.NET programmers were there first because the founder, Joel Spolsky, moved his (large) community over there first, and that community was mostly Microsoft-centric (Joel worked at Microsoft and wrote some very insightful posts on Redmond strategy, back in the day). Most old-school VB types were knee-deep in C# by then, so that's what they brought up.
What you do is clearly a breach of contract between you and the content provider, with more contractual implications up the licensing chain. At worst, it could be argued that you're defrauding the content provider/producer. So, "not illegal"? Maybe, maybe not, it's a grey area. For sites like HideMyAss to state that this sort of usage is fully legal is very self-serving and clearly false.
Let's be honest, we now know that HMA will fold when the first copyright troll comes knocking with a court order. Their reputation is shot.
(Note that I'm not blaming the victim here, just pointing out a fact people tend to forget)
This is why you never, ever talk to the police without a lawyer. A good lawyer would have asserted his client's full rights out of the bat, suggested him what to say and how to say it, and probably threatened to sue for harassment if they wanted to confiscate the iPad. At that point most policemen would have given up as "not worth the hassle".
Instead, they just saw a boy playing with toys, and made him frame himself. He completely missed the big picture here; when asked if he thought a crime had been committed, he basically said "it's for the hacker to define that" -- "crimes" are defined by criminals now? It's for the *police* to decide, and they did indeed decide, probably because they saw the boy being somehow ambivalent about it ("when in doubt, charge" is a common police attitude in many parts of the world). Again, a good lawyer would have stopped him from saying anything -- you don't debate the fine points of the law while under official questioning, because it doesn't matter and it can only hurt your case. Let the lawyers debate it for you, they'll do it better than you ever could.
"Anything you say can be used against you" is not really understood by the common folk until they have this sort of experience. It should be taught in school.
"The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads,"
If anything, the current "social" bubble is giving us unprecedented insight in sociological behaviour at mass scale. We are leaving behind the world where "sociology scientists" could only run limited and poorly-defined experiments over their own student population; now "social companies" like Facebook have at their disposal an incredible amount of relevant, up-to-date, *exact*, aggregated data. The field will never be the same.
No, the announced closure was just postponed in February for another 5 years at least, with a view to get an additional 5 years on top of that after a bit of maintenance.
Reactors cost huge sums to build, nobody really expects them to last only 30 years; 40 is the bare minimum to get some returns from the whole operation, anything on top of that is pure profit... which is where the REAL interest is, of course.
The Egyptian revolt was led, among others, by Coptic Christians tired of being abused by Islamic fanatics while a tyrannical government won't lift a finger to defend them. The Moroccan dynasty is based on Sharia law and Islam, but still people are protesting there. And obviously the Iranian movement is about *less* power to Islamic authorities...
So I guess you don't know much about "People in North Africa" and what they fight for, after all, dear Coward.
The University of Bologna is the oldest university in the world, founded in 1088, and one of the few good universities left in Italy, specializing in engineering, history and medicine.
However, from what I understand these people are not part of any research group at the University; one of them, Focardi, is just a (now often absent) professor of physics there. He was also a member of a research group in Siena which also claimed they had had a "breakthrough" 15 years ago; and they claimed then that commercial exploitation was 6 months away...
The other "businessman" involved was previously convicted for (unrelated) fraud. To me, it sounds like yet another scam.
The emphasis on one-hand use looks spot-on. I'd be curious to see a similar concept working up on some hacker-friendly smartphone (Maemo/Meego or Android).
Optimus was a standalone keyboard, too heavy and expensive to be really attractive outside specific niches (plus, they made some very controversial decisions, and didn't really push hard to get into the mainstream).
This is supposed to be a ultraportable gaming laptop, a concept I find really "meh" (would you really play WoW on a 7'' screen?), nevermind the keyboard.
I'd like to see the likes of Toshiba or Fujitsu marketing a full 15'' laptop with this sort of keyboard under $ 1500 / £ 1000, I'm sure there would be a market for it.
Available research tells us two things:
1) It's easier for people to use well-designed icons than to memorize keys or key-combos, especially in the short and medium term. (this is still contentious among power users, but it's a long-proven fact, originally established by Xerox and confirmed by Apple research)
2) people don't really like interfaces that dynamically change too much. This was determined the hard way by Microsoft (see XP Start menu and Office 97/2003).
So we can probably deduce:
1) this sort of interfaces are very good for non-power-users, to reduce learning curves in general and possibly gain a bit of speed in executing tasks
2) however, changes must be triggered in predictable "manual" ways by the user himself, i.e. when you launch a specific program. Things like automatically changing keyboard layout when switching windows would probably make people hate it, if not handled in a very visible way (i.e. big on-screen alerts that your keyboard has changed).
This said, I'd love to see a full laptop trying out this concept. It would probably be crazy expensive in the short term (screens are among the most expensive parts in laptops, and here you'd have TWO for each product), but could be very useful, especially in education/training environments.
That's why I said "in theory"
Anyway, that's a very pessimistic view, but you know what? If that really happens, I don't give a toss. Until writers and musicians keep siding with their corporate overlords for the sake of a quick buck, they deserve to suffer. The public is quite happy to keep consuming repetitive shit like "Harry Potter 457: Trapped in the Hospice"; it's the makers and creators that will suffer, as they'll struggle to come up with "totally original" material. Coincidentally, that's the same class of people who regularly side with the likes of Disney (the late Sonny Bono, Paul McCartney, Metallica, etc etc etc) because they can't see beyond their own greed.
Until authors stand up for what is *really* in their long-term interest, things will keep getting worse... but it's not my problem.
No, he's right: 1928 (publication date) + 28 + 67 = 2023 (when Steamboat Willie will eventually be free, in theory).
The 67 years extension was allowed because Disney renewed that copyright when the law was changed, in 1976. You can bet they were first in line: they almost certainly paid for the law themselves.
(Besides, some people think SW is, in fact, already in PD for different reasons.)
It was pulled when they released the War Logs, because they expected an inevitable surge of traffic (and DDOSes), much like press sites do with huge-hyper-massive-net-straining breaking news.
After that, they were overwhelmed by the effort required to publish these cables, and putting back the minor stuff got a very low priority. Plus, their profile is no so high that a vanilla mediawiki would crumble in a few days, so you need something better and safer.
Wikileaks is a very small org, it's clear they're struggling to manage their workload.
Davenport-Lyons was the legal firm who started this racket, which was then relaunched under ACS:Law; Gallant-Macmillan was the third entity to try it.
Only the first group of evildoers has been obliterated; the second has been damaged, but it's still in the game; the third one is still cranking out letters, although in a fairly restrained manner (in this case, it's really their customer who is pushing hard). And, eventual enforcement of the Digital Economy Bill, currently expected for late January 2011, will probably open the floodgates to hordes of copycats.
There's still a long way to go for the legal situation around UK filesharing to get back to anything resembling sanity.
On the eighth day, God created FORTRAN.
