Really, any manufacturer who implements that should be liable for the time wasted for people trying to get real work done with their 3D printer.

You are making a mistake in assuming the Australian culture is the same as US culture. It's one our own commentators have actually started doing too.

Australia has never had the same views on freedom and rights that the US has. It has always been understood that there is a compromise between personal freedoms and state control. An example of this is that we don't have a Bill or Rights, we don't have a Freedom of Expression, in fact there are no "rights" in our federal law at all. (We are a signatory to the UN human rights convention and one of the territories has rights legistlation which complicates things a little, but in general when an Australian mentions their rights they have no idea what they are talking about).

So this isn't a recent tyrannical takeover and raising guns as an issue is completely irrelevant. Hell, we started has a prison colony where everyone had to obey orders and there has never ever been a serious movement of Australians employing violence against their own government. What we have is a misstep by a government regulator that has very little idea what it's doing. The IT press are whipping up the rage to try and ensure that this is an election issue, for at least a day or two. The major parties will probably move strongly to avoid it becoming a problem for them and the regulator will be put back in it's box for a few years.

Mounting things to light poles is 10,000 times more practical.

For years, we have had a cut-out in ITAR 121 that applies to Open Source, it is due to a lawsuit that Phil Karn brought against the Federal Government. Thus, you can implement with impunity, and export to anywhere, as long as it's Open Source.

Rather than an encryption gateway, having your email client handle encryption avoids the problem of man-in-the-middle attacks between the gateway and the client.

I don't have much reason to encrypt, but Thunderbird has my certificate installed and does my digital signing. This is not unusual for a modern email client.

It's pretty nasty when a company 'giving away razors to sell blades' starts trying to make money off of the razors too. The Kindle was originally Amazon's way to jump-start their ebook and streaming services. Now they want to be a tablet player too. Greedy.

Yes, the German one looks a lot more impressive, with a real person in it (piloting using the remote control) rather than a mannequin.

When you win a copyright case you may be awarded your attorneys fees. I can't wait to see YouTube's attorneys fee motion. It's going to make my firm's bills seem like chicken feed.

But the defendant's lawyers have done a great job of beating back the Evil Empire, and in so doing have accomplished an important victory for the vitality of the internet.

Yeah.

And trying to 'maximize' the 'minimal' legal authority that exists to support their positions.

And trying to maximize their eroding monopolies.

Actually, you're 100% right. I think I was trying to decide between the phrase "content cartel" and "copyright maximalists", so my aging brain settled on "content maximalists". Would you change that to "copyright maximalists" for me, please :)

It means the big old school content "gatekeeper" companies, and their trade groups like the MPAA, RIAA, ASCAP, etc., whose economic power is being eroded by digitalization and the internet, and who are fighting back by taking extremist positions in defense of their copyright ownership.

Oops, I forgot to put "(PDF)" after the link to the Judge's 24 page decision, which is indeed a PDF file. I always like to give that heads-up, but forgot to this time.

I had a customer who thought I was crazy for suggesting that all they really needed was chroot for their particular task. In the face of VMs people don't realize that simplicity often works better.

Xen's biggest obstacle right now is KVM. I am no VM expert, but I've been impressed with how well KVM runs, supporting non-VM-aware versions of Microsoft Windows among other things. It's really fun to put that Windows screen on the face of someone's iPad and watch them freak out when they see it's not a screenshot, somehow their iPad got Windows 7 installed on it!