Well duh, it's not like the copyright holder can just delete it themselves now is it?

If Apple allowed anyone to sign or otherwise distribute & install binaries on iOS devices then the original copyright holder would have had no standing to ask for the removal, as it would have been distributed in compliance with the GPL.

You can distribute GPL2 on locked devices - that was TiVo's great innovation - so you get plenty of GPL2 software in the App Store. As far as Apple is concerned, they're just the man in the middle. If you upload something, they assume you have the rights to do so. If you tell Apple that a particular app violates your copyright, no doubt they'll take your word in good faith and pull it from the store.

Wrong.

VLC is GPL3. GPL3 is incompatible with the App Store due to the anti-Tivoisation provisions. On that basis, nobody has the right to publish an iOS App Store version without the consent of all contributors.

I despair, how is this insightful? MS isn't going to bully OEMs into doing anything. They've already been dragged through the courts for bullying OEMs during their anti-trust days, I'm sure they realise it's not worth it.

What will happen is that some OEMs won't release certificates allowing you to install third party OSs. Most major OEMs like Dell, HP and Lenovo will allow it.

This won't affect most home users who care about these things as we all build from scratch, no? Except for laptops of course, but I'd be amazed if the big OEMs shot themselves in the foot by making it hard to install your own OS. In fact OEMs have to sell you PCs with no OS installed if you ask as the competition authorities have taken the view that insisting that a machine should come with Windows is unlawful tying.

That's because MS appear to have removed their adverts. Apple still seems to advertise on Google fine.

If MS wants to get all butthurt that's their problem.

If I'm searching for a product and it appears in the text ads, I'll click the ad. I make a point of clicking the ad if I'm looking for something on the Apple or MS website!

The tablet will have access to DOI. If you can gain access to the DOI network then it should be fairly easy for someone with malicious intent to gain access to something important like CIS.

A simple piece of paper generally can't be used to gain access to the entire social security database. That's why the department is generally quite paranoid about who it issues laptops to.

In all my time in the department I never heard of anyone having their own colour laser printer. The few occasions I needed colour prints I emailed our bulk reprographics section with the documents and job specification.

I find it doubtful that the cost of printers is £400 (the price of a basic 16GB WiFi model) over 18 months per member of staff.

Also, handing out tablets poses a massive information security risk, They're already quite picky about who they give a laptop to, and for good reason!

Then again, the article does seem to be talking about DCLG. That's a comparatively small department; most people would consider a "major government department" to be something like DWP, HMRC or the Home Office. DCLG only has a few offices. Compare that to DWP where you've got hundreds of offices with a hundred thousand employees and it's easy to see how handing out iPads is less of a challenge for them.

This seems more like that prick Pickles trying to grab another headline.

But if you lower the population, there won't be a need to build robots to magnify productive capacity. It'd just be easier to use humans instead.

It's a contradiction; on the one hand capital is invested in machinery to increase profits but, in doing so, it puts people out of work so that fewer people can actually afford to buy the cheaper products. Poverty in the midst of plenty!

So, a crisis of overproduction.

You'd expect a few studies to come out with that result due to chance. Thankfully most research shows no link, so overall I think we can be sure that electrosmog isn't the cause for the reported symptoms.

One of my sisters claims to be sensitive to microwave radiation. She refuses to be in our parents kitchen when their combination microwave / grill / convection (fan) oven is turned on, as she can "feel the radiation". She claims she can feel it even when it's on the convection setting; really she's just responding to the sound of the fan and the motor that turns the table, as it sounds exactly the same on the microwave and convection settings.

Of course, there could be some malaise associated with fan ovens. That raises the question as to why she has no symptoms around the much larger fan oven our parents also have in their kitchen.

In Capital he says quite clearly that socialism can only have a "world historical existence".

The Bolsheviks understood this quite clearly. Lenin and Trotsky predicted that the October Revolution would eventually degenerate if it wasn't supported by further proletarian revolutions in the other more developed capitalist countries in Europe.

Covering that up was one of the great ideological lies of Stalinism; the idea that you can have "socialism in one country".

The definition of worker (proletariat) and capitalist (bourgeoisie) are clearly and objectively defined - like "up" and "down".

If you invest capital in order to make a return, you're part of the bourgeoisie. If you sell your physical or mental labour in return for a wage or salary, you're proletariat.

Marx's critique in Capital goes into great depth to discuss how the interests of the two classes in capitalism are contradict each other, and thereby generate class struggle.

You're making the mistake of confusing Stalinist central planning with communism.

Gosplan failed because they measured secondary outcomes. They focused on doing things like moving x amount of steel y number of miles by railroad, resulting in steel being moved from one side of the country and back again to meet the target. Those secondary outcomes were determined on the basis of national pride, so that Stalin could look like a big man and say "our perfect socialism in one country has a much better rail network than your feeble capitalist railways!".

Of course, railways in a capitalist system are only there to serve consumer demand. Steel is only produced insofar as it's needed to make things people want and it's only moved around to get it to the factories that need it. Each link in the chain represents an individual primary outcome.

Capitalism isn't immune from market information crisis; under capitalism you get the crisis of overproduction! Over time capitalism tends towards centralised monopolies, but not necessarily in obvious ways. Certain functions that seem to be integral get outsourced, so things like facilities management for offices become centralised outside of companies, who then simply focus on their own core competencies. This reflects the fact that having a smaller number of organisations doing things is inherently more efficient; you benefit from scale and pooled expertise.

Previous calls for central planning from the left should be understood in that context. Socialists call for an end to all business secrets - in effect making all businesses "open source" - so that the information can be shared amongst everyone. There's no reason why we should have just one central planning authority, there could be several competing projects in the same manner that FOSS projects like GNOME and KDE compete.

You seem to be missing the point.

Most people will spend their entire lives without getting so much as a sniff of power. If instead of having the current system there were a system of part-time workers councils with direct recall in the style of, say, a trade union branch executive committee, those low-class workers would be better off.

That's what a workers government means. No full time politicians, just regular people taking decisions over things that affect their own lives. The advantage of having a strong revolutionary tradition would also be that, if for some reason the committee became unresponsive to the popular will, a new organisation could be formed to take power.

The big stumbling block (and it is huge) is the level of education required. All of this is really contingent on having a working class who have the attitude and debating skills you'd normally acquire through private schooling. It's not dependant on some magical transformation of human nature.