil (mostly) to write software that doesn't crash all the time, but I don't want him looking out for my legal interests, and I don't particularly believe that he understands, for example, the limits of nondisclosure agreements with regard to pre-existing works in my particular state. Just use the Nolo books. They are inexpensive, far less expensive than 10 minutes of an attorney's time (literally).

So they looked at the patent and created a version of the invention. Big deal. This is a sort of abuse of the term "open source", isn't it? It's burdened by the patent. Anyone marketing these things would be sueable - and for treble damages because they infringed on the patent willfully.

Get the Nolo book about how to form an LLC. Read it. Form the LLC. Transfer ownership of the application to the LLC and make sure this is unambiguous. Then have the LLC sell your software. Be sure to use the LLC in a clear and unambiguous fashion. Distribute profits to the members immediately upon receiving them. If a big awful patent challenge occurs and you can't afford to oppose the bad guy, then you can have the LLC declare bankruptcy and the big awful patent owner can't pursue the profits that you have already distributed to the members. Also, lobby your senators and representatives for software patent reform, assuming you live in the US.

The DS is the foremost portable gaming platform. The PSP is #2. Everything else is distant. "What's not to like" is that iPhone games to date are weak, compared to the quality of DS games. The game systems you see on the train in Japan are DSs.

Yes. The reporter is stupid and annoying when claiming that the cause of coke on the cash is "well understood" and then proceeds to claim it's from (a) everyone rolling up dollar bills and snorting it, and (b) money changes hands during a drug transaction, "of course". Problems are, (a) dollar bills are probably filthier than coke and everyone knows it; and (b) what, is the coke not in plastic bags? Is the money transported along with loose cocaine rather than being exchanged for cocaine?

People like to bitch on Slashdot that "Office is a steaming pile of crap" but these people are ridiculous. How many have tried to use both Office and Google Apps for real work? Google Apps sucks. It'll get better, but at the moment it is far behind Office.

You just need to design a lot of games and then your resume becomes the best 3 of them. The language is not very important because once you get the job, you are probably going to have to use some horrible internally-developed scripting language, if we are talking about PC or console games. If it's Web game design you're interested in then just use Flash.

There's no need to overstate things. The Tacoma Narrows Bridge collapse article would be enhanced with video (and it has had a video clip for a long time). [[Atomic bomb]]. [[Nirvana]]. The [[wing]] article, showing the vortices of air. It's easy to name a hundred articles that would benefit from a video clip right on the page, for the education of the reader.

The acquisition of PowerSet was a few days ago and is presumably not what is powering Bing. Apologies if this is inaccurate, it's the result of spending 5 seconds skimming the parent's TFA link.

As the IT guy, your job is to optimize the productivity of the people who are getting the film made, right? Therefore you need to do a survey of everybody and find out what software they are all familiar with, and then you need to use that. If you need to train them on new software, then that is not only a waste of your time, but much more importantly, it's a waste of their time. Don't use this as an opportunity to push your agenda. Just get them working immediately using whatever software they are currently comfortable with.

Regular users of Office 2007 and OpenOffice know that Office 2007 isn't merely superior "in some senses". It's in almost every sense, as long as you have a relatively modern computer.

I salute you, sir - whenever the Harkonnens took any prisoners of the civilian population of Arrakis, the survivors held a funeral for the hostages and acted as though they were dead. No leverage, no more hostages.