And it looks like the FSF project can't be hosted on Savannah due to potential "legal problems"

Donaldson has a terrible writing style that has a few brief moments of greatness and a lot of tawdry mediocrity. He doesn't come close of Tolkien on any level, and I found "The chronicles of Thomas Covenant the unbeliever" to be very dull for the most part. I wouldn't recommend them to anyone.

Agreed. Turgid prose made worse by the uncritical application of a thesaurus. Anyone that enjoys the adventure and poetry of Tolkein should steer well clear of Donaldson.

I would imagine that Google don't want users to just switch to other search engines.

This change (coupled with their bias towards google+ results) is probably going to push more users in that direction as they doubt the quality of the information resulting from a google search.

I've switched to using DuckDuckGo! and Ixquick about 6 months ago. They work perfectly.

https://duckduckgo.com/
https://www.ixquick.com/

FireGPG has to call a local copy of GPG outside of the browser. This GPG4Browsers all happens within the browser. The eventual goal seems to be to be able to provide OpenPGP even in environments where GPG is not installed on the OS and the user only has rights to run a web-browser.

The authors are aware of the following problems in the _prototype_:
      - this uses HTML5 local store which can't be cleared securely
      - it lacks validation of certificates
      - it can't generate keys.

But it is very interesting. Danke schÃn!

Sorry to burst *your* bubble but your argument fails on several fronts:

1. There already exists a succesful support company based around R: http://www.revolutionanalytics.com/
2. The model of making money by providing BETTER support and releasing Free Software is proven by Red Hat, MySQL AB (pre-acquisition), etc
3. The OP doesn't sound like they need anything besides out of the box functionality, which is incredibly full-featured in R (especially compared to Excel!)

n/t

The icon attached to this story is for "Open Source" yet the story is discussing GPL licensed software. Ironically the objective of OSS advocates was exactly to hide the obligations that Free Software licensing imposed on distributors. It would seem from the problem being discussed that they've succeeded.

You're assuming malice. But the most likely thing is that they used Wolfram Alpha to search for "CDF" instead of using Google or Ixquick. ;)

Similar cluelessness abounds in their comparison chart which claims e.g. that HTML5 is incapable of a "dynamic document hierarchy" while "Readers can dynamically open and close chapters and sections in CDF documents. CDF also supports hierarchical, tab, slide, flip, opener, and other document organizations."

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AsOBtTNJ-aA

And now that this study has been published there will be a spike in the number of people searching for "granny porn" and "aged cunts". ;)

This is another recommendation for Jitsi.

In addition to all the above advantages it also offers encryption of audio calls through ZRTP.

- Instant messaging doesn't work everywhere. AIM, MSN, ICQ, SMS... all incompatible. It's a mess.

Google Talk just added the ability to message AIM (e.g. SMSAIM )users. So that's one incompatibility gone.

https://www.google.com/support/chat/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1281761

So Facebook gets to ask it's unsuspecting users for their mobile phone numbers in addition to the other data they now spew out into the eager hands of crackers and marketeers?

Sweet.

Even better, it creates an evolutionary pressure for spammers to invest in databases of peoples faces linked to names and associated face-recognition technology. Brilliant. Something else for which to thank the Facebook tards.

True. And also the money to pay for any ensuing legal costs. Patents are virtually useless except as a weapon for large companies.