No. It makes it so that nobody can tag you in that photo again (except you).

I believe those would be git repositories. Since the ID of every commit is based on the entire history of every file, directory, and commit before it, it would be almost impossible to rewrite the history. Sure, Google could do it, but (a) every commit would get a different ID, breaking the ability for everyone to update their repositories trivially, and (b) every individual's copy of the original repository will contain the entire history and every version of every file. There is no practical way to remove those files permanently, and anytime someone pushes their modified version to their server or to github or wherever, they'll come back again.

The reason Mozilla gave for supporting certain video formats in the browser instead of using system implementations is consistency. It avoids cases where one system has a codec installed but another doesn't, leading to hard-to-reproduce problems. It also avoids problems where different platforms' implementations are buggy or implement less than the entire spec.

The App Store imposes additional restrictions on what users can do with the apps. The GPL, which is used by VLC, prohibits additional restrictions. So it is impossible to legally distribute VLC (or any derivative work) through the App Store.

The i387 (and its successors) suck as floating-point hardware; this we know. However, this bug isn't as crippling as it might seem. This bug won't affect amd64 machines running in 64-bit mode where the compiler is GCC (since GCC uses SSE2 in that case). It also won't affect any Mac OS X machines, since they made the smart move to always use SSE2 on Intel hardware since all of the Intel chips they've ever shipped support it. And I think FreeBSD uses double precision mode by default, so this probably won't affect them either, unless PHP puts the libc into extended-precision mode.

Actually, Microsoft's EULAs disclaim liability just like FLOSS licenses do. The difference is that Microsoft has deep pockets. Your average FLOSS project does not.

Everyone does not necessarily need a distributed source control system. (Although I use one and am happy with it.) But if you're ever sending your programmers out of the office somewhere and expect them to do work, distributed source control is essential, since they may not have access to the Internet wherever they're going.

You can find the information on Intel's own site: http://www.intel.com/technology/anti-theft/ . The 3G kill switch requires the operating system to keep working, but there are other disable mechanisms, such as a watchdog, that don't.

Generally, policies end up being legally binding. Companies that have had certain non-discrimination policies (say, on the basis of sexual orientation) but ended up violating them have been successfully sued. Basically, if you end up doing anything in reliance on a company policy, it's legally binding.

That, of course, is why most privacy policies are extremely vague and one-sided.

Actually, yes. They were quite pleasant and agreeable. And they were all in Canada.

That's true. But iteration does. For example, WPA requires 4096 iterations of PBKDF to make it prohibitively expensive to attack the passphrase. OpenPGP does something similar to generate a key from a passphrase.

Java is supposed to be cross-platform. But the Java VM and standard libraries need to be ported to whatever architecture and platform. For example, Java needs networking support, which it gets through native code to the Berkeley sockets interface. Code to handle sound is also likely to require native code.

So basically, programs written in the Java language or for the Java virtual machine are only cross-platform because people have already put work into abstracting these differences away by porting the JVM code.

Most (if not all) RIRs require some sort of demonstration of need. If you ask for a /16, you're going to need to show that you really need all those addresses. If you don't, they won't hand them out. So it's unlikely that anyone is going to be able to stockpile addresses.

Yes. Furthermore, the purpose of a trademark is to prevent confusion in a certain field of endeavor. It's completely acceptable to use a trademark to refer to the entity in question. So if I trademarked "bk2204", it's entirely within your rights to use it in pretty much any context as long as you're actually referring to me, whether or not those references are flattering.

If you use "bk2204" to say untrue and defamatory things about me, that's libel (or slander), but that's because they're untrue and defamatory. Whether I have a trademark on that name is irrelevant.

That's not my experience. When I was a kid, the joystick was always on the left side of the computer (because there wasn't any space to put it on the right side). Consequently, I always used the joystick left-handed, even though I'm right-handed. Finding an ambidextrous joystick was exceptionally difficult, let alone one specifically for left-handers.