...and if you conspire to commit a felony, it isn't a conspiracy until the felony is actually committed?

Yeah, if all the ads were limited to an image, maybe some text and clickable links, it would make everybody happy except the most hard-core advertisers looking for the next big thing and the poor slobs who actually click on the ads.

Also of note, zedo.com shows up in NoScript as a site that has javascript awaiting permissions on the /. home page.

Yeah, just on off-the-cuff calculations, say 30 million copies across all platforms,could be as high as 40 M, but PC is only 16-17 M. I'm not sure what cut Mojang gets from the non-PC versions after you take out the development costs and Xbox/PS platform royalties, but let's say that Mojang grossed about $20 per copy overall. This includes he alpha and beta sales that were for under $20 averaged with the higher costs now.

This comes out to $600-$800 M before taxes, so after you factor in Minecraft Realms monthly fees and any income from Scrolls, you're probably somewhere around $1B in sales. I'm pretty sure there are more than 2 employees with equity in the company, and when you factor in Swedish income taxes, Notch is clearly not a billionaire in dollars.

It's worth $2B to Microsoft, because they can milk the Minecraft cow for at least that much by merchandising paraphenalia and movies, Minecraft Realms is also an ongoing cashflow. Oh, and I bet they institute a monthly fee for Minecraft Server.

Apart from the money, I think Notch is really selling because he's sick of the BS of running a company: Bethesda suing them over scrolls, parents suing them over exploitative MC servers....etc.

I was wondering the same thing. AFAIK, HP isn't even involved in the case, so it borders on libel to link their logo with this story.

So they're blackmailing Mojang...

Bad move when Mojang is finally making progress on their own Mod API.

The other way to make this legal is to change the license on Bukkit/CraftBukkit to something more liberal. They won't be able to do this retroactively, so someone may decide to pursue this idiocy on a back-level GPL-based fork, but at least the main project could legally license under CC by-sa, BSD, Apache or possibly even LGPL.

In other words, some idiot is trying to blackmail Mojang into open-sourcing Minecraft server by linking to Mojang's non-Open code into a GPL licensed product and then claiming that Mojang needs to release the source code to be compliant with the GPL? I know that the GPL states that all code needed to compile and link a GPLproduct must be available, but this is backwards. If there is Minecraft server code linked in CraftBukkit, that just means Craftbukkit and anything that links to it can't use GPL. You can't use the GPL to force open a non-open product that you elected to link to in your code. That just means you've misused the GPL in your own code.

Didn't someone already try this with proprietary graphics drivers in Linux?

Oh great, now when your family sets fire to their farts, they'll blow up the whole block instead of just scorching the carpet.

But OBS (open broadcaster software) does a good job of video mixing/overlays greenscreening. https://obsproject.com/

Corel Video Studio isn't quite free, but you can get it for around $50 on sale (or less if you go with a backlevel version 3 or 4) and it is pretty full-featured. It's not designed for full blown professional use because the front-end does more hand-holding than a pro would want, but the key features are all there.

Actually, this is probably the main reason MS is defying the US court order. If they give over the info without getting permission from the Irish government, they are likely to be in violation of Irish or EU laws on data privacy. They have some ground to defer the compliance with the US court during the appeals process, so they are deferring the risk of violating the EU laws until absolutely necessary. Or they may elect to take contempt charges in the US over greater charges in the EU, and reap the PR benefit. It definitely isn't a purely altruistic "defend the consumer" action, even if they choose to play it that way.

On the other hand, it does defend their customers against overreaching by the US, so more power to them.

Well, yeah - cops and arrestees are both human. That's the fundamental problem. Are we ready for RoboCop?

The practical issue here is that courts and juries give more weight to cop testimony than Joe Schmoe's testimony. So most of the time when the cops do something wrong, Joe loses. The cams are the best way to generate evidence and history to counteract that bias. In the short term, they also provide final proof between the cop said/Joe said testimony.

Yeah Java is the COBOL of the 21st Century. It's the lowest common denominator, almost every programmer knows at least the rudiments, and the tool and support ecosystem around it is huge.

More politely - if these guys spent as much (re)training each US worker as they spend on lawyers, visa fees and other costs related to bringing in the replacements, they wouldn't have a problem.

One reason I route all email from my company's PAC to my junk folder. Why should I help fund legislation against my own interests as well as those of the country.

Now if there was a permanent residence visa program, I might go for it. The foreign workers would have more bargaining power over their salaries/benefits and they would be long-term paying payroll taxes and other things that would help the US economy and budget.

Walmart used to do (and probably still does) this to their suppliers. The only difference is the consumer never knew their was a coercive price negotiation going on because the product simply never appeared on store shelves, and usually there was a substitute from another vendor.