Thank you for informing me that the deal is over. However it would not at all surprise me if there are deals that are not public knowledge currently in force. Our conservative government does this sort of thing all the time and the management decisions of the Mounties are under their direct control, unlike in the US where the FBI was a distorted organization run by a Tzar that was appointed essentially for life because he had dirt on all the political parties.

What is really disgusting is that Corbis has essentially done damage long term to the free dissemination of digital images of the worlds great art. I am sure that all the artists who painted the masterpieces are turning in their graves. As are Leonard Bernstein, Igor Stravinsky, George Szell and a host of other greats who produced great recorded arts that are now owned by the assholes at Sony.

My original statement still stands, these assholes are doing more damage to the arts than they are good, period.

What would you do if your kid decided to get creative then you were sued by Disney? All because he or she did a doll based cartoon using Mickey and Mini and then posted the results online?

It will take something like this happening to expose these crooks for what they really are. I am sorry I have no respect for Sony or Disney as they more than any other corporations have stifled creativity and have become anti-creative and destructive to the arts in many ways. Youtube and other sites scare the shit out of the hats at Sony and Disney for a very good reason. It is a place where real creativity can happen and they do not control all the content. The leaked e-mails revealed this fact and I have no doubt that Google gets plagued with take down requests from these morons. In the long term the United States will become one of the worst places to create anything new if these corporations have their way. Perhaps they do not see it yet but their policies will bite them in the ass in the long term.

It is almost as if they are deliberately destroying the creative end of their organizations.

I would guess what is really happening with them is that the bean counters point to how much of their business is coming from old moldy rehashes of the stuff in the vaults and then board and CEO cave in and cut the budget for new ventures. And at the same time increase the legal budget to fight for extensions to their copyrights.

Sony and Disney have become little more than a disease upon the arts, the fact that the attack from North Korea is seen by the media as a "national security crisis" instead of a minor annoyance speaks volumes to how much power they wield.

Sums up the mickey mouse laws that Sony, Disney and their ilk have created in the industry. It has nothing to do with copyrights it has everything to do with control of content. If I want to include an RCMP officer in full dress uniform in a stage play even in the country where they come from then I have to get permission from Disney to use the image.

It is time for someone to challenge this nonsense and expose the practices of these charlatans for what they really are. Then perhaps the public will wake up to the real damage to freedom of expression in the entertainment industry that these corporate thieves and their myrmidons in government have foisted upon the audience.

As long as your sig is under construction it will not be ready to move into the light. Personally I prefer tailor made sigs.

"You'd rather just whine in complete ignorance rather then read something interesting and become more knowledgeable. Pathetic."

A complete ignorance of native species within an ecosystem is the problem sir. The use of the word "trout" is symptomatic of the ignorance of the general populace, especially in the east. The native char species of the Great Lakes have a tendency to be slow growing variants, in fact the actual age of mature Salvelinus that were the predominant top shelf predators of Superior and Huron are very poorly understood. Some have a life span that is many times longer than any Oncorhynchus. And as for ignorance well what can I say, other than it is extremely unfortunate that we tend to ignore the individuals who warned against these interventions in the first place.

No matter how well intentioned, putting an artificial construct into a robust ecosystem by completely ignoring how it works in the first place is the problem and those who advocate this policy usually have a very short term monetary interest in mind not the environment especially some idiots out west here that have actually illegally planted all sorts of eastern species.

No sir the ignorance is much deeper and problematic than my rant, the problems start by taking the easy way out by creating artificial fisheries that cannot work in the long term instead of embarking upon long term habitat stewardship and is the core of the issue here.

Out west, where the original Oncorhynchus (so called Great Lakes salmon and Rainbow trout) stock came from we are experiencing a decline in the viability of stocks because of hatchery methods. Perhaps the decline in stocks in Lake Huron is partly due to this problem as well as a drop in feed levels. The entire marine habitat of the Georgia Straight as well as the Straights of Juan de Fuca is losing resident native strains of Oncorhynchus because of the loss of viable in stream rearing habitat on the rivers and creeks that are essential to the life cycle of west coast salmon.

In turn we are seeing a drop in populations of many native species that predate upon the salmon, including the resident Orca pods.

Out here our answer to the problems is to use the few remaining herring and instead feed it to farmed salmon in pens. In fact one of the arguements for the expansion of the fish farming industry is the fact that we have screwed up the viability of the existing one, so go ahead mess it up completely! As the genetic viability of the hatchery stocks declines over the next few decades then just maybe we might start to take action in the place where it is needed most, kicking out the idiots who are doing the damage and exposing the practices of fish farming for what they are not what they pretend to be.

Just maybe the loss of the sport fishery in the Great Lakes will serve as a wake up call to the idiots who oversee the fisheries, if not it is time to turf them out of their fat chairs in Ottawa, Washington and the provinces of BC, Ontario and states like Michigan where the management of our fisheries has become the realm of short sighted morons who bend to industrial interests.

rm -rf /dev/sd(*)"whichever drive you mounted that has been infected by the manufacturer with windows", can protect the user against infections by Windows 8 very nicely indeed though. Or for those who like to watch a drive slowly kill it off, a good session of dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/sd(*)"whichever drive you mounted that has been infected by the manufacturer with windows"

Either way a very satisfying result and a sense of real accomplishment happens, without any serious data loss.

These simple actions are the best known method to increase the life span of old computers with less than 8 gig of ram with hdd drives and a primitive OS that constantly overtaxes drives by constantly indexing a pagefile.sys section to disk for no good reason other than to kill the drive in a short period of time, so the consumer will go out and buy a new 'puter ever other year! GRRR

LOL the first post that mentions anything about the competition. Perhaps the EU is just trying to get special software seat costs for member countries from Redmond. A simple case of "the Mouse That Roared" strategy to get special treatment from the real monopolists on the block!

Either way the truth about why the EU are trying to oust Google is most likely well and truly hidden from the tech journalists and the tech journalists that are reporting on this perceived strategy to dismantle Google as a company are in the pocket of the people behind the scenes.

If Google is successfully dismantled and restricted in access by a segment of the internet as large as the domains of Europe then chances are what we will see happen in the future is new routing hardware and nodes being built. The results of breaking up Google in a big way will be a case of "All Roads Lead To Redmond" not Rome along with huge bandwidth cost increased not real competition as some officials in Europe may think.

The other possibility is that the net will split up and we will see disconnected local nets firewalled in the same way China does. This could be easily done with hardware based domain blocking technologies the way cell phones can be made to lock out competing providers network pipes.

Either way the network traffic and services including ad revenues will be controlled in Washington State instead of California. The revenues conveniently off shored by the lords of Redmond to avoid paying American corporate and state taxes regardless of which who is on the top of the heap.

Or just maybe Suse will get more money and build a competitor search engine based upon Bing's search engine software, perhaps this explains the recent love affair with Linux that is happening in Redmond.

I have a wonderful cell for sale if anyone is interested. The radio is absolutely excellent and rarely drops calls even in remote locations. The hardware has not given me any issues at all over 5 years of use and the battery is interchangeable by the user! Really it is called a Samsung Omnia 910. Trouble with the phone though is the OS which is essentially useless for web surfing with html 5 multimedia content.

The offending OS is unfortunately a Windows mobile mashup of xp and double unfortunately even though it will easily run an early Android release the carrier has the thing locked down to the point where there is no way to change the OS.

"Someone buy my phone PLEASE!"

To quote a famous comedian.

And if you use BSD or Slac you will not have to deal with a the over sized POS systemd configuration to accelerate your bits for packet collisions!

Steve was a little out of sorts at the time. He was looking at the Win8 after market sales figures on Amazon compared to the numbers of Android products.

Too bad you called the OP a dork, for obvious reasons. If I had mod points I would have given your post a boost. Obviously the same goes for the bing things and all the other crapware from AOL and the like. Google is running into the same image problem that Microsoft did with activeX. Damned if you do, loose user eyeballs if you don't. Java that is another whole kettle of muck. Here is hoping that html5 does not turn out to be as insidious with add on off browser capable apps that just highjack the engine and fool the user into thinking the add on is a real computer program that they absolutely must have.

The mind of the user is the first target of add on malware, the second target is usually their wallet.

There fixed that for you.

Either that or she was a really hungry. Working stocking the shelves at PetSmart cat food is most likely all she can afford to eat. I am a pensioner and sometimes my cat eats better than I do, Friskies starts looking better and better all the time, wonder if their chicken and giblets pate would taste ok with mustard on a cracker? Might need a little salt but honestly some high end cat food is starting look better than what I have to eat most of the time.

The point was specifically that the guys who highjack e-mail accounts to send viagra offer e-mails all over the net are known to reside on phoney porn sites sitting there like fishermen waiting for some sucker to click their targets which are usually phoney links in the first place. They are the ones who were quick to exploit the Openssl hole and do man in the middle interception of encrypted passwords.

Believe it or not there are still phone calls being made by people claiming to be from Microsoft telling you that you have a problem with your Windows. These guys come from the same places that pull all these scams. They have been at it for years and are starting to worry about the down fall of the Windows operating system on the home desktop. Many are out looking for jobs and some even apply for unemployment insurance, others are trying to find easy ways to target other devices.

As long as phoney certs can happen these guys will find ways to redirect or intercept data from unsuspecting users and create havoc on the net. It does not matter if you are using a VM if your instance is hacked and your password to a site is stolen you are cooked because it has nothing to do with being "infected" with a virus it has to do with being hacked while on the net and your network stack being temporarily hosed to expose your sensitive data.