Just FYI, the main law is being broken is that the VoIP providers are unlicensed telecommunications providers.

In order to be a licensed telecommunications provider, your company must meet certain ownership requirements and comply with government oversight.
Part of the government oversight is the tariffs charged. Part of the ownership requirements ensures profit for the country.

Since the infrastructure to provide the internet is subsidized by international minutes (remember where the content, and where Saudi is) VoIP in its most common form is used as rate/toll bypass telecommunications fraud. Same like reconfiguring someone's voice mail to forward to an international number.

There is no technical reason why VoIP can be cheaper than what the telecommunications providers can provide. They could provide VoIP too or terminate the call through TDMoIP, lower codec quality etc... but this is whole thing is not about the COST of the call. It's about the margins and ownership. The telecommunications companies employ thousands of Saudi nationals. The Saudi nationals do not care about VoIP. This mostly does not effect them, it effects the expatriates. And even then, it only effects the expatriates who came to Saudi on contracts that don't pay them enough to make phone calls.

Skype has been typically allowed to operate in many middle eastern countries but only for PC to PC video calling. Skype-in and Skype-out services as well as access to the website to download and market the client was typically blocked.

Yes, the NSA scandal probably has some impact on the recent re-evaluation of Skype.

A black market will exist as long as there is a reason for it. The more money that is siphoned out of our pockets by the swine of an unproductive industry, the further we will go to protect our interests. I'd love to believe Hollywood helped better our education system or somehow improved our standards of living... and maybe it is anti-american to believe it has taken more then it has given... yet I pay a hidden tax on all my blank media and generate add revenue for the american music lables on my youtube video that happened to catch an audio clip in the background. I spend more than a meal or hour of minimum wage on a single album or movie screening. Oh... and I'm NOT an American. I am Canadian.

Yes, when all my friends are recommending and linking to content on malware sites I'll probably want to check them out!

Back in the day, you could get cars with car phones that worked with Bluetooth Sim Access Profile - those car phones had fixed antennas mounted outside so could broadcast up to 1 watt... but then came the iphone... since the iPhone was so trendy and hip (yet not supporting SAP or copy and paste) BMW/Mercedes stopped selling such equipped bluetooth car phones instead opting for the crappy reception of your crappy mobile located inside your metal box.

When one is an arrogant self-absorbed prick who thinks impeeding traffic is their personally-granted-god-given right, they cause other arrogant self-absorbed pricks to follow too close, pass improperly or try and "make up time" - so collectively all such pricks create the situation for all motorists...

Unlike the 60's (when the speed limits were set) - your car won't just explode when you cross 70mph.

Since they have lights, cameras, radios, and friends with tools that can turn $1000 Z rated tires into litter... possibly more effectively then you'd wan't to risk...

So Netflix has a policy to stop side-channel sales and distribution? You mean you can't reach a new audience through Netflix and tell them to use a competing distribution channel?

When is the last time you saw a commercial for CNN on Fox News?! You havent?? - CRY FOWL!

Never under-estimate the stupidity of consumers... I mean, we will probably end up with tassimo style 3d printers that you put in a pod of plastic and end up with forks/straws etc... not because it was a good idea or that tassimo machines make better/easier/cheaper coffees then a real espresso maker... but because consumers are stupid.

Not to rain on your parade, but wit is best served dry.

Feeding the appetite for war, of course. We can't do too many things at once and a country at war with someone/something will be united instead of at war with itself.

To be fair, it seems many group Canada and the U.S. together or often just call us all "the west"

I have always been anal about not touching the bulb... and I have gone through at least 5 silverstar ultra bulbs in 5 years. After my last spare goes, I'll try some other bulb manufacturer.

Is that really the floppy driver's source code?!
Is this the display driver detection source code?!

Driver of the screen
impliment vesa if is seen
else just bitch and scream

I think what the guy means by no "huge development community" is no geeks with interest in doing it, just because. ARM is different then x86 and I would assume to make a good port on ARM, there would be a lot of specific x86 hacks that need to be revisited

And re: "massive software repository": The people who are interested in rasberry pi need to be interested in it for a particular prupose... since debian has a huge software repository, there are likely many more users who will be interested in the well established linux that fits their purpose vs the port of beos with few apps

So what I interpreted from that is there is no want to do it...
That and porting your own OS is a lot different then porting a community written OS that is made to be binary compatible with another closed source OS to another architecture.

The concept of file ownership/permissions != DRM... file ownership/permissions are supposed to be a way to stop you from getting owned - the concept and implemnentation it's a simple method of sandboxing dumb users or poorly writen applications from writing to places it should not be able to. Every modern operating system does this.

I think you miss the point that he is making, with any process/application to be able to write to any other process or application, it creates a completely untrusted environment where you cannot expect the system to be in any state when you cannot completely control it's inputs. Combine that with many alternatives available that are more secure/sane by design, there aren't many uses for it...

Sure maybe it can go in a stand alone video editor... but why would you when you can put linux on that same machine and connect it to the internet/render farm and not have to worry about it getting pwned in a javascript buffer overflow