When I was young and we copied our friends' games on floppies (bad, bad me), we knew that this was illegal. However, we also knew that we'd never experience punishment, mostly due to the small scale at which our file copying took place. Bad mindset? Sure thing. I've grown up and buy my games now. Same thing for music.

Most people will agree that going after people illegally sharing their music for example isn't a bad thing. What IS bad is the draconian solutions being proposed. The fine rate in the US is way out of line. In France, you had the 3 strikes law (struck down for the moment). You have all kinds of guilty until proven otherwise nonsense. THAT is bad.

What's downright unacceptable is the way in which governments are apparently influenced by the large corporations. That's not called democracy but plutocracy. I personally find that indicative of a far more fatal infection.

Plenty, as any country in which the possession of arms is more sternly regulated can attest to. No need to be scared shitless of your citizens to deny them free access to lethal arms.

I wouldn't be so sure of that. Soldiers are instructed to obey commands, and not so much to question them. By the time a sensible number of them will start questioning their superiors, damage will already have been done. Or a schism between army and citizens will have been created. Just look at all those countries whose armies do suppress the people.

Even more important: things just won't work that way. People won't start crowding the streets and the military won't be fighting them, as is the case in Iran, for example. Protests will be silenced long before that. This isn't an age in which armed conflicts will be fought out in a chivalrous manner.

So, where was your need to bear arms again?

So let's try to get rid of this evil dictator by means of war, what a splendid idea! I see an awful lot of opportunities where Bush could have started a trend to police evil nations worldwide. Well, maybe another American president will...

Terrorists aren't really locatable in one region or another. That's one of the reasons terrorism keeps reoccuring: it's just such a good strategy. Throwing large numbers of soldiers at it won't really work. I don't quite understand why the USA keeps trying to solve this kind of problem with military action only.

In the Netherlands, copying a book or anything else in public libraries also is more expensive, which serves as yet another arrangement for allowing the copying of copyrighted works. Also, a similar mechanism was proposed for taxing other storage media, like hard drives and MP3 players.

Yet, the Dutch copyright watchdog finds this not being illegal of downloading for personal use a loophole in copyright law. Someone proposing some kind of law against it is only a matter of time.

My fridge bears but one piece of paper, and that's a warning sign meant to keep me from plundering it yet again. I can tell you it's stuck to the thing by other means than fridge magnets, and I'm glad to say I forgot exactly how the sticking part is accomplished!

This guy seems eager for attention anyway. I have seen this very same video about half a year ago. Can't find the original anywhere, of course...

Except they're free... And who would pay good money for a beta anyway, sounds like stupidity to me.

No, free beta apps that do their jobs well enough are for people like you and me, people that think it's cool to have their agendas online.

Business users use Outlook and/or Exchange. However, these 'casual users' of free beta apps DO provide valuable input - and they probably won't be abandoning their free beta apps as well, since those might not be bug-free yet, but ARE still in development - and, well, free.

So that's where Google is: they have their broad user base, providing them with the necessary info to improve their apps, and a considerable 'fan base' as a nice side effect. The next step would obviously be to get out of the beta stage, so the Google apps will be seen as mature enough to compete with the Serious Business level's applications!

Really, I think Google is employing a cool PR strategy here.

A risky assumption. New Zealanders might be witnessing the shed blood of thousands. Snuff in it's purest form! And you're all "Oh, this would probably just be lemonade!"

The patents on the LZW algorithm employed in the GIF file format have all expired now. The claim about the patent on the JPEG format was never found to be fully valid.

Nonetheless, corporations seem eager to start patent wars over technology potentially involving a lot of money. Which goes to show that careful choices have to be made, so as to avoid patent troll issues as much as possible.

I don't know exactly about the USA, but where I live (Netherlands), certain court sessions are publicly accessible by any individual, even when not involved with the case in any way. Journalism students, for example, use these.

Now, wouldn't anything filmed in these public sessions be in the public domain anyway? As opposed to court sessions that are held "in chambers"?

Either you're illegally modded 'Insightful' instead of 'Funny', or I'm experiencing a quickly developing vision impairment that causes me to see words where they shoulnd't be...

This (small) documentary about Daniel Kish, a blind person using echolocation, suggests these blind people use this technique in a quite advanced manner. See the 'test' they perform on one of the blind people featured in the film, at about 4:20. Sounds like he's able to hear much, much more than just some surroundings. At the end, they even go out mountainbiking.

If ever I should become blind, I'd surely investigate in this technique.

What's newsworthy? This news will be forgotten. What will be remembered is that IP is violated on a large scale. This will fuel incentives towards more grotesque punishments of the violators.

</sarcasm>

I remember a relative bought a modem back in the days. It came with 2 diskettes (anyone still remember what that were? ;) ). One labeled 'Compuserve' (IIRC), and the other one containing the communication apps. I seem to remember reading the user's manual of Kermit, and not understanding a single word of it. Of course, I would understand things right now - thanks to the right amount of experience and a degree in IT. And thanks to things now being handled by the appropriate communication drivers.

The BBS'es of that time of course looked like nothing compared to the internet of now. I do remember they featured 'graphics', though. Ah, the secret joys of viewing big blobs of ASCII art - in no more than 16 colors, for those lucky enough to own an EGA monitor!

Interesting. I was always wondering which game companies actually wrote their own engines.

Which makes Carmacks position even more amazing. Imagine having the graphics engine you wrote yourself powering a multitude of games...