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Piracy

Submission + - BSA Withdraws Support for SOPA (pcworld.com)

quantumplacet writes: The Business Software Alliance has withdrawn their support for the increasingly controversial Stop Online Piracy Act claiming that "Valid and important questions have been raised about the bill.". While the BSA has a long history of focusing on the worst offenders and mostly ignoring casual piracy, this still represents a dramatic turnaround as the organization has been a SOPA supporter since the act's inception. BSA President Robert Hollyman posted on the company blog that "Due process, free speech, and privacy are rights that cannot be compromised. ....Some observers have raised reasonable questions about whether certain SOPA provisions might have unintended consequences in these areas".

Submission + - Lisp Creator John McCarth dead at 84 (techcrunch.com)

johnjaydk writes: The creator of Lisp and arguably the father of modern artificial intelligence, John McCarthy, died last night.

Lisp was (and to some extend still is) a radical leap forward and have had a strong influence on a lot of other languages although many still refuse to see beauty between parens.

Iphone

Submission + - iOS5 Helps NYC Man Catch His Cheating Wife (washingtonpost.com) 1

quantumplacet writes: A user going by ThomasMetz has posted on the MacRumors forum that he bought his wife a new iPhone 4S and set up the new feature Find My Friends without her knowledge. She later texted him claiming to be at a friends house on the lower east side, but Find My Friends showed him she was uptown, at the house of a man he suspected her of having an affair with. The MacRumors post contains several incriminating screenshots, and several media outlets have picked up the story
Google

Submission + - Googler Steve Yegge accidently shares rant about G (google.com)

quantumplacet writes: Longtime Googler Steve Yegge posted an insightful rant on his Google+ page about how Google is failing to make platforms of it's products. He also shares some interesting little tidbits about his six year stint at Amazon working for the "Dread Pirate Bezos". The rant was intended to be shared only with his Google coworkers, but was accidentally made public. Steve has since removed it from his page, but it has been reposted elsewhere.

Comment Re:No Ubuntu 11.04? (Score 3, Insightful) 142

Thanks but no thanks for the FUD. In the off chance you are a retard and not a troll, please let me explain. It takes considerable time and effort to validate an OS for a piece of hardware. More than two months in fact. Asus has to offer support for these netbooks, so they cannot put an OS on it that has not been thoroughly tested on the hardware. When they started this task, 10.10 was the latest and greatest. Strangely enough, they decided not to start all over in the middle of the process simply because a new release came out. Also, it's pretty ridiculous to call 10.10 "obsolete". Non LTS Ubuntu releases go EoL after 18 months, so 10.10 will not be obsolete for another year.

Submission + - Oracle Sues Google Over Android Patent Infringemen (pcmag.com)

quantumplacet writes: The terse, two-paragraph press release contained the following quote from Oracle spokeswoman Karen Tillman:

"In developing Android, Google knowingly, directly and repeatedly infringed Oracle's Java-related intellectual property. This lawsuit seeks appropriate remedies for their infringement."
Oracle has asked the court to enjoin Google from further acts of infringement, which would possibly bar Google from shipping its Android operating system. "Sun released their 'free java' source code under the GPLv2 to both win the free software crowd and capture peripheral innovation and bug fixing from the community," writes Stefano Mazzocchi, an application catalyst at Metaweb. "For the java standard edition (aka 'the cat is out of the bag') there is an exception to the GPLv2 that makes it "reciprocal" only for the Java platform code itself but not for the user code running on it (or most people wouldn't even dare touching it with a pole). "But such exception to the GPLv2 is not there for the mobile edition (aka 'where the money is'),"Mazzocchi added. "This brilliant move allows Sun to play 'free software paladin' on one hand and still enjoy complete control of the licensing and income creation for the Java ME platform on mobile and embedded devices on the other (because cell phone makers would rather pay than being forced to release all their code that runs on the phone under the GPLv2 or, in many cases, they can't even if they wanted to as they don't own the entire software stack),"

Comment Re:Time to repeat the brief love affair. (Score 4, Informative) 320

Did you play Civ IV? There absolutely was no "one true path" in that game. Particularly with all the expansions and on the hardest difficulty, you absolutely had to play to your particular civs strength, and trying to get different victory conditions with each of the different civs was always a challenge. On top of that, playing the same civ with a different leader could be a very different experience.

Comment Re:It's down to the cost of one disk? (Score 2, Informative) 551

Having spent more time than I'd care to think about digging through those backup DVDs for drivers, they generally only support one model, occasionally two or three. The reason there are so many drivers on the disc is because a given model usually has dozens of different configuration options, eg 4 or 5 different graphics cards, 3 or 4 different NICs, etc. However, each disc is usually locked to a single model, and does some sort of check that prevents it from running on any other model even if it has all the necessary drivers.

Comment Re:It's all just a money grab... (Score 1) 336

Well, you can Trademark it, but you'll have to actually make use of that trademark or you'll lose it, and if you do trademark it, the actual inventor will just use a different name. You could patent it, but you'll have to actually invent something to do that, which would be pretty cool, but probably not that easy. Or you could just be another whiny 15 year old bitching about "imaginary property" on the internet without even the slightest concept of how patents, copyrights and trademarks work.

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