I used to have TVs all over the house. Now I only have two. The reason for this is the $15/mth rental on the cable box that is needed at each TV. Over three or four years the cost of this box rental exceeds the cost of the TV.

If Windows were a car...

http://www.performantsystems.com/GM.html

Only if the cars are running Windows.

I think this more about stopping funding of things like this:

Dr. Li’s project will develop, implement and evaluate a venue-based alcohol and HIV risk reduction intervention center for establishment-based female sex workers in Guangxi, China. The sex trade is more prevalent in Guangxi, Dr. Li said, an area ranked third in the rate of HIV among provinces.

http://prognosis.med.wayne.edu/article/grant-allows-research-to-study-link-between-alcohol-abuse-and-spread-of-hiv

If you're going to study hookers, they have to be American hookers.

That would be fun to see. I still can't see any reason for the MIr split other than Canonical's contributor agreement which lets them sell the code. Does Canonical really think Redhat/Intel/etc are going to write code and then give it to Canonical so that they can resell it as closed source?

But I would much rather have one fully working graphics system than four or five half working ones. Much more interesting would be to work towards a merger between Wayland and Surfaceflinger.

Ars wrote on this a while ago.

Boston wants to apply a lot of taxes to FIOS and Verizon decided to pass on the deal.
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2009/07/boston-a-copper-hole-in-the-fiber-donut-demands-fios/

Why do you assume that AMD did this voluntarily? Much more likely that this is caused by some idiotic DRM requirement for for HDCP 'protected audio path' or working around some idiotic patent. Likely reason - a DRM requirement to stop people from plugging in devices that strip HDCP.

They need the subsidize the extra 32GB of flash needed to hold Windows Phone too.

Then we can delete WIndows Phone and use the 32GB flash.

Just for fun Google should put those exact licensing terms Microsoft used against Toshiba into their Android license.

My memory is fuzzy on this, but I believe Microsoft took Toshiba to court and made them stop dual booting Linux on their laptops about 20 years ago. At the time Toshiba owned a Linux distribution so they prevented Toshiba from shipping their own code.

This is the same Microsoft that is extorting everyone over unnamed Android patent infringements.

Why would you want to work with them? Every company that works with them ends up dead or wounded.

OpenWRT is the way to go. Just buy a new, cheap commercial router and replace the software with OpenWRT. Don't mess with the laptop. It chews too much AC power and the wifi is probably not as powerful as the radio in the commercial router. You can buy fine 2.4Ghz router hardware for $30.

DDwrt is a mess, OpenWRT project organization is much better.

Microsoft shipped these products without first negotiating a RAND royalty rate. They just picked their own rate of 'zero' and shipped. Motorola then filed suit to force a negotiation and payment. Google has nothing to do with this, this all happened before Google bought Motorola. Of course Motorola was annoyed about having to file suit to get paid so they picked a high number.

Would it your change your opinion if you knew that Microsoft's interpretation of FRAND over these patents is for them to pay zero to Motorola for their use? And that's what started this lawsuit in the first place - so far they have paid nothing.

I'm not an insider but I suspect this has to do with Oracle's acquisition of Sun. Sun used to take care of X.org. Now that Oracle has swallowed Sun a lot of things that Sun used to do have been cut. So X.org needs some new friend with a legal and tax department to keep everything in order. Groups of volunteer programmers are known not to be competent in these matters.

X.org is not a company. It is is a group of volunteers, either individuals or corporate employees begin donated by their employers. The group writes and maintains the Xserver which is in use on almost every Linux desktop and many embedded systems. This code is given away for free to benefit all who use Linux.

If that doesn't qualify as a 501(c)3 I don't know what would qualify. The group has no revenue, they rely on donations to function and everything they make is given away for free -- to anyone who asks with no restrictions other than some minor licensing terms. And the licensing terms are really minor, like give proper attribution to the authors of the code. The benefit from being a 501(c)3 does not accrue to X.org, the tax benefits goes to the companies donating to the organization since those donations are now tax deductible. Hopefully that means X.org will get more donations.

I do agree that a few companies seem to be abusing 501(c)3 and open source. Those companies are making captive open source projects which basically only benefit themselves. But that's more of a marketing gimmick than a tax avoidance one. The resources being given to the captive 501(c)3 were deductible to the parent corporation anyway. So if the IRS dissolves these captive 501(c)3s they aren't going to get any more revenue. They'll just move where the deductions are being taken.