His problems really started after he took the steam tray.

Did the owner of the domain with your name buy it only because your name gave it value? If not, your case and this one are completely different. Fame doesn't have anything to do with it beyond that famous names are likely to be worth pulling this scam. Look at the rules here. This case sure looks like this one to me:

I can't believe how many people here have suddenly taken the side of someone I consider a domain squatter. Registering the name of a famous purpose for the primary purpose of holding it hostage is a douchebag move. In this case the ronpaul.com site did just enough work that it doesn't fall into the "primarily for the purpose" category here. I can't blame Paul for accusing them of violating the rules though. They certainly did not follow the spirit of the domain registration rules, even though a strict reading leaves them clean.

But if you're Ron Paul, you already have a giant mailing list of supporters. It could easily be the case that the ronpaul.com mailing list doesn't have anyone who isn't already known to the campaign.

Ah ha...I see you aren't familiar with SAP then. Their IT based cash cow pulls in $20 billion a year.

MariaDB is taking the MySQL code via the GPL and then building on top of it with new code. Those changes are all having their copyright assigned to MariaDB, and in some cases the GPL will also require a public release. Eventually MariaDB is expected to have a non-trivial set of improvements, and the copyright ownership of all the new code will be to MariaDB. That allows selling the combination of GPL core plus some explicitly owned private code, the exact same way MySQL was sold to Sun.

This is the same scam that let Monty cash out once already, using the work of open source contributors who assigned their copyright to his original company. No reason he can't do it again, if people are gullible enough to fall for it twice.

Concerns about MariaDB's long-term plans are appropriate too. Monty has setup his new company with contributor copyright assignment such that he can sell it off again, the same way he did with MySQL. If you actually taste the FUD here, you should be migrating away from both of these uncertain projects, not deciding which of them to use.

If you're developing kernel components, having a kernel that crashes cleanly can make development much easier. Being able to shut down your buggy kernel level program and then try again sure beats rebooting after a panic. Even though this isn't directly helpful to users of the system, making the test side of development easier can lead to the program evolving more quickly over time. The Hurd design has been filled with taking the side of various trade-offs that take longer, but are believed to be more powerful in the end.

It takes a while when you have to fetch web pages from other sites by sending mail to a program that fetches them, much like wget, and then mails them back so you can then look at them using a local web browser. (Seriously!)

And Google+ is second to no one when it comes to counting incidental users as active ones! I have an "active" Google+ account attached to my work e-mail address now, because someone I do work with invited me to a Hangout once. People can't stay on the edge of Google's infrastructure for very long now before being likely to have a + account.

Still a better love story than Twi...actually, that's almost the same story.

Edison's electrified furniture was so good, it could handle an elephant!

Your incoming mail can easily be unencrypted for some number of hops between the sender and your ISP. There aren't that many SMTP systems that support transport encryption still. And I would wager the odds someone sending this sort of message is sending is originating via an unencrypted channel is even lower than average.

Rolling Stone's Matt Taibbi recently apologized to conspiracy theorists after realizing they were right all along about the financial side of things.

The VIC-20 was named for its VIC display chip. It uses character definitions instead of bits, which means code for it is unique to running on VIC-based systems. There's a completely different video chip in the C64, they're not at all alike.

The VIC20 doesn't have a bitmapped display mode. To show graphics you have to redefine the character set. The usual solution to that limitation was to throw RAM at the problem of holding the character definitions. I suspect it will be a lot more complicated than the C64 for the sort of code you're running.