The latest is that The Age has prevented the police from taking the computers through legal injunction. Nice to see that occasionally this kind of madness can be stopped sometimes.

Err, that's specifically what this is designed to solve. If you can show that prior art existed in public before the patent was filed, the patent is void. End of story.

Whereas currently, you have to prove that the patent troll didn't invent the item before the prior art existed. So you've got to go into this complicated discovery process to prove things one way or another. The first-to-file system solves a lot of the he-said she-said nature of current lawsuits as everything relevant is on the public record, simplifying them significantly.

Precisely. The advantage that Android retains over developing for iOS devices, though, is that if Amazon shoot down your application on whatever grounds (such as what happens with Apple), you can always be sure that you'll be able to find another app store to publish through.

What I think that we'll see is 'tiered' app stores - Amazon and perhaps a couple of other companies will run the top tiered app stores where everything is carefully checked and things like pornography is not allowed; then Google and a couple of other companies will run mid-tier app stores which allow pornography and run a relatively small amount of malware-checking; and then there'll be bottom-tier app stores which sell whatever to whoever, including completely illegal software. At least this means that developers won't be completely left out in the cold, although obviously the higher-tier store, the better for most things.

There's no doubt that Bin Laden is a fervent Islamist fundamentalist. Without doubt, he will not be satisfied with anything less than the subjugation and conversion of the entire world to Islam. The real question, though, is how does he continue to attract so many followers and so much support? The vast majority of people, no matter their religion, are perfectly happy spending their life living as best they can (being the "sheeple" that some around here seem to detest so much) - they wouldn't have anything to do with such dangerous ideology if there wasn't something driving them to do it. The way that those who want peace can win is by leaving fanatics left all alone.

As opposed to letting everyone starve? That's even eviler.

There is no such thing as free will in the first place.

*cough*
If there's no such thing as free will, there's no such thing as evil. Just saying.

I'd beg to differ, to be honest. Voting for your representative rather than your party sounds nice, and in fact before the previous election I supported the idea. Unfortunately, having that situation turn into a reality (3 independents now hold the balance of power here in Australia) has shown what that leads to: pork and unreliable ability to deliver the policies that the party was elected on. I hear a lot of Americans complain about the incompetence of their government; have you ever considered that perhaps it's because of the every-man-for-himself style of legislative body you have? Where every representative has to spend all of their time trying to wrangle things for their seats, as otherwise their seats would get nothing? What if all money spent in a state was purely on the basis of nation-wide policy, rather than individual bits of cash added into legislation purely to benefit the representative's chances of being voted back in? Maybe you wouldn't have so much ineffectiveness in your government

I'm not saying that our system doesn't have problems - far from it, and in many ways the US does it better. But I think that legislating for a whole nation rather than just bits of is a much better fit for a federal legislative body.

If you bother to RTFS, you'll note that they worked with the content providers - they shut the servers down themselves. No hacking involved.

Hey, that would have been a really good reason to do it. Unfortunately, the real reason was just to tie the lesson into an upcoming movie about Australia being invaded. She was just teaching the kids how to mount a resistance! :P