I'm glad I'm not the only one who was left wondering what the hell this was all about.

The short story: "Mailinator is a free, disposable email service". Some site operators wants to block people with this service from registering. There's a way of listing all the domains used by Mailinator (by generating a bunch of new throwaway addresses?). Mailinator in turn has a way to detect when a script is trying to go through this list.

The amazing idea is to detect when a script is scraping this list, and feed it bogus data like "gmail.com".

I think you might have missed the whole idea with patents and how patent law differs from copyright law..

I am not sure if you are aware or not, but gnome-shell does have a menu organized by category. Activities->Applications.

I find myself actually liking gnome-shell once I got over the initial "shock". :-) I'm also using Unity (Ubuntu 11.04) on my laptop and, while perhaps looking a bit sleeker, something doesn't feel quite right.

I would have wanted a separate option for the in-ear type that doubles as ear-plugs. I guess the first option sort-of covers them, but they are (generally) a lot nicer than the loose hanging variety I would refer to as "earbuds"..

I'm not a fan of ATI's drivers in general (I use the open source r600g at the moment and it's working fine for me), but obviously "empty blackness" is not the norm - not even for the closed source drivers.

Another possible related thing: "Empty blackness" would be what you get with X nowadays before any window manager or similar is started (did you try clicking somewhere if you were using twm?). I can see why they removed the pretty horrible patterned background that was the default earlier, but there are some drawbacks..

Can we here perhaps see the next step for patent trolls when they're done adding ON THE INTERNET to every old inventions?

Surely it's "just" a matter of bypassing the electronics all together and keep the green light lit by powering it directly? Perhaps controlled by your own electronics to be able to have some control over the behavior. You'd need physical access, of course..

I'm usually not the one to buy into any conspiracy theories, but in the case of Microsoft I make exceptions drawn from experience. :-P

I simply don't quite buy the "it makes Windows 7 better"-argument. Why would they not simply be happy to use the lack of H.264-support as a way to get people to use Internet Explorer instead?

Whether I'm the "pissed" communist you want to paint me as or not I will leave to another debate, my point is simply that I see this more as a way of forcing mozilla to give up their stance than a way to improve the experience for Windows 7 users. If their priorities were different, I'm pretty sure Microsoft would be happy to use this leverage to get more people to switch to Internet Explorer instead.

Also, this doesn't just affect distributions. It basically means that anyone who wants to distribute a full browser needs to pay pretty expensive royalties, which would mean that in practice it would be limited to those who have enough money to pay for one.

You can view it however you want and it might not even be particularly wrong as such, but to me it seems like a pretty obvious attack on WebM and open standards for HTML5 video. h264 is not open and firefox will never be able to ship with it.

Yes, you can outsource the problem to things like gstreamer, but the problem still remains - you will be unable to ship a complete open source system that plays video on the web and doesn't depend on any legally dubious patented stuff. As I've understood it, mozilla has avoided taking this approach in order to be able to steer the development onto the more open alternative.

I've been considering donating, but I haven't gotten around to it yet. Perhaps partly because it's not entirely clear to me why exactly they need all the money they are trying to gather. Right now, my "local" donation page says that half of the money would go to the Wikimedia Foundation and half of it to Wikimedia Sverige, "which, in Sweden, acts to make knowledge freely available to everybody."

I'd happily help keep the servers running, but how much of my money would end up helping that part of it all? I guess I will end up donating some small sum anyway in the end, though, because I do use wikipedia a lot.

Even if there's no truth whatsoever behind the initial claim, I suspect we'll be seeing this pop up in various more and less accurate forms for several years to come.

I paid $10 for the last bundle (as a Linux buyer), but I still haven't even tried any of the games..

Both? Neither?

This is one of the places where I, for one, would welcome more regulation. The roaming charges are often completely absurd, and I don't see the free market taking care of it anytime soon. Now, if they could fix the roaming charges for data connections outside of the EU too... (over 10€/MB? Seriously?)