I live in NZ too, but NZ have treaties with the US to extradite criminals and that is OK. People shouldn't be able to evade justice by simply going to another country.

That's the point, though, isn't it? Dotcom didn't physically perpetrate any crimes in the US. He didn't flee our jurisdiction. Extradition laws are typically about crimes committed in a jurisdiction from which the the defendant fled.

Even more to the point. Dotcom is CEO of a corporation that is accused—not convicted—of copyright infringement. Officers and employees of corporations are usually exempt from prosecution for laws broken by the company. There are ways of piercing the corporate veil but to do so typically requires that the officers and employees in question knew the actions were illegal. MegaUpload and Dotcom are arguing that they adhered to the laws and even helped US authorities gather evidence in other proceedings.

There's a great deal of uncertainty regarding the case...uncertainty that might be clarified during trial proceedings against MegaUpload. To argue that Dotcom should be prosecuted at all would, to me, require that MegaUpload be first found guilt of a crime. Once that had been done the extradition request would have been a mere formality.

But that's not what happened. US authorities have seemingly abandoned the niceties of sending officers to the accused's house or place of business during daylight hours. In many cases they've resorted to a shock-and-awe methodology of pre-dawn raids with smoke, tear gas and loaded weapons drawn. The argue it's necessary to prevent destruction of evidence.

Somehow US authorities convinced NZ authorities this method of arrest was necessary to "capture" a rather portly big mouth who's shot more videos than he has firing-range targets.

I don't believe any of it was necessary. I don't believe there's a viable case of criminal conduct. What I suspect is the whole thing is a botched case that authorities in both countries want to sweep under the rug. And, while we're on the topic...the argument that exposing the case to public scrutiny will "reveal intelligence gathering and sharing methods" is straight from the US playbook.

The real shame is they tried to use criminal-case law and methods in what should have been a civil case, screwed it up and as a result have undermined public confidence in the justice system in general.

"Begun the Clone War has" - Yoda

RTS could make Red Hat happy by running a Black Duck analysis on their proprietary code and sharing the result

Bradley Kuhn addressed this already with two objections:

1. Blackduck can only confirm that the code in question doesn't copy directly from code in it's look-up database. It can't determine whether a given bit of modified code is a derivative work under copyright law and hence a possible GPL violation (where GPL code is involved).
2. The Blackduck software is proprietary. While their clients may feel assured (and are perhaps indemnified against mistakes), copyright holders have no assurance that the software is exhaustive or accurate in its analysis.

In other words, a Blackduck assurance is a proprietary, "black box" assurance...worthless to third parties.

I voted in Houston as well. I hate the jog wheel as well but mostly because it's attached to an all electronic system. There's no paper ballot. The screen *showed* my selections but I have no idea what it sent to the server.

What's wrong with the paper ballot and electronic tabulator?

It's always no.

One thing though: This story is a great demonstration of my maxim that any headline which ends in a question mark can be answered by the word "no". The reason why journalists use that style of headline is that they know the story is probably bollocks, and donâ(TM)t actually have the sources and facts to back it up, but still want to run it.

In other words, Betteridge's law of headlines describes trolling by the writer or publisher rather than a commenter.

One of the reasons I like OpenBSD is the developers are very forthright about why things can't or won't work. Reading the misc@ mail list is a great way to learn about the issues they face trying to get documentation. There are non-trivial issues with both acpi and efi. The developers reverse engineer what they can.

Instead of asking "Why doesn't OpenBSD have better support for $hardware?" we should be asking "Why don't vendors post more public information about their hardware?"

Anyone who grew up in the 70s and 80s buying electronics probably has very distinct memories of getting schematics and diagrams with their new products (or could order them cheaply). My first cw-band radio came with a full electrical schematic. Now, it's a crap shoot. Some of the blame lies with the industry as a whole. Much lies with the USPTO, or more precisely, the laws governing patentability and duration of patents.

The industry is to blame because it's easier to not to. Even if a retail vendor wanted to release good doc sub-component vendors may refuse to allow them. Why? In part to protect themselves from copycats. In part to protect themselves from patent lawsuits.

Patents are the another aspect of the not-so-secret problem. They're all violating somebody's patent on something (at least in the eyes of the patent holder). Whether it's in the fabrication process, a "method" of calculating or who knows what, someone has a claim. The more a company expose about the inner workings of their devices the more information patent trolls and competitors have for pursuing license (revenue), agreements. The smartphone patent war we're seeing played out in the courts is one example of the problem.

Yet another aspect of the problem is self-serving vendor "standards". EFI began as an Intel initiative. Intel later handed control of the spec over to the UEFI Forum, a non-profit corporation. The goal of EFI isn't so much to fix BIOS as to further vendor interests, whether to protect their "IP" or lock customers into using their devices in vendor "approved" ways.

Contrast that to Open Firmware (OpenBoot) which began as a Sun initiative and later became an IEEE standard. Or LinuxBios (now coreboot) which is an open source replacement replacement for both BIOS and EFI. Coreboot has made some progress but it requires vendor participation to make critical details available for implementation. You can guess how well that's going.

If the OpenBSD project were willing to sign NDAs and/or accept binary blobs there would be better support of technologies like suspend/sleep. But they're not willing to do so. Rather they work with vendors who are willing to share details, reverse engineer where possible and do without when neither option is available.

There are two replies to this:

1) OpenBSD supports tons of hardware. Click on one of the supported platforms. First you'll notice is OpenBSD runs on more than x86. Second, click through. You have to work hard to find a class of hardware that doesn't have some support. Most mainstream hardware is supported with many vendors to select from. When you do find missing hardware it's due to the point 2 below.

2) There may be some truth to the claim that Theo has pissed-off some vendors but it plays a small part. A more significant reason there aren't tons of corporate drivers for OpenBSD is the OpenBSD community won't accept any undocumented code (settings that use magic numbers), binary blobs (other than micro code or firmware) and won't sign NDAs to get the info. For code to go in the base it also has to be licensed under a BSD or ISC license.[1]

Many vendors want us to buy their hardware and trust their giant binary blob won't crash our systems. That's their call. Refusing to buy their hardware is ours.

Because of Theo's and the developer's stand against binary blobs OpenBSD base is one of the freest OSs you'll find. If that means a few missing drivers then so be it. Our systems run fine without them.

[1] The only GPL licensed code in base I can think of is gcc.

All I can promise is that we editors will continue to fight for user experience.

So you're going to block comments by userids above 1459? ;-)

we need to negotiate a license for Java under the terms we need.

I keep reading each side's position in terms of movie quotes:

1. You keep using that phrase. I do not think it means what you think it means.
2. Neh...gohtiate. No further questions your honor.
3. This is not the incriminating email you're looking for.
4. I'm sorry, Larry. I'm afraid I can't do that.
5. "Negotiate a license for Java"? What do you think he means by that?
6. Maybe it's a perk!
7. SQUIRREL!

I don't think you have to ruin the vehicle to accomplish the goal. In the article I linked above the Google car suffered little damage but it stayed at the location. Why? It's a hit and run otherwise.

I think it'll be pretty easy. The vehicle will have to stop if it detects a collision[1]. So the question is: after bumping the car from any side, how fast can determined thieves get to the GPS (or the communications device), disable it, hook up a tow truck and get away?

I'm betting faster than typical metro police can get to the last reported coordinates.

[1] Google's autonomous car rear-ended a car last year and stayed around for the accident. Apparently the accident was a result of "human error" but still, it stayed put.

They're going to mandate driver-less cars have unique, identifiable license plates? Sounds like a "Steal Me!" badge.

Remember the problem Florida had about 10 years ago where rental cars with clearly-identifiable stickers (Enterprise "E")? The cards were driven mostly by out-of-country tourists. They were being jacked because the bad guys knew they couldn't defend themselves.

Driver-less cars are chock-a-block with experimental technology, all wrapped-up inside of a $15k - $40k vehicle...with no one to defend them.

What could go wrong?

At least until they get lasers.

No one has tweeted to me that there was a speed trap around the bend.

True. But a lot of people coordinated #SOPA and #PIPA protests via Twitter. @jimmy_wales raised a lot of awareness about the issue with his tweets supporting the protest.

I'll take a speeding ticket any day of the week over SOPA, PIPA and the current outrage, ACTA.

When I studied for my driver's license in the UK I thought it humorous that several study courses recommended putting the handbrake on at stops to in part prevent the brake lights from dazzling the driver behind:

Using the footbrake is also antisocial and can be dangerous because brake lights can dazzle the driver behind, especially at night and in poor weather conditions. Smart Driving[1]

Apparently laser to the eye isn't as anti-social as leaving one's brake lights on at a stop at night.

[1] And that's not the only example.

I bought the Nook Color for the same reason. The Nook Color PDF reader is a very capable viewer. I didn't want the Nook version of Android so I bought one that was already rooted with CyanogenMod.

I'm mostly happy with it for reading PDFs. Like any tablet-sized reader you will have to pan. You can view the pages in portrait mode fully zoomed out but it's hard to read that way. I read in landscape and just pan the document a bit. I'm finding more authors are publishing to PDF using one column. In those cases it just work. Pinch-zooming works but the text rarely (if ever) re-flows the way web pages do in Chrome.

I don't like the Adobe file browser on Android, though. It adds every PDF on the SD card to the master list. It's a giant scrollable list with each folder path as a section separator. I would like the option to toggle between hierarchical folder view and list.

I tried using Calibre to convert some PDFs to ePub. Two-column PDFs have been a disaster. I rarely get anything that's usable. YMMV. I decided to stick with PDFs (or .ps files I convert to PDF).

Using Chrome to read web pages is mostly workable. Strangely, clicking an HTML file in the file manager doesn't launch the regular Chrome browser. Rather you get the "HTML Viewer". It's mostly Chrome but has no open dialog or access to bookmarks (AFAICT).

As an Android device it's quite functional. Most market applications install without a problem. The one I have problems with are those for which the Download button doesn't appear. I haven't chased the issue down yet. Not sure whether it's a Cyanogen issue.

Google Books works great but you have to have internet access to read the books. Just goes to prove Android is really designed to be an always-connected OS. FBReader, on the other hand, just works.

As you can tell, it's no iPad in terms of "It Just Works". In sum, as a PDF reader I'm mostly happy with it. All the other features are bonuses. The issues are mostly irrelevant.

Lastly, if you check E-Bay or B&N's website they sell refurbed Nook Color's for $199. For an extra $50 you can get the extended warranty (if you're into those). For the same $249 for a new one with 1-year warranty you get a unit with a 2-year warranty.