It's like they had to balance out the stupid lame, half-baked porn filter law they just announced with something that actually made a bit of sense. Although knowing our government as I do, I'll wait until I've seen the small print, before I assume that the headlines are actually in tune with the reality of the proposals.

Presumably Buffet is making the same assumptions as Murdoch did in putting The Times (UK) behind a paywall a couple of years ago, namely that a) a tiny number of paying subscribers brings in more money in fees than millions of freeloaders do in ad revenue, and b) hopefully many more major publications will follow suit sooner or later, thus making it harder for people to get quality content for free, and so increasing the chance that they'll decide to pay for their news. There is some evidence that paywalls work if done right, and are working for the New York Post, the evidence seems slightly more mixed for The Times, I guess we're a smaller market in the UK, so it will be harder to make it work here. Whether it will be true for the Washington Post remains to be seen, but it's not completely crazy.

Yes; organisations like Google are in the unenviable position of having to either a) devote a great deal of resources to looking into all these takedown requests to see if they are valid, or b) accept the takedown requests at face value, and wait to see if the person on the receiving end protest. Neither choice is good, but it might make a point to the studios if Google chose to take the latter course as far as these particular requests are concerned. And perhaps not be in too much of a hurry to restore the pages when the time comes either.

First paragraph of TFA says "We’ve written about the ridiculousness of automated Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) requests before, including Microsoft asking Google to censor BBC, CBS, CNN, Wikipedia, the US government, and even its own Bing links, but this latest episode takes the cake." That would seem to imply it's an automated process in play, although there really isn't much information in the article, and it could conceivably be read another way.

It's not so much PR as reality. Germany is one of the greenest countries in Europe, yet they're building new coal plants. Why? Because they're decommissioning old nuclear plants, and they have to replace them with some suitable base-load source. Since Fukushima, new nuclear plants are practically off the cards, so coal is about it. It's cheap, it's not nuclear, and we don't have to buy it from the Arabs; what's not to love?

Yes.

German coal power revival poses new emissions threat

"As much as I dislike Apple, kudos to them for admitting the new iTunes isn't ready and postponing the release rather than pushing out potentially buggy and incomplete software. Too many software companies will just shove whatever they have finished out the door, whether it works or not."

Like that company that pushed out iOS 6 with the Maps application that everyone was so impressed by? What were they called again?

I seem to be wrong, according to wikipedia, there was demo flight in May, my memory ain't what it used to be. I guess since that is classed as a test rather than a supply mission, hence the "first" in TFA.

No.

It's not a purple tint, it's a rose tint. Giving a rose-tinted view of everything is absolutely standard for Apple, although they seem to be taking it a bit literally this time.

You'd be amazed how clever some idiots are.

Well IBM are making a big push in Lithium air, there was an article about that here on /. a while back, but even they were only predicting products on the street between 2020-2030 (link), and probably a while more before they are price-competitive with existing tech. That's a couple of generations of cars at least, so yeah, hardly "around the corner".

"They already have. Most don't like the video, but also don't like the rioting. Problem is, how can they stop it? And how are they supposed to make a statement disowning them? "

Trouble is, there seem there don't seem to be enough of the non-crazy Muslims in some countries. When you have a government minister in Pakistan offering a $100000 bounty for the murder of a foreign civilian, and he's not instantly dismissed, you have a serious problem. He can do that because a large majority of the population back those views, and he knows it. In Pakistan, not so long ago considered an ally of the west, the crazy extremist types are very much in the ascendant, and a lot of Muslim countries seem to be heading that way. It's not just a small minority of crazies making a lot of noise, it's a large majority of them.

Yeah, I was with the summary right up until it proposed Windows 8's mixed-up hash of an attempt to bolt a tablet UI and a desktop UI together as a superior alternative.

This. I've never broken a phone, even though I've never used cases or screen protectors, so while I can't be bothered to work out exactly how much I might have saved by not insuring them over the years, I'm pretty sure that even if my luck changes for the worse, I'll have to write off a fair few before I come out negative