Is this the case in Germany?

This isn't a global rule. In my country, illegally gathered evidence can be used in court just as much as legally gathered evidence, but the crimes committed while gathering the evidence can and will be prosecuted separately.

But the recent version had quite a bit of UI overhaul...

Also, this compression does help on older machines (I still have an old dual PII 266 that I check up sometimes); maybe they have less to process that way (images in much lower quality, restructured js), I don't know. Plus on such machine the snappiness of the browser as a whole is very noticeable, and of great value.

The question of novelty can be solved by whether two or more people independantly come up with the identical idea (not merely similar) without any knowledge of each others work (or anyone else with similar ideas).

Think about the wheel. If patents had been around when the wheel was invented, would the wheel be obvious? It certainly is to anyone today, and you can list lots of reasons why. But the wheel was probably based on rolling logs. Someone looking at a log on the ground and watching it roll around may or may not consider cutting it to create smaller logs to allow the transportation of heavy objects.

I agree that's often the case, but even for obvious things, someone has to be the first to do them. I don't think you should get a patent for something just because you were first, unless it was also sufficiently novel...

Not everyone wants to dig deep. As I get older I get more lazy and don't want to configure everything so I choose products that suit me the best with pretty much default options. I have had times when I have really tried liking Opera, but I just didn't like it. A lot of things worked differently from other browsers and for me they felt wrong. Yes, I would be able to configure it to work the way I want, but I just don't want to go through that. That might be a lot of work and still something would bug me or the configurations could be lost in the next version update (I don't know if this happens with Opera or not).

I almost liked Chrome, but I hated the fact that it is installed (by default) under each user's profile and the address bar didn't work properly and the much hated awesomebar was actually the feature that turned me back to Firefox, which is the closest to what I want by default.

"Complex software requires complex source code which is the source of code bloat."

Then we're meaning to different things by "bloat". To me, bloat is unneccessary.

(Since this article is about browsers: Opera has blown anything else out of the water for longer than I can think of, in terms of configurability, amount and quality of features, and it's also consistently been a much smaller download and performing much faster than any comparable browser. So other browser seem bloated to me in comparison: they do less and do it more slowly, while taking up more space. And I don't think Opera is coded in assembler, you know.)

Yes, features and complexity make executables bigger and sometimes make apps slower, but so do many other factors, like bad programmers, or corporate/open source bureaucracies, and sometimes the non-bloated version of something is not really that highly optimized, it's simply not bloated.

It seems there was no control group. From TFA:

And

Those controls would be hard to find these days, anyway.

Although I have to say I'm no cancer expert, more than 5000 cancers in 13,000 interviewees sounds darn high.

Funny that the first person to mention Launchpad is someone that works for OpenHatch.

Not to steal your thunder, I think OpenHatch is wonderful, but it does remind me an awful lot about launchpad.
For those of you unfamiliar with LP, launchpad.net is another site like this, that tries to get people involved with F/OSS projects.
You can contribute bugreports, fixes, Q&A about software, provide translations...
It used to be focussed around Ubuntu and Gnome (because the site is run by Canonical Inc.), but nowadays the site has really taken off (no pun intended) and hosts many kinds of FOSS projects.

I like how OpenHatch makes FOSS-involvement something you can boast about on forums/social networking sites using their HTML widget.
It makes me want to get my hands dirty and get involved :)

The great tragedy to me is that while we as western civilization have done a somewhat serviceable job of preaching the evils of slavery and of the German genocide against the Jews, but we seem to be trying to forget the genocide we practiced against Native Americans. Manifest Destiny was no less than that.

I don't know that we try to forget it, it's just hard, emotionally, to focus on. But I object to calling it genocidal. They were seen as subhuman; It was greedy and evil- but the Native Americans were killed to steal from them, not to wipe them out.

Wonder if these new Texas books teach the Trail of Tears. I have my doubts.

The Trail of Tears was not a genocidal act. It was a greedy act. The Cherokee were on land with gold, and that was that.

We should be proud there that the SCOTUS ordered them not to be removed. And ashamed that Andrew Jackson marched the army down there to do it anyway. At least to whatever degree we take pride/shame in our nation's history.

The other option is to just plug it up...

In which case they just come back later and start sucking the oil out. It would be a lot more efficient to plug it and then put an actual production rig on top of it to suck the oil out. That's actually how it is normally done - a drill rig (which is what the Horizon rig was) drills the hole, then plugs it up with cement. That rig moves on to drill another well, and a production rig moves in, unplugs the hole, and starts collecting the oil.

The last thing an oil company wants to see is oil leaking freely into the ocean. Their ultimate goals (ignoring the PR goals and other regulation induced goals) are naturally aligned with the environmentalists - they don't want to see a drop of that oil hit the ocean.

The USA has the same problem every other group has.

Muslims have a very minor but very vocal group of fundamentalist terrorists.

Popular sports have a very minor but very vocal group of hooligans.

USA has a very minor but very vocal group of christian rightwing Texans.

Every other group has such hate-bearing extremists. The rest of the group disagrees with them just as much as outsiders do.

NRP had a story about this the last week. I don't remember the facts enough to find a quick link but the example they used was an American pharma company sells a drug in the US, but they pay licensing fees to a subsidiary in another country with better tax laws. So they basically break even in the US so pay no taxes here. It costs a lot in lawyers but when you're talking billions it makes financial sense to do this. Also after the Valdez spill congress put a cap of 75 million for economic damages from an oil spill so I don't see BP getting hurt too bad from this.

Software patents literally make these open source projects illegal

You know, I keep seeing this said over and over again, and I've been letting it go, but I can't anymore ...

A PATENT DOESN'T MEAN ITS ILLEGAL TO IMPLEMENT IT.

It doesn't mean you can't make it open source.

All a patent does is grant someone a right to exclusive use ... IF THEY WANT IT TO BE USED EXCLUSIVELY BY THEMSELVES OR LICENSE IT TO OTHERS.

Having a patent doesnt do anything by itself, it gives the holder of the patent specific options.

It is not illegal to make an OSS h264 codec, you just simply need the license authority to allow you to do so.

You people really need to get a freaking clue before you go ranting about things you don't understand.

Let me ask you, how many people has the MPEG-LA sued over h264 ... there are OSS implementations ... how many of them have been sued? I can count to one higher on my dick, so just stop with the retarded bullshit you're pulling out of your ass.

Whats absolutely ludicrous is how completely ignorant of reality you and the rest of the 'ZOMG PATENT!%!@!@!@' twits are. You know what the biggest problem for patents in OSS is? Ignorant OSS zealots without a clue.

I suppose the fact that Novell, Redhat and Canonical all are patent holders just slipped your fucking mind too right? There are most certainly patented features in the Linux kernel, and it doesn't fucking matter because the patent holders are OK WITH THAT. It actually means that no one else can stop Linux from using those ideas. Patents help OSS too, just like software licensing.

I get that you don't like patents, but what you need to get is a god damn clue about what patents do, how they do it, and why they exist. You clearly don't know any of those 3 things. You're just another one of those people that rant about things they don't understand. Like the twits who rant about software licensing followed up immediately by telling everyone how GPL is gods gift to the world. Pure ignorance and stupidity.

Sorry, you're just full of shit. Jobs never said these things were not needed, and he did not say they would never come to the phone. Native apps were planned from the beginning. It just wasn't ready in time for the release of the original iPhone. You certainly have a masterly way of totally misunderstanding statements. I'm inclined to think it's deliberate, though, given your trollish ways. If it's not deliberate, it's either comprehension failure, or sourcing your info from tainted sources. You know what they say, Garbage In, Garbage Out.

Name 1 in the past year that was on the level of HL, HL2, DOOM, Monkey Island, Portal. I love gaming and some good games did come out recently but I cannot think of a great 1-2 in the past year.

Here's two: Dragon Age and Mass Effect 2. Sure, I enjoyed many games back then too - the TIE fighter series, Day of the tentacle, Monkey Island, Gabriel Knight and more - but there are plenty of good games today as well.