Facebook ... says creator Matt Kruze must remove them if he doesn't want to be banned from Facebook.

The threat appears to have been carried out. Kruze's Facebook page is made 'unavailable'.

Found the broken-square symbol and tried it. Now the beta looks much better.

There is way too much visual noise. The images (and I mean images, not icons) are unnecessary and distracting. I would suggest you remove them and find some way to do without them.

That is a misunderstanding.

Let me shift the bulletin down: The only reason ham radio is allowed to operate anywhere in the world is because the governments of the world (including ours) do not regard it as a threat to them. Encryption is a threat as far as governments are concerned; and legal limitations (or their lack) in this country don't matter, since ham radio is global. If you add encryption to ham radio, then ham radio becomes a threat to governments, too. Then ham radio will become largely banned or restricted, and its enjoyment elsewhere will drop to the point where it is no longer viable as a hobby.

This proposal, requested by a relatively narrow sector of society (hospitals) out of fear of litigation, if it every becomes allowed, will turn and bite hospitals in the collective butt when they face a shrinking pool of licensed radio operators. Any remaining ham radio operators will use ham radio at work, where the employer assumes the legal risk. Otherwise, why bother, when encryption makes ham radio too much trouble.

Let assume that the bill passes both houses of Illinois' legislature. The governor might see it for the nonsense it is, and veto it. Even if he signs the bill (or his veto is overridden), the law will be challenged in court almost immediately. It is likely it will be struck down on constitutional grounds, and will almost certainly not be enacted in the meantime.

Just to make things more interesting, the proposer of this bill is also proposing another bill to make gun ownership anonymous.

Okay, on reflection maybe I should not have used the adverb 'physically'. But I did have to remove the Kaspersky folder from the Program Files. Otherwise the install program would crash while reinstalling the software.

This is not Kaspersky's only problem with its anti-virus product. I have been asked to install a 'technical update'. When I did so, it crashed the anti-virus so badly that it no longer worked at all. I had to physically remove its folder from the Program Files area and reinstall the program from scratch. And this was with Windows 7. That was back in November. When I got the same message in January, I thought Kaspersky might have fixed the problem. Nope: Install -- crash -- scrape up mess -- reinstall from scratch. You kind of wonder what has Kaspersky been doing over the past six months.

I would like to preserve and safeguard my books, but we are talking wood pulp fiber that starts to rot the minute the book is printed. I have books from the turn of the last century, whose pages are so brown that it is hard to read the text. Yes, the shift from cotton rag to wood pulp may have made books cheaper and thus more available; but trying to preserve rotting books makes up for the cheap price. Oh, and electricity and optical/magnetic media are even more ephemeral.

Who's having a hard time filling mission-critical IT positions? Perhaps the kind of companies that will not hire anyone over thirty? Perhaps the kind of companies that think that IT workers ought to be treated like part assemblers, warehouse order fillers or hamburger flippers — cheap and expendable? This is coming from the same kind of arrogant managers and executives who have been whining about programmers, developers, and IT staff for decades. Why do we keep bringing this crap up over and over again? Why don't we just tell those losers to just shut up?

The Free Software Foundation let their code by free-as-in-beer, but charged for the media to transport the code and for the printed documentation for the code. It was only fair, as this was a way to keep the foundation self-sufficient. So the problem is not, in itself, open-source not equal to free-as-in-gratis.

The point is not that the Growl project is charging for its software, but that the project is not making its code available for patches or for improvements by other programmers, which is the whole idea of open-source. The Growl project, starting with 1.3, are not doing that. And they made the problem worse by refusing to admit that there is a problem.

I have listened to the forker on the interview; he sounds like a rational fellow, and he did believe that he had a reasonable grievance. Frankly, I cannot see any problem that the Growl project had with him (or with the others they cut off and then claimed did not exist), unless they have become blind from their own hubris.

The real problem is that the Growl project may never have been open-source in the first place. The project misrepresented themselves in their license (enclosed below), which looked like it was GPL but in face was not. The least that the Growl project can do now is to admit openly that they are going closed-source, pull out of Google forums, and let their volunteers choose to go elsewhere.

Growl License

Copyright (c) The Growl Project, 2004-2011
All rights reserved.

Redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without modification, are permitted provided that the following conditions are met:

1. Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer.
2. Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer in the documentation and/or other materials provided with the distribution.
3. Neither the name of Growl nor the names of its contributors may be used to endorse or promote products derived from this software without specific prior written permission.

THIS SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED BY THE COPYRIGHT HOLDERS AND CONTRIBUTORS "AS IS" AND ANY EXPRESS OR IMPLIED WARRANTIES, INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, THE IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE ARE DISCLAIMED. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE COPYRIGHT OWNER OR CONTRIBUTORS BE LIABLE FOR ANY DIRECT, INDIRECT, INCIDENTAL, SPECIAL, EXEMPLARY, OR CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES (INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, PROCUREMENT OF SUBSTITUTE GOODS OR SERVICES; LOSS OF USE, DATA, OR PROFITS; OR BUSINESS INTERRUPTION) HOWEVER CAUSED AND ON ANY THEORY OF LIABILITY, WHETHER IN CONTRACT, STRICT LIABILITY, OR TORT (INCLUDING NEGLIGENCE OR OTHERWISE) ARISING IN ANY WAY OUT OF THE USE OF THIS SOFTWARE, EVEN IF ADVISED OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGE.

It is going to take more than money for OpenOffice to justify its existence, now that most of the original OpenOffice programmers have moved on with LibreOffice, and many Linux distros support it rather than OpenOffice.