the situation singular? "EDS has been involved in a parade of government IT failures, budget overruns and data losses in recent years, including but not limited to the National Offender Management Information Service, the tax credits system, the Defence Information Infrastructure and the Child Support Agency." (the register)
it took them years to actually stump up the £71.25mil to the govt after the tax creds disaster and even then only on condition of further govt contracts
the parliamentary committee investigating their effed up ministry of defence system described it as 'catastrophic' and their mistakes as 'truly reprehensible'
as for corruption, there's the crooked peer, and the string of their lawyers involved in assorted scandals
this of course is EDS, not HP--one would hope things will improve, especially now that they'll be running the new gchq 'big brother' system to monitor each and every online communication
not just bashing for the sake of it, in all honesty as a british citizen their relationship with the govt & manner of conducting business really worries me--you won't find many EDS fans in the UK

a cursory glance at the mainstream UK news media will provide all the proof you need
or parliamentary reports for that matter
also guessing their lawyers are a bit busy coping with the billions of pounds of compensation claims against them
though they did have a crooked labour peer in their pockets
you could start here or here

ya, EDS really knew how to run a data center--the terms 'incompetence' and 'corruption' spring to mind

Yes and no: people aren't getting more stupid; but more stupid people are getting into univeristy. Now that an education's a product, if you can afford it, you can have it; if you can't, you can't. Net result: more stupid people with university degrees. Maybe not quite an idiocracy, but certainly no meritocracy. The worry isn't more stupid people--it's more stupid people in positions of authority.

he said 'the community', not nokia official statements, so the FUD's the community's rather than his
FWIW the rumour appears to be that the n900 is to be discontinued and replaced by a maemo 6 device with capacitive multitouch and no slideout keyboard--so even if the FUD has some substance, you could do worse than grab the n900 while you can

With software patents there is no such thing as free from patent risk. Both mepg2 and h264 have had litigation threats......

Except the problem is how do you keep the users from redistrubting the code that has how to decode a h264 file? and the users they give it to, and so on? Good luck getting a license from MPEG-LA that grants everyone a license to use it. Also, is Chrome(not chromium) available for linux distros other than debian/ubuntu/redhat/SUSE? slackware? gentoo? LFS? and host of others, see distro watch, because Chromium does not have support for the html5/h264 youtube.

Ironically enough: ALL of those will be using ffmpeg. They will just dress it
up differently can call it by a different name. But yeah, using the mime and
plug-in interface that has existed in mozilla since the beginning of time does
seem an obvious way to approach this "problem".

Nonsense. Firefox can use any codec that is already installed on the user's system. It's only because they have decided that they should try to force Theora on people that they are rejecting that solution.

So buy a second hand phone on ebay, unlock it and stick a PAYG SIM in it (or whatever contract works for you)...

And push the license fees down to the users? Is that what you really want?

getting mad, are we? personal attacks are a sign of desperation from people who have difficulties articulating their thoughts. i suppose it's clear why you hid your name now.

now back to the topic. the scholarly debate is over whether the famine was intentional or not. that in turn determines whether it was genocide at all. this i got from the wikipedia link you gave me, so i hope you can see the irony in the fact that you -- as the kids say -- pwnt yourself.

as i said before, lul