Not that we really need yet another spreadsheet program, but if IBM doesn't intend to use this code base anymore, how about releasing its source code to the public?

It would be interesting to find out how Syria is physically connected to the Internet, and who the operators on both sides actually are.

Unfortunately the Supreme Court refused to take up the absurd statutory award that was put forward in the Jamie Thomas case despite overturning the much (smaller proportionally speaking) Exxon Valdez award.

If the SCOTUS thinks that those absurd statutory awards are okay, what's the use of lower courts deciding otherwise, even if it is a whole string of cases? Couldn't the rights holders simply refer to the SCOTUS decision as overriding any kind of lower jurisprudence to enforce their claims and claim carte blanche to destroy peoples' lives with the help of the judicial system?

Now that would explain why Germans had this "cash for clunkers" program where they mandated that EVERY committed car had to be physically destroyed, instead of being shipped to Africa, where it could still have worked 20+ years. This has always struck me as incredibly selfish and petty, like some young child which would destroy its used toys rather than give them to other children.

Sorry "artists" but you don't deserve 10 million for your "creation". You deserve, at BEST, 200k a year for your work.

People rarely get what they deserve. They usually get that what the market gives them, and they deserve that which makes them useful to others. Say, a pop singer gets some millions selling his songs, while medics who save lives get far, far less than that. What said singer and those medics deserve though is something quite different... but that can't be determined by any kinds of objective criteria.

While I agree that LLVM and Clang are superior, technologically and developer community-wise speaking, having multiple C++ compilers can actually improve client code quality. Right now, most OSS developers are using some GCC-isms in their code, knowingly or unknowingly, and when confronted with compiling that code with Clang, they realize just how far they left the C++ standard. Keeping more than one compiler implementation around and using them concurrently is always a good thing, IMHO.

Not really a visual language, but basically, you can seamlessly define localized wrappers around every LISP function, macro, and special form to obtain a fully-localized programming language. And yes, kids can learn programming with LISP.

Content maximalists?

I'm sure the poster meant "copyright maximalist", a.k.a. "copyright taliban", "copyright extremist", etc...

Intelligence agencies are seeking intelligence for some reason, you know...

Is it a physical thing? Is it an immaterial form? Is it a sequence of bits?

Mathematically, an MP3 file is nothing more than a BIG number. Nothing more, nothing less.

The thing is, any modernized country in the world has the same access to this type of technology and could be proposing similarly oppressive actions ... and yet most of them are not.

Well... actually they are. There's a world wide push for real-time scanning and deep packet inspection. Blame 9/11 or nonchalance and an apathetic populace for it, but that's the way it is.

What are the alternatives for email services?

None, actually. If you need privacy, end-to-end encryption as in PGP is your only recourse... and it won't protect you against traffic analysis (they know with whom you communicate, when and how often, even if they can't decrypt). If you need something against traffic analysis as well, perhaps a an ip2p- or freenet-based darknet with enough family and friends as members would do? You can send e-mails on top of those networks just fine.

For those who object to this behaviour, write to congress.

Unless your letter contains a big monetary donation as well, it's likely to be /dev/null-ed, unread.

For a normal mail provider, sure, that's a good idea. For mail providers like Gmail that make money out of advertising, and thus (automatically) reading the mail of their users, it's not a viable alternative. Right now, Gmail tolerates the little group of users who use PGP/GnuPG, because that group is so small. But imagine that this groups grows above a certain threshold. What then?

A telecommuting, decentralized Congress would make life for all those "poor" lobbyists much more difficult. They'll have to travel to all kinds of weird States they never heard before to deliver their corruption^Wcampaign money to Congresspeople, instead of having them all in one nice place inside the Beltway. Won't anybody please think of the lobbyists?!