Carefully avoiding all known patents puts them into a better position, even if the position is just a smaller number of patents.

I think there are two distinct worlds, people who handle the distribution of video and content creators. For content creators, they need highly polished GUIs ... like those provided by Final Cut Pro and iMovie. There are also batch video conversion tools that are entirely oriented around the GUI.

I actually read through some of the patents Nokia was threatening VP8/9 with and they really are not sophisticated at all, they are just written in the most confusing possible way. For example, the following paragraph is from a Nokia patent that basically describes the selection of neighboring pixels:

I was planning on busting all of the Nokia patents myself, but then I got busy :p

Bonus: This Film is Not Yet Rated is on YouTube.

After seeing the blatant and pointless censorship pushed by the movie industry's version of the ESRB, all I can say is that I hope he does as much damaage as possible.

It would be nice to hear from an archivist about how they plan to go about archiving the projects. How well does Archive.org's time machine cover Google Code? It would be cool if Google would post a link to a zip export of every project so you can just pul upl the last (and latest) result up on Archive.org and download the project.

Foreign language graduation requirements are a scam to employ PhD and masters students in the linguistics department. I know a lot of about educational psych and language learning and there was little about the intensive foreign language course I had to take at the UW that could be mistaken as for prepping us for actual fluency. These classes are designed to allow students to pass a test, not speak a foreign language. It actually got easier as the summer went on because each grad student got more desperate for high reviews and thus more forgiving of mistakes.

Whatever you stance on learning foreign languages, computer languages give a window into a different way of logic. This is at least as educational as rote memorization of vocabulary and verb forms.

Agreed, there are hundreds of programming languages, discussion about their merits is overshadowed by the need to get shit done. Evolutionary theory posits that organisms fill niches, but it doesn't assign importance to niches.

So, does this suggest a reasonable upper temperature for superconductivity?

Yup, Germany stepped off their high-horse and dived right into our cesspool. But just because everyone is violating our fundamental civil liberties en-mass doesn't make it any less evil.

The only thing this tells us is what our threat model should have been from the start.

Because Assange has said that if Britain and Sweden would put forth a good-faith promise not to extradite him he would happily travel to Sweden to face the molestation charges.

If what you are saying is true then I don't know why Glenn Greenwald (a former lawyer) and others would have put together a document detailing exactly how the two governments could make that promise,

Of course, Greenwald and the Guardian might be lying but, at this point, I trust them much more than I trust British and Swedish governments.

Patents were created to help protect the upfront capital investments required for creating physical goods. We came up with a set of rules that protect against utterly absurd misapplications of this temporary monopoly. The justices are trying to apply these baseline protections to an area of investment and innovation that is radically different. If only we could just pass a law saying "this is stupid" and move on....