It's a waste of time learning new ways to do things if the old ways actually work better and are more productive. I wouldn't mind going through a learning curve if there was actually a benefit at the end of it.

I have a licence, but it's expired. I could renew it by paying a fee. Does it count?

If you don't work, you don't get vacations :( Which has serious consequences, namely not having a valid poll option to select.

Yes, Linux would be fine for any number of users, many of whom need nothing more than a web browser. I suppose installing it would be too hard for most of them though (downloading an ISO, writing it to a USB stick and modifying a BIOS setting - tricky).

But if people insist that they need Windows, then they should accept the facts, and buy a new machine after Microsoft stops supporting their OS. Where do they get the idea that they can continue using a 10 year old operating system forever and expect a strongly profit-motivated company to help them for free?

Copyright claims on "Happy Birthday" are old news.

They just get the X years, you don't have to wait for the corporation to die.

I agree with your objections to the treaty, but I'm not sure that your point about prescription drugs is correct. See this.

Besides the obvious prior art, the patent also seems to be incomplete. I haven't read it in detail, but a quick scan suggests that they have patented the analysis of data using methods such as "heuristics analysis module 308" which are not further specified. Do they expect to have a patent for the very idea of heuristics analysis for the given application? I was always lead to believe that ideas aren't patentable, only specific inventions, so shouldn't they be describing exactly what this "heuristics analysis module 308" is doing? Shouldn't I have been given enough information to replicate the entire method, so that the public domain is actually enriched in some way once the patent expires? If I use my own "heuristics analysis module 310" instead, will I be fine?

There will be a lot of blowback from this device:

No worse than for a Taser, surely. Somehow they deal with these sorts of issues and carry on using them.

you're not understanding. The summary is wrong. Warner Brothers can send takedown notices at will. The only thing that's illegal is to claim you're a content owner when you're not.

The way I read the article, it would be illegal to send a takedown notice in the name of Warner brothers if you don't actually represent Warner Brothers. However if you do represent Warner Brothers, it's fine to send takedown notices about absolutely anything regardless of whether Warner Brothers holds the copyright.

Yes, exactly, the complexity of copyright laws in practice is overwhelming. I'd love to watch the MPAA try to teach kids how to determine whether a particular work is still in copyright or not in a random country in Europe. That would be a whole generation ready to abolish the madness.

Given the ridiculous corporatism, overbearing security measures, hostility to the Internet, doping scandals, and obsessive nationalism (which was of course built in from the beginning), it seems like it has already been dead for quite a while. They are now just going through the motions.

The SSL Observatory wouldn't notice a change in certificate if it was only targetted against certain individuals. The CA system is counterproductive if compromising a single CA is all that it takes to disable SSL against any chosen target.

So 1/10th of the numbers are valid, and there are 15 significant digits? Then there are 10^14 valid numbers and each number is 16 digits long ... that's going to be a pretty big Google docs spreadsheet.

Actually the main thing I use archive.org for is their archive of scanned books. It's incredibly useful. The only caveat is that I find searching their site using site:archive.org on Google tends to work better than the search feature on archive.org itself.