If you violate copyright, copyright will violate you.

Or, as they said in ancient Rome, "dura lex, sed lex" ("the law is harsh, but it is the law").

Chances are, if there is an appeal, she'll get the death penalty. Three times.

Sending humans up into space is colossally expensive, and of little scientific interest in itself. (It has been proven that you can send humans up into space.) Actual experiments in space, be they to do with zero gravity, telescopes, or what have you can generally be conducted much more economically by mechanised probes.

For the past few decades, manned spaceflight was more a PR exercise than anything else. Someone would go up with a few schoolchildren's experiments, make a few transmissions and get some heroic news coverage. This would be great for national prestige, and to be one of those kids whose plant seedlings got taken up on the space shuttle would have been pretty awesome, though the scientific value of such missions hit the point of diminishing returns a while ago. Now the PR value seems to be declining as well (it has been almost half a century since the first astronauts went up), and the question must be asked: is it really the best use of such sums of money?

The corporate world is 90%+ wedded to IE, and much of it still stuck on IE6. (And it gets worse; one project I worked on last year had to work with an enterprise-wide "secure" deployment of an ancient, extra-buggy version of IE6 not seen outside of that company; we ended up losing much of the AJAX bells and whistles.) I'm told that this is because one thing Microsoft do better is remote administration of large enterprise-wide setups.

Which means that, unless there is a paradigm shift in the corporate culture, HTML5 will remain irrelevant on the corporate desktop; MS don't want to support HTML5 for the reasons described in the article, so IE support for these standards will remain either nonexistent or patched on with layers of hacks (like Google's JavaScript SVG library for IE8). Google's best bet is to ensure that such a shift happens.

How does this differ from the Chromium daily builds? Is it identical only officially a Google product, or are there technical differences?

whether there'll be a last.fm client for it.

Didn't the Church of Scientology own (a big stake in) earthlink.net some years ago? Is this still the case? If so, does this mean that this ISP's users will be banned from editing Wikipedia?

Track listings of unreleased albums, along with accurate track length information (which the Audioscrobbler protocol provides), could be used as probable cause for a search warrant.

The difference between the USA and North Korea is that North Korea is as close to a perfect example of a totalitarian state as has probably ever existed. The state is everywhere, in every aspect of its citizens' lives, to the point where they have internalised it. (Witness, for example, reports from the train explosion in the north of North Korea a few years ago, which stated that many citizens perished going back into their burning houses to rescue their portraits of Kim Jong Il, and imagine, for a moment, what sort of psychological conditioning could make people behave in this fashion.)

If/when the regime collapses, a lot of North Koreans are going to have an extremely hard time adjusting. There will be chaos and hardship, and a lot of North Koreans will pine for the "good old days" of the regime, in the way that East Germans and Russians do, only more so. In short, things are going to get quite fucked up.

So if you're living in the US on a work visa, you're still not allowed any e-book goodness? How do they verify that you're actually a citizen, and not some foreign ne'er-do-well with a US bank account/social security number/other credentials?

I suspect the opposite will happen. The IFPI and/or US Government will appeal the disproportionate leniency of the sentences (i.e., an act of international economic warfare* is being treated as equivalent to a mere burglary), and the sentences will be increased to 5+ years. Either that or the convicts will be extradited to face trial in the United States, where more severe sentences would be almost certainly handed down.

* Currency counterfeiting is an act of war in international law. Under some doctrines of intellectual property (i.e., the ones that have been upheld in US courts when levying $200,000 fines for sharing songs), this could be argued to be equivalent.

If they had walked free, within the next half hour, the US would have announced a trade embargo against Sweden and the blocking of Swedish internet traffic.

They should be glad they're going to a soft Swedish prison and not a US federal prison, given that most of the intellectual property in question belongs to US corporations.

So soon it will be possible to watch blocky, smeary versions of all the Spider-Man films in a web browser. Awesome!

In any case, it's open source (under the name Chromium), so if you don't like Google's EULA, or any other part of their plans for Chrome, you will be able to download and run one of the third-party, de-Googlised builds of Chromium, or even build your own. It seems unlikely that Google would impose particularly unpalatable terms on Chrome, given that it comes with its own competition built in.

I wonder where their satellite constellations are.