I say yes, I doubt one influenced the other.

Both the ISP filtering and the NBN/Telstra/Optus deal have been in the works for years now. Neither is a surprise, they both were obviously going to happen.

If I was Stephen Conroy, I'd censor posts like that.

Isn't that redundant?

"'We are only driving on public roads and taking publicly available imagery so what we are not doing is going into a specific installation and taking private pictures and obviously we are working with the authorities so if there are certain locations they don't want us to be there we won't go there, we are happy working with the authorities here."

61 words in a single sentence makes Google sound rather flustered by the accusation.

This manager would sound much more relaxed with a bit of punctuation:

"'We are only driving on public roads and taking publicly available imagery. So what we are not doing is going into a specific installation — and taking private pictures. And obviously we are working with the authorities. So if there are certain locations they don't want us to be there, we won't go there. We are happy working with the authorities here."

Offensive versus risqué is irrelevant. Duke Nukem Forever is denigrating to women, which is a completely different thing.

You can be as offensive and as risqué as you like in your own home. But if you treated women in your home like they are treated in Duke Nukem Forever, it would be a matter for the police.

+1... having a camera restricts you in so many places, I have many friends who look longingly at the iPhone but simply cannot purchase it because it has a camera. They don't work in exotic military installations, they work in some of the important and unglamourous jobs of this world:

Nurses and paramedics who can't bring cameras into some hospitals — youth workers who work with young children, in the curent climate of child porn paranoia — psychologists who need to visit involuntary mental health patients (ie people locked up because they're mentally ill) — bicycle couriers who deliver letters and small packages directly to offices (they don't know the rules of each building they enter, so they can't risk having a camera) — and I'm sure there are many others that I don't know about...

Don't be so sure!

The biggest kick in the nuts for Lodsys in that letter is when Apple says "Lodsys's threatened claims are barred by the doctrines of patent exhaustion and first sale". As I read it: because Apple have already paid for a patent license for each iOS device that they sell, no-one can demand another license fee. It's already licensed and paid for. Lodsys is effectively asking to be paid multiple times for the same device, which they can't do.

So, assuming that Google and others are similarly licensed to Apple, Lodsys would not be entitled to any fees from apps on unofficial mods and third-party stores. That's because the Android mod or third-party apps could only run on devices which are already licensed — the mod or app might not license the patent directly, but each user of the mod or app effectively has, because Google or Apple or whoever paid their license fee to IV for the device. It could be that almost every owner of a smartphone in the world is already licensed for this patent, which would make Lodsys feel sick in the stomach (if trolls have stomachs?)

(Remember IANAL and IV got paid for the Apple license, not Lodsys, but who got paid makes no difference)

The HTML5 technologies that ChromeOS will use for offline functionality are really designed to synchronise with the original server. So when Google Docs or your network goes down, you will be able to keep working on your document. But if you want to take your document somewhere else — say take a copy home as a file on a USB stick — you can't. Exporting documents is done in the cloud, not by the browser, so your document is stuck on your machine. You just have to wait until Google Docs works again so it can sync back up and then export it.

That is almost exactly the same as the PS3 outage. The PS3 console and games continue to work as normal offline, but you can't play online and you can't switch to a competing provider of online games. In a major outage of Google Docs, your ChromeOS would continue to work as normal offline, but you wouldn't be able to take the document anywhere or give it to someone else — and you wouldn't be able to switch to a competing provider like Office Live — because your data is stuck in the Google cloud. One day Google may fix this, but at the moment you would be stuck.

The problem here is being reliant on one company. On a desktop computer with a full operating system you've got myriad alternatives and competing solutions for any problem. On the PS3 and ChromeOS you've got a very simple-to-use system that's normally all you need; but if it fails then you're stuck with no alternative.