Obviously, it does. ;)

Related: http://www.serialata.org/technology/port_multipliers.asp

Swearing is immoral and God forbid our children seeing any naked bodies (male or female) on the telly.

On the other hand, violence (Rambo-like caricature violence is still violence) and titilation is probably OK.

I recently read that family groups were all up in arms because the little girl in the movie Kick-Ass said the word "cunts" or something like that. They did not seem to mind the fact that she murders tens of people in the film, though.

Um, here: http://search.slashdot.org/story/10/05/22/1218242/Google-Offers-Encrypted-Web-Search-Option

That was like, three days ago.

The "meat" starts out at page 9. For those too bored to read through the PDF, here's a summary:

ISO created MPEG, MPEG established several standards, including MPEG-2, MPEG-4 Visual and AVC. In 1993, MPEG LA created one of the first patent pools (on behalf of the respective patent holders), and started licensing patents pertaining to MPEG-2 to licensees. In 1997, the DOJ sent a letter highlighting the potential anticompetitive nature of the patent pool. MPEG LA responded by assuring the DOJ that only "essential patents" (27 in total) were licensed as part of the patent pool, and that an independent expert would administer any new patents entering the patent pool, thus ensuring that licensees would only pay for patents that covered the technologies they implemented in their products. They also assured the DOJ that they would license the patents on a nondiscriminatory and fair manner. The DOJ remained skeptical but did not launch an investigation.

Fast forward and the patent pool for MPEG-2 contains more than 800 patents, with the patent pools for MPEG-4 Visual and AVC containing 1000 and 1300 patents respectively. Kenneth Rubenstein, the "independent expert" is shown to have a financial interest in the MPEG-LA (page 5 for more). Nero AG also claims that the MPEG LA does not license the patents in a fair and nondiscriminatory manner, especially when it comes between licensors and non-licensor licensees. Furthermore, by adding additional patents, the MPEG LA is ensuring that the patent pool has an extended lifetime. Some of the patents licensed might actually be expired, but negotiating patent-by-patent with the respective patent holders (26 are in the MPEG-2 patent pool) is unfeasible, so most companies will have to license the whole lot.

Initially, MPEG LA considered trial products as sales with returns, thus requiring no license payment from the licensee. MPEG LA changed its stance in 2008 and demanded that Nero AG pay for every trial product distributed, with retroactive interest (for an amount exceeding $15 million). So, basically, Nero AG signed a license which MPEG LA changed with no prior warning after some time, and is now demanding that Nero AG pay them back, retroactively!

There is far more information in the PDF document, and some of it is very interesting. There is quite a bit of detail on the economic dealings of the MPEG LA, internal and external (i.e. towards their licensees). Nero is a small company compared to the giants that stand behind MPEG LA, but they seem to have a valid case, if what they say is true (IANAL, though). Let's see how this plays out.

Not feasible on a laptop. This drive, however, seems perfect for most purposes, and the price is not half-bad either ($156 for the 500GB version). Performance is better than traditional drives in almost all benchmarks, and reaches up to 2x the performance when using commonly accessed files (like, the operating system).

I'd love to see what this does for boot speeds etc.

Are you implying that our needs have changed so much during these two years?

I'm pretty sure that the Pandora is still the most powerful portable game console out there. The battery is a dog (10+ hours of gaming), the controls are said to be more than solid, and the platform (ARM Cortex-A8) is far from obsolete.

Google should be fined for doing the government's job without a licence.

Now gimme that data!

...and how is .h264 an open standard, again?

Are these patents of real inventions (as in, products at least made but not released) or just patents of product ideas? Some of these are extremely unlikely to have existed (did they have foldable displays back in 2001?), though I could be wrong.

Like dokuwiki, for example. It's simple to set up and configure, and is pretty powerful (especially through the use of plugins). I'm fairly certain it fits your criteria.

...all the researchers are men and have never met any women.

Why should anything "die"? People choose solutions based on their individual merits. If something doesn't work, exchange it for something that does. I'm sure certain people find NoSQL-type databases perfect for their needs.

In short, people should just shut up about other people's choices and get on with their own.

According to the FA, the controversy seems to concern two different but interrelated issues:

Trademark assignment and copyright assignment

The first is probably more clear cut than the second one. Trademark is controlled by the person(s) it has been assigned to. As long as Mr. Vermuelen holds the trademark to the name Nexuiz, or as long as there is no trademark assigned to anybody for the name Nexuiz, Illfonic is most likely clear on this matter.

The second, and most controversial issue is that of the relicencing of the Nexuiz/DarkPlaces codebase. Even though, according to the Nexuiz forums, Illfonic seems to have struck a deal with the primary developers of Nexuiz and DarkPlaces, I'm not sure if that would be enough. DarkPlaces is arguably not such a big change over the original GPL'd Quake engine codebase, and even if it was, I'm not really sure if copyright can be reassigned without some kind of consensus amongst most (major) developers. Does each contributor hold the copyright for his work under the GPL or do the contributions end up under a single copyright holder?

Regardless of the legal issues, this is a really crappy way to treat your community and developers. They have every right to feel betrayed. This forum thread is a great read, and proves that the community is sane about their demands towards Illfonic, Mr. Vermuelen and LordHavoc.

For those just in, here's an article covering Perelman and his theorem.

This wikipedia entry covers some controversies following the article.

One of the main issues with GTK has been the lack of any serious corporate sponsorship. Really, money goes a long way, not only in helping people contribute more time to the project, but also in setting goals.

That said, Clutter is still an Intel project, and probably will remain so for the time being. Intel has stated that MeeGo will remain forward-compatible to Moblin, but for how long, that remains in question.

As far as I know, Clutter will eventually be integrated into GTK+ 3.x, just like Cairo and Pango, so maintainership will probably be passed from Intel to the GTK maintainers, if Intel decides to drop support.