The amount of jiggery pokery they'd done to the internals was quite obvious and caused one of Vista's greatest problems. A lot of the internals had changed including several alterations that meant needing new drivers for existing devices which a lot of manufacturers didn't bother producing (why would Epson, to give an example I presonally experienced, spend time writing drivers for their old devices, time they'd see no money back from, when they might instead get some sales of a new devices when peopel discovered Vista didn't like the old ones?), and often the Vista drivers (both for new devices and where they were created to support old ones) were much less tested than the existing XP ones so early adoptors exsperienced a lot of bugs.

Probably at some point, once the relevant evidence is collected and researched. There have been a couple of cases against high profile individuals in recent years (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_Catholicism_in_Belgium#Pedophile_priests_scandal) but collating the right evidence to make a solid case against a large organisation is rather more difficult.

Altering a video convincingly is much harder than an indivdual frame, though still possible.

In this instance a there will be other evidence to back up the video: the sequencing of the lights will follow certain patterns for instance, so changing the colour of lights in the video is likely to create a sequence that simply isn't possible. In most cases where video or photographic evidence is accpeted, it is used in conjunction with other evidence rather than trusted on its face value alone because of how many ways such things can be tampered with.

Also in instances like this it is unlikely to come to court. The insurance company certainly won't fight like that, and the driver will hopefully have either the good sense to not waste the time and money or not have the time/money to throw at such a case anyway. It it really was the insurer calling then it would have been simply to check that they were safe to reject a claim, if not then it will be someone acting on behalf of the driver testing the water to see if there is enough evidence to make a claim (or further appeal) pointless.

The quote is "open-source information" - the lack of capitalisation is significant here: no link to the OSI is intended to be implied.

Open-source information is a fairly common term in some circles, it refers to information that can be obtained or derived from sources that are open to (legitimate) public access. In other words accessing that information does not in itself constitute a break of any law or other rule.

Of course the way he used the information once he had obtained it is another matter.

They can't in this instance. "open-source information" is a phrase that has been used by people intelligence services, academia, and other organisations since long before the OSI existed in any form. Even if they could afford the team of lawyers Microsoft use to defend their sole use of the word "windows" in certain contexts, I doubt this would be one of the contexts where they would win.

Could be encryption export restrictions (yes, I knwo the devices were made in China in the first place and are available everywhere else anyway so the restriction has no real effect, but that are still legal restrictions).

There may be other trade limiting legislation that is relevant.

She could be bypassing import/export taxes and other such.

Getting less iPhone specific: she may have been intending to use the phones to pay for other illegal products/services, high priced items are sometimes used as part of attempts to launder money associated with drug and people transportation.



Nothing that really warrants a tasering, though if she was getting overly argumentative they could claim (however disengenuously) that they reacted in fear that she might become violent and put other members of the public in danger.

There are two thigs that make it costing more than Windows unsurprising.

Firstly the cost of Windows to manufacturers like Dell is much much much lower per unit than the likes of you or I would pay personally, and they get a kick-back for every bit of crapware they install on it for you which could easily make the Windows+crap solution zero cost. The crapware is not available for Linux, so they lose that couple of $/unit.

Secondly, if they have done as much work as "the result of a skunkworks project to optimise the open-source OS to run on Dell projects, to create better laptops for developers" might imlpy, then that sort of work to any decent quality level costs a fair amount in experienced man-time. Most chipset/device manufacturers produce their own Windows drivers that are (eventually, usually after a few revisions) fast and stable, but produce very little or nothing at all for other OSs such as Linux. This means that anything not yet fully supported and optimsed by the mainstream kernel woudl need work from Dell's team - and it may not be easy work as often public documentation for such things is sparce or otherwise lacking (or simply not available: they may have had to pay for access to some information).

This isn't about creaming money of us silly Linux people - it is about not doing work for nothing (which is fine for individuals and small groups who are making use of what would otherwise be spare time, but very difficult to get passed your shareholders when you are a publicly listed company).

As Windows gradually loses market share due to the number of devices (I'm including everything here, not just desktops and laptops where Windows is still very much king) running other options (Android, iOS, Linux, ...) the device support situation will hopefully change to the point where (at very least) good documentation is publicly available for most things.

Excellent, my evil island cloaking device is functioning perfectly. They'll never know my nefarious plans until they are too late to do anything about them!

But they also can't stop their customers making the GPL covered code available elsewhere once they have access to it, so releasing to their customers is effectively releasing to the world.

Unfortunately most of the general public think that because nothing really went wrong there was not a problem in the first place, and that it was all hyped up by the media. Some of this is the simple truth that it was over-hyped by the media who over-hype everything so people are growing desensitised, some of it is people not bothering to research their opinions or properly engage their critical thinking abilities.

Nope. Not just your browser. Your browser, your OS & some of its support libraries that many other apps may use.

Interesting fact: it isn't just the light that makes them scurry away adn hide. They can smell us, and find us quite disgusting (presumably an evolved survival reaction: avoid mammals as they'll either eat you or just stomp on you).

The supply deal between Samsung and Apple is already due to end (in 2014) IIRC, so Samsung are in a position to lose at most that. Chip manufacture is an expensive business, there are a fair few players in the mobile device market right now and Samsung don't have infinite production capacity - presumably they think they can make the same money (or more) using that finite resource to service other clients (including other parts of themselves), and do so without helping a competitor, they may even already have new contracts lined up ready.

My assumption is that Samsung could do better now. The contract must have room for price variance nor room for Samsung to walk away, but clauses that would allow Apple to walk away. If I'm right then what Samsung have done is simply demand Apply pay the going rate, which is higher right now than when their deal was first negotiated. They couldn't lose: either Apple agree and give Samsung what they want, or Apple walk away and Samsung get the same from others (or via equivalent saving by being able to make use of the manufacturing resource directly themselves).

I think that inconveniencing a competitor in another market probably didn't even come into it, other than inspiring a few humorous/ironic/what-ever notes on internal memos. This seems to be to be basic cost/benefit and "what the market will bare" stuff. If anything inconveniencing Apple would have made them think twice rather than make them more eager to cause disruption: being seen to deliberately inconvenience a partner, no matter what the provocation, can look bad and make other potential partners think twice about dealing with you.

I've gone a quick check of my memory, and it looks like QuickBasic and its descendants had those directives, which will be where I'll remember it from.

GPP was imprecise but almost correct. Unless I'm misremembering and assigning properties of other BASIC variants (I used a few variants way back then) to MS's that it didn't have, or course.

IIRC all unqualified variable names defaulted to integer type, adding the $ told the interpreter that a string type is required instead. But there existed directives to alter this behaviour, so for instance strings were the default. Something like "DEFSTR S-R" would make variables starting with S, T or R default to string (unless specifically set to something else by a trailing type indicator) from that point on.

I'm only one data-point, but a lot of people I know directly or indirectly seem to have switched away from MS's IM. It usually starts with using Facebook's IM for contacts that are on there then slowly logging into MSN/Live/what-ever less and less often until they don't bother at all (and reverting to mobile phone text messages for communicating with people who are not on facebook).