You also forgot that legitimate businesses will be buying up the .xxx domains as fast as possible to prevent others tarnishing their name (Google.xxx, Yahoo.xxx, Bing.xxx, Oracle.xxx, etc.). If establishing a serious presence on the internet, I suspect that some companies buy all the TLD they can get for a domain for future proofing too.

And there was much rejoicing from the internet.

I don't suspect the author was aware of Ksplice. You can actually perform kernel upgrades without a reboot.

Funny; 2:30am is when I tend to schedule maintenance on servers so that users don't experience downtime.

I wonder if this might play into future decisions by GM.

I would be just fine with Sony protecting their PSN by banning modded consoles. That's good for gamers and means pirates will probably not be able to play their copies for long online. The part I have a problem with is Sony's assumption that the hardware is intertwined with PSN and therefore must litigate to erase all knowledge of how to uncouple the two. Why should Sony care if I want to buy 3 consoles to start a small Pov-Ray rendering farm? There's nothing wrong with trying to erase Sony's software from the console. The bit that is wrong is trying to modify their software to allow pirated games or hacks on the PSN. Geohot did not reveal how to add infinate ammo cheats to Call Of Duty. He simply provided access to the hardware that was originally part of the design.

Didn't the same thing happen to torrent-finder not long ago.

One thing I notice is that things never move as fast as bureaucrats want/declare them to. If they do succeed magically it's because one of two things happened. First; questionable practices, lack of transparency, or lack of industry input occurred. Second, what came out is a pile of poo or is drastically under scope of what the dream was. If success happens, everyone pats each other on the back and doesn't ask how it happened. If things fail or arn't the success they were hoping for, then it just gets swept under the rug.

If you throw money at the problem, that doesn't always fix things. In the software industry you can't just pull a developer out of a hat and get 100% productivity immediately to solve a federal ambition because someone gave you some money. Governments have to bid for resources just like any utility does. If more utilities are asking for software that works and does what they need today in the field, that's what is going to happen. If the government pulls the trump card (FERC, NERC, NARUC, PUCs), then it hurts the industry as a hole because that time that was going into awesome software is now forced into federal compliance instead.

The Great Zero Challenge only is targeting data recovering businesses, not governments. If the NSA really wanted the data on that drive they may be able to do it. However, if they did the general public wouldn't know.

My house has crappy upload speeds which are just fine for everyday browsing, but not seeding. Additionally with a larger number of connections my router tends to slow down. Finally, I'd prefer not to get caught up in MAFIAA dragnet lawsuits. Even if everything is legal, the burden of disproof against mercenary "experts" is time out of my day and pocketbook.

This all being said, as soon as I can provide a reasonable upload speed without fear of lawsuit I'll be glad to just leave my machine seeding for the benefit of humanity.

How about we just go ahead and call it "the unpronounceable symbol which stands for the project formerly known as OpenOffice.org". We could totally pick some obscure symbol in unicode and just let that be the new name (I'm thinking of you opensarcasm).

No, you get a contender to animatedGIF. After 5+ years of development and 3rd party toolkits, you might get flash.

This sounds an awful lot like other patent/export issues we've had in the past. Linux support for WMV, MP3, or DVD codecs as well as SSL encryption are restricted in various countries for patent and export reasons; yet many successful projects have enabled users to make the choice on these features. If a linux user chooses not to pay the appropriate patent license fees, it's not the media player's fault that a user made that choice. Likewise, shouldn't Mozilla simply find a way to load this support as a plugin for those on the planet not bound by US patent trolls?