Is this guy actually saying that the lobby has bought into the European Court system? And democracy doesn't count anymore?

Like the CDN had to be redone for the opendns stuff (non-geographic queries). And the HTTPS stuff had to be redone because Google thought FalseStart was a great idea :)

Doesn't this all remind us at the CompuServe times where typing just one word was enough to do exactly what is being sold now at a much higher price?

Maybe there is just a tippingpoint where the genius part of the brain has expanded that far that gets often out of bounds. Where the actual creativity is actually not a random set of neurons, but neurons primed for another task maintaining our common accepted singular personality.

So how can they, if all government produced works actually fall in the public domain under the Freedom of Information Act?

They write on vehicle positions here: https://developers.google.com/transit/gtfs-realtime/vehicle-positions Now just wonder how polling a staticly generated file is going to help here.

Unless what any /. reader observes as realtime data, GTFS Realtime is just not realtime transit data. GTFS Realtime updates a GTFS feed with current information if a planned trip was canceled. It is in its current form not telling the actual positions of busses, their punctuality etc. If you want to look more into why realtime is not realtime, go to their usergroup and search for wave. A nice thread on why Google Wave (aka ProtoBuf combined with XMPP) does make sense here - but too complex for Google and their partners. Next to that its great that an inferior defacto presentation standard is send into the world as 'cool and amazing' but the only reason Google is pushing this is because it is simple. It is not like SIRI, NeTEx, Transmodel, etc. that every operator out there has running in their management systems. What Google did with GTFS was: lets materialize all possible data. Tell operators that their timetable generation is wrong. Let them fix timetable generation. Use timetable and a networkgraph to do some routing *advise*, not do trip planning.

So if Oracle is so happy with MySQL. Give us a TPC-H benchmark. Scalefactor: 100.

Isn't it common law practice to file a counter claim, instead of starting a new courtcase?

What is the reason of this kind of behavior? Do they want to make a claim on the patentportfolio of Kodak? I wonder what Apple executives would have thought when someone would have started to sue Apple at this point in their past.

The loudnesswar has killed virtually anything on a digital medium, resulting in a worse quality masters. Far worse than compressed phonogram recordings in the past. Sadly this seems to be the new standard for every commercial publication. So first give us back the -12dB, then complain about our rooms.

You could have Googled why this matters over long distances. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Submarine_power_cable

Also the above statements is FUD. Please read were DC is currently used, one example is deep sea lines. Using AC in the sea is basically impossible. In and around the house: what about the solar panels on the roof, all DC, relatively low voltage (24V), not wasted at all. For some application the AC out of the outlet isn't stable enough, and is first made kinectic and then converted back. There are good uses for AC, there are also for DC.

Transistors were not invented when Tesla proposed AC. Hence at that time it was -by far- more efficient.