My theory of why there are so many US postings on wikileaks is that the US is the "land of the free" and a nation that is, generally, held to a higher standard than others. We expect Pakistan/North Korea/China to treat people like shit. When the American, Hell let's just say Governments of the Western World behave badly we should be outraged and tell them to sort their shit out.

Step 1) Patent a process by which members of an organization transfer a circular container amongst themselves, incrementing the capital value within the container after each transfer.
Step 2) Sue church for profiting from your patents for the last thousand years.
Step 3) Profit
Step 4) Damnation.

Of course, there's always the slim slim hope that this will show the ridiculousness of the patent system and it will be overhauled.

When I first saw that, I wanted to know why the fuck my fellow countrymen decided to burden the police with knowledge of the sand bag instead of picking it up, moving it off the road, and carrying on with their lives. Maybe they could send the police an email about what they'd done if they felt the need.

How about we cut the welfare budget? Let people get what they earn, rather than what the govt gives them. That'll save 200bn a year.

well, shit.

If by 34% you mean 65%.

Also even if voter turnout was 34%, I would call 34% a democratic mandate. Nothing stopped the hypothetical 66% from not voting, and their abstinence is impartiality.

As I understand it, the EU parliament now has a bit more authority and can stand up to the commission. not sure though, so don't quote me.

Not if you consider Gmail's purpose to be facilitating communication. I think it's getting better. bigger, and clunkier, and I'd rather some features were separated out, but it's still improving as a means of communication.

Look where oil company liability got BP.....

We have to be this generous to attract talent, it's not like people move here for the weather or civil liberties :)

I agree with "needs to be able to protect their customers and their business" and disagree with "did something to my goddamn phone without my express permission".

How about a compromise? A notification that says "WARNING - This App is malicious, we recommend you remove it. [Uninstall App] [Cancel]"

Protecting their users without having the ability to remotely alter my phone without my permission. win-win.

The HTC Hero has a bookmark widget that uses screenshots of the websites as the buttons with a small label underneath(which is the websites title text I think). Since these images are called bookmark_thumb, I'm going to propose it has something to do with that...

As a programmer, I speak for all of myself and no-one else. but let me say this: fuck unions. fuck them. Seriously. If a company starts treating me like shit, I find a new job and they lose my skills. what's difficult about that? Even if I can't line up a new job instantly, I'll survive. I'll do freelance work(heh, I'm not ukranian) or become a taxi driver or something if I run out of savings while jobhunting.

I don't need or want a union to look after me(for a fee that might as well be another tax). I'll do it myself, thank you very much.

As I said, speaking only for myself here...

They have this sort of thing in Taiwan, I was working for a company in South Africa that bought the license to sell it. Here it is: Ip-Guard Basically, the software is scarily powerful in what it records and can do.

In south african law it's legal only if the employee is aware of it, so if it's in the employment contract. I think.

The company I was working for charged too much, didn't make enough sales, went tits-up. Classic case of greed before the fall.

Granted, if you follow a blogger and don't follow a newspaper, then the newspaper's website would gain nothing if the blogger hadn't existed. but is that 100% of the way people find news articles? Let's say I live in dallas, and I google "bloke who got shot on main street" and click the reposted article in the blog and not on the newspapers website, then what? Personally, I think this approach to finding news is more likely from the technologically impaired. So if a blogger ends up higher in a search results page than a newspaper website? In this situation? yes, the copyright infringement is damaging the revenue stream of the newspapers website.

I agree with what you are saying to an extent, but you say it isn't a black and white world, and you're very much correct in that. I think there should be some protection for content creators in respect of the effort put into creating content. I do not think the USA or the UK or Canada or anyone really has an acceptable solution, and I don't think the content creators can carry on as if the world hasn't changed. Not black and white indeed. the content consumers have changed, the content creators need to change, and so do the laws, but I believe content creators do deserve protection.