There actually IS a penalty for knowingly making false claims, its a federal crime. But its one of those "must fight in court, full of loopholes" crimes that's not meant for Fox and friends, its meant for "ordinary people". You know, people. Not... The People.

From looking at the spec, all it appears to be doing is creating a protocol for the negotiation of third party platform specific DRM plugins. So basically, platform specific third party browser plugins, but now in the standard for some reason. Why is this necessary? It doesn't make it so that the plugins are platform agnostic or open, it just makes it so that the protocol to load and activate platform SPECIFIC, purpose SPECIFIC, binary plugins are part of the standard now... for some reason. This just makes it more complicated and doesn't actually have any upside! These closed, binary DRM plugins will still need to be installed, just like flash or silverlight is, and they'll still only be on the platforms that the movie industry considers trustworthy, nothing will have changed except now we have a more complicated spec to follow in order to make a "compliant" browser.

Atari has filed for bankruptcy several times now. Each an every time, someone buys the name and some IP, then they go bankrupt soon after. It's a curse!

On the business software side, there's also well known applications like Autodesk Maya (2011 and above, they switched TO qt recently!), and also the Perforce client (P4V). I'm seeing more and more of it in the internals of "big" apps like that, even if the user is unaware. I have a feeling its partly because of the LGPL side of things opening up more than anything. Although I'm pretty sure autodesk licensed it commercially.

QT is about the best "native SDK" I've seen out there. In the company I work at, we dev our internal tools in Qt, and at home my hobby projects are in Qt also. They run on mac, linux, and windows. Other projects that run on Qt include Maya (Autodesk), they recently swapped over to using 4.7.1. Knowing autodesk, in only a couple decades they'll switch to Qt5!

Because every time I see someone abbreviate "Function" as "Fn" I read it as "effing"

Yeah, this is a way to 'legally' do it but the BSA is more of a racket than that. You see, they don't just apply legal pressure. Their contracts make others in the same alliance refuse to deal with those that won't work with the BSA. So for example, Microsoft / Sony / etc will stop validating your hardware or software and Apple will blacklist your keys and so on. If the BSA was standing only on legal footing that would be one thing but right now these large corps are using it as leverage to get smaller ones who depend on them to play ball.

You're incorrect here. The EULA on all these games indicate that what you bought was a hunk of plastic, and you can do what you want with that (including melt it down), but the data that happens to be on it does not belong to you. You've merely been given a revocable license to copy it into ram in order to play it. It sounds unbelievable, I know, but read the small print. This is where we're at in the legal side of games now.

I'm guessing most of it is astroturfing. They are up against folks with a lot of money who find their image to be important, after all.

Getting really tired of hearing this. Nothing is finely tuned for life. As far as we know, it takes certain conditions for very complex life to form, but that simply means that complex life will only form in those conditions, and here we are. If there were no regions in this universe with the right conditions for complex life we would not be here.

Its okay. If that happens I'll switch away from them too. It hasn't happened yet, so I'll stick where I am.

I used Ubuntu for about a year and a half. When unity came out, I gave it a try, quit using Ubuntu entirely because of it. Now I use windows and kind of dislike it but whatever. At least everything worked for me without having to tweak anything. I do miss several really nice features, though. But not enough to want to return. Ubuntu had a decent mix of ease-of-maintenance and ease-of-use, and then they ditched the ease of use and added an app store.

Your rights are only worth anything if you have the means to actually defend them. In legal theory this is not the case, your rights are supposed to be intrinsic. But in actual reality, this is exactly the case, since money and power can exert pressure and pressure can remove your ability to fight back or (more likely) make the expenditure involved more than you are willing to expend. So yes, the right to fair use no longer exists practically. Your rights can be overridden by funding. You can be shut up by enough money.

They're not challenging consoles. They're becoming consoles. Locked-down hardware, closed internals, gatekeeper needing to sign software, set-top equipment... that's a console. Its not LIKE a console, it IS one.

me