that it's Sun's patents that are being used in this litigation. Imagine if the patents were original Oracle submissions?

Your data, and consequently you or your business, can be locked into an application even on your own server. I fully support the people running their own distributed server architecture but I think one important step toward that is getting data portability, part of what I call a new fifth Freedom to Migrate.

reached a virtual standstill when the maintainers told Saudi Arabia to "stick it".

Well the highest ranked czar in Google Suggest saw Imperial Russia "go from being one of the foremost great powers of the world to an economic and military disaster."(wikipedia) Yeah, substitute USA for Imperial Russia and that's about right.

Possible ad you may see on your license plate in the future:

Jailbreak your license plate. $19.95. Text 'Plate' to 55555 and follow this car for 60 seconds.

Because humans are emotional creatures and threatening children evokes an immediate emotional response. It makes people act. And this action is not necessarily taken after the appropriate amount of thought and discussion. In fact, if you get people worked up enough, they won't be able to think at all and will have no choice but to follow your directions.

The Internet and communication technologies in general threaten power. Don't be surprised if power tries to protect itself.

I did read the fine article and saw no mention of any lakes, let alone Earth's Great Lakes. Where did that come from or did subby take some liberties when composing this ... umm ... composition?

How many processes are running on your behalf on all your boxen?

Of course you couldn't count things behind websites you're using but it would be a more interesting metric.

I first saw the question for a split second as I was leaving /. and thought it was asking how many processors are running on your behalf. Again, this would also be a more interesting question since almost all of the 156 processes on my desktop box are sleeping.

Twitter has been manipulating their trending topics for a while now. In the past they've added big live events like sports contests to their trending topics when, in my analysis, those topics simply weren't trending. How do I know? I spent some time trying to build a long-term trending topics list using the public_timeline feeds. There were obvious items there that were underrepresented in the actual tweets. They should label these "sponsored topics" as such.

Oddly, square-grid graph paper is more liberating. Freedom is a blank sheet of quality (70lb.) drawing paper.

The singularity is a lie. By which I mean, it's not as if this mass is all really in one infinitesimal dot...it's just that you do any characterization of that mass when even light can't escape. So no, you wouldn't be destroying the singularity since we don't really know that's what it is, but, if they do happen to change the black hole by adding charge and angular momentum, and it allows radiation to escape it will cease to be a black hole.

I would like to find a black hole that's just barely massive enough and then try this.

Finally, I think they're just trying to do a thought experiment whereby they change the shape or topology of the event horizon. Imagine a toroidal event horizon for example.

The reason this is trollish is that there are significant differences between these two situations. Google.com is Google's website! The iOS devices on the other hand are devices that people have purchased and now ostensibly own.

Users and developers expect a different level of freedom with devices than with websites owned by others. Users would like to run the software they want on their devices. Developers would simply like the same abilities they have on computers.

Every restriction Apple puts on their devices becomes another benefit that non-Apple devices have. Sure, it's hard to switch away from the polish of Apple but the benefits of doing so seem to be growing daily.

Vote with your code and let people know you're doing it.

Ads are not just about clicking. Yes, a lot of interesting tracking happens post-click but a big purpose of advertising is simply getting yourself in the mind of the customer. I, like many people, tend to skip those ads at the top of search results but if I see them again and again, I may just go to the site anyway to see what it's all about.

was going for this...appears to have been an airball