I remember reading an interview with one of them several years ago (I believe it was Brin), where they talked about the original homepage. At a time when other search engines were cramming as much crap onto their homepage as possible, Google stood out for being very minimal and serving up "just results" very quickly.

He said they were amused when people gave them compliments for taking such a bold move and assumed it was an intentional departure, but in reality they just didn't know HTML and cobbling together a single form and crappy logo was pretty much all they could manage (or were interested in).

A thousand times this :( It's so sad that we don't have Groklaw to help sort this all out for us. Mr. Florian woke up with a massive hard-on this morning, spewing his usual hypocritical diatribe about how Google brought this all on themselves by not caving in the past. I can't stand the thought that he's the only "tech patent expert" who will be quoted in the news on all of this.

But that's a big "if". If the wording is too broad, it will be easy to find prior art. Hell, the old Archie-based internet could be seen as doing this.

However I think that Google will go the other way. What is a "search argument"? I would think it's words such as "and", "or", "like" that are used to narrow the results. At least as a computer scientist, that's what the term usually means. Even though Google has these arguments available, the vast majority of searches don't use them.

There are plenty of other terms in the patent that can be beaten to death and shown to not apply. The thing about patents is that each claim is taken in its entirety. If Google can show that any of those bullet points don't apply to them due to their specific wording, they don't infringe.

Luckily for us they were able to arrange their own extinction-level event before becoming a danger.

You should read the actual article! This guy really likes his exclamation points!!1

Ah, thanks for that. It really is a pity, even more so that they go to such great lengths to hide it. Digging around a bit more from your example I found this page which explains in detail which printers require the binary plug-in and what functions it's used for.

Do you have more info on this? Last time I was in the market (which was a couple years ago), HP had far and away the best free driver support. They contribute them upstream instead of making you download separate files and try to install them, and everything "just worked". My multi-function laserjet prints, scans, and duplexes, all over the network, with zero configuration or bother from me.

They have an entire website dedicated to their efforts to support open source, their list of supported printers has any recent printer I can find, and their most recent release notes indicate they're still adding features, printers, and supported distros (notably Ubuntu 13.10 Beta and OpenSuse 13.1 Beta).

They do have a list of printers which are are unsupported due to IP issues but those still seem to be far and away the exception, not the rule.

He's making a profit off Ubuntu? I'm not so sure about that.

As a scientist who happens to also believe in a creator, I don't understand why evolution and intelligent design have to be mutually exclusive. Why can't a creator have designed evolution?

The fact that life on this planet has undergone -- and continues to undergo -- evolution is undeniable. That doesn't prove that God doesn't exist. A system that is not only capable of propagating itself indefinitely but also continually updates itself over centuries and millennia.. now that's a pretty impressive hack if you ask me.

A common refrain from those who want to disprove intelligent design is "this creature's adapted behavior isn't the most efficient way to accomplish this task, so therefore it was not designed by an all-knowing, all-powerful creator". Just because this spider's means of locomotion is an "obtuse solution" also doesn't mean it's not "by design".

Who says God doesn't have a bit of Rube Goldberg in him? You're presuming that he's trying to create the perfect organism and he just can't quite get it right. Maybe he realizes that if he created the perfect spider it'll freak the hell out of his humans who will then wipe it off the planet.

In other words, using GitHub is every bit as transparent and consistent as the git command line! It's a feature...

I'm sure the first person to ever make a pun about ReiserFS was probably pretty funny. Maybe it even had a funny follow-up. At this point they're like that awkward friend you have who isn't quite clever enough to make a funny joke on his own so he just repeats others' jokes and hopes no one has heard them.

Where have I heard this before? Oh yeah...

http://www.thecomicstrips.com/store/add_strip.php?iid=83812

I'm seriously LOLing over here. Thanks for the Friday laugh...

Okay, but no true Australian drinks it.

MySQL is a good choice because I can log in to my Amazon Web Services account, provision a new RDS instance, and be done with it. I have no interest in managing an RDBMS and am willing to pay someone else to do it for me. Until AWS supports Postgres, I'll stick with MySQL.