Absolutely right. It's been hilarious the last few days to see the UK press get themselves worked up because they might actually be forced to respect the law. What did they think they would get after the hacking scandal inquiry ? A "don't do it again" ? It's been clearly proven that they can't be trusted to regulate themselves.

This is a total non-story designed to scare the UK underclasses.

Not all Free software is open source and not all open source is free. It seems to me that your only concern is that the software is free; that's how you phrased it.

Yes, I think if your company uses open source software then you should try to give something back because you are a commercial user and you are no doubt saving a bundle of money.

"I am trying to set up a surveillance system ... from the fixed cameras around our facility"

I see, so when you say Open Source what you really mean is Free because this has nothing to do with using and contributing something back. Otherwise you would have said so.

For example, you could donate to the programmers who make the software that you decide to use. You could have an interesting custom requirement that you could make a module for and release as OSS. Or you could find and fix bugs or documentation for some existing package. Why don't you offer to do something like that in your question ?

I love this report about the article:

One user, Taylor Winkelmeyer, wrote: "I clicked on the link because I thought the warning was a joke. "I am furious I had to see something like this. Someone please tell me how to get it off my feed."

It's got to be fake, right ?

You know the one; just cut it out; I'm not going to tell you again.

Yeah, but he wasn't black he was Klingon.

It would be nice if finally they made a Star Trek that wasn't male dominated for a change. Or use all black actors to play the Klingons

Oh you mean like Lursa and B'Etor the Klingon sisters ?

How about Gowron ? The actor who played him, Robert O'Reilly is white; in fact all these actors are white.

The core of the summary is this:

Patent attorney Michael Bates of 1Place agreed that developers could use the patent system to ensure their inventions remained open source. “If a group of open source collaborators can secure a patent, it can choose to grant a royalty-free licence to the open source community to use it just as open source software is licensed,” Bates noted.

What a joke! Let me guess, Bates wants people to pay him to check patent applications for OSS. Prior art invalidates a patent. Simply publishing or releasing your software open source makes it prior art therefore preventing someone from claiming an "inventive step" - the usual requirement for a patent. Save your money.

You only created your account here on slashdot to write comments on this thread and all of them are excuses. Yes, replying directly after a troll post and addressing the subject of the troll *is* feeding the trolls. Have you ever heard of PR ? When someone says "All MacDonalds food is unhealthy" they (MacDonalds) don't immediately make a statement saying "Ignore that guy".

This girl is clearly an attention seeker. No one gets stalked for 10 years and not gather enough evidence to take some action.

While I think that Kickstarter could have handled it better; read the article on her website.

She got spam comments and she replied to them. She claims that she was being stalked and she recognised the stalker: why reply ? Just report them. You're not supposed to feed trolls.

It is clear the reason she got kicked off because she got interacted with the spammer and was part of the problem.

And WTF is a "transmedia artist" ? She uses various media, multimedia ?

People used to say the iPod would bomb, it's done well. People said the iPhone would bomb, it's done well. People used to say the iPad... well, you get the point.

No, not really.

When the iPod was launched mp3 players were already tiny and popular. The innovation was that iPod had a tiny hard drive (and it wasn't the first to do that). No one said iPod would bomb.

Then the iPod touch came out and everyone said what an awesome phone it could be; no one said the iPhone would bomb. In fact the hype was so strong at the time, Apple could have made almost any phone and it would have been popular.

Before the iPad came out, everyone said it would be awesome. Steve Jobs was the only one saying that they had tried large scale touch UI but it "didn't work".

If Apple is saying that the Galaxy Tab looks too similar to the iPad then they really should find some new designers because there is nothing visually innovative about the iPad since the iPod touch.

There's no point getting irate about freedom of speech. The whole point of domain names is to make money. The only reason .xxx was introduced was to "offer a new product", i.e. another TLD that could be subdivided and sold. Who would have thought it, people would pay money for the equivalent of a memorable telephone number.

Paul Mockapetris, inventor of DNS, said that "The DNS was built to be simple and predictable" so why is it handled by an organisational committee who make political decisions ? If it was only about ease of use then .xxx would have been decided years ago. And why do you have to pay more than a nominal admin fee to have your details entered into the DNS database ? It's all about money.

WP7 gives them a ready to go, high-end OS

By "ready to go" I take it you mean "economical in functionality but with glossy social networking stuff" and for "high-end" you mean "without multitasking" ?

What makes you think partnering with Microsoft will remove delays ? Are you thinking of another company named Microsoft ?

Think of the children - they might see a nipple and then they would have serious psychological issues. For life. Thanks for the link, tuomasb.

Now I feel like YouTube is evil. I hate advertising masquerading as normal content. It seems like YouTube is party to this; maybe this was their Faustian pact, put up with this crap or we'll sue you for every violation we ever find. People who *try* to make a "viral" video are the epitome of uncool. Especially the fake ones; cellphones cooking popcorn, etc etc. I thought marketing departments were supposed to "get" people. Overpaid idiots.