How can you be running a browser without something like NoScript these days? It's almost as bad as running a Windows machine without anti-virus software.

I tried Chrome for a while, but the "work around" for the lack of NoScript was just annoying. It certainly isn't as robust as I'm used to with NoScript. So I barely use it anymore. I wouldn't recommend it to anyone until a good NoScript solution gets worked into the system.

I agree with you completely. Let's take away the money from fines and donate it to the homeless shelters in the city (if you let the city have it it just becomes part of their budget and the incentives for how fines are generated don't change).

Now, how much of a tax increase can I put you down for? Police departments aren't cheap you know, and recently it's become a fact of life that money from fines has to replace money lost from income and property taxes. Especially with unemployment high and people losing their homes. So - a 5% increase in your city taxes? 3%? How much extra are you willing to pay to recover the budget money lost from losing those fines?

Although I completely agree from an ideological perspective that the whole thing is stupid, I'm also perfectly content to drive the speed limit religiously in areas that I either don't know well OR know to be speed traps/covered with cameras and let the fools who like to take chances make up for my tax money. I'd be willing to go along with a tax increase to cover my own ideological problems with the whole setup - I have no ideological problems with paying money for services, and a functional police department actually provides a valuable service to a community - but I doubt I could get my neighbors to go along with it. For some reason they hate taxes more than they like cops.

WTF?

I can't stand to listen to NPR either, but it's mostly because ever since sometime shortly after 2000 they became another branch of cheerleaders for the so-called "centrist" Democrats and the GOP who want to bend over every time Wall Street asks for something. They're like CNN, only slightly more pompous about it. They may be somewhat harsh on the neo-"Know Nothings" who have been trying to take over the GOP in recent years, but that doesn't mean that they're liberal.

If you seriously think that NPR is liberal you need to expand your horizons a bit. NPR is barely left of center, let alone liberal. The only brand of socialism NPR advocates these days is corporate socialism - bail out the banks and the big money guys on Wall Street and gut Social Security as much as you can to pay for it! That's been NPR's unofficial motto for years.

Except maybe Car Talk. Those guys are totally rampant Maoists.

What browser are you using?

I'm using Firefox 3.6.3 and it started very slow, but I reloaded the page and it was as fast as running it in flash native. So I think the issue might be un-related to the script itself and actually in the javascript implementation or maybe in the interaction of various plug-ins I'm using that required a reload to make it go away (after allowing it through temporarily for noscript).

Why should Adobe care? As far as their history goes, I think Adobe would love it if they didn't need to support a flash plug-in. They certainly don't seem to want to invest a lot of time/money into keeping it up-to-date.

Adobe makes their money on Flash development tools. They give the plug-ins away for free to sell more dev kits. I could see them kicking up a fuss over open source compilers, but not interpreters.

Not really. The GPL says you may place no restrictions on redistribution of source or binaries that have been licensed under the GPL. Apple places a restriction on redistribution of binaries - as in "you're not allowed to redistribute the binaries at all". Doesn't get more restricted than that. Therefore it's a violation of the GPL. It's pretty cut and dried, actually, and if the guy who ported the game had understood the GPL he would have realized it was a problem. A lot of people don't "get" the GPL and think it's just a source code license - it isn't. It covers far more than source.

The solution is either Apple opens up their walled garden for GPL programs and allows redistribution OR Apple doesn't distribute GPL programs in the first place. I can almost guarantee with 100% certainty that Apple will choose the latter, because the GPL subverts their business model. What's more, the GPL was designed to subvert business models like Apple's - anyone who's read the essays that RMS wrote when the GPL was first being floated around knows that he built it with the specific intent that software developed under the GPL can't be contained by a single company/entity and must always be freely distributable so that no single entity has control over the source OR the binaries. If you don't like it, the alternative is to not sell GPL software. Everyone's always free not to use GPL software after all.

Get yourself a lawyer. If you're running a business of almost any kind, you should have a good relationship with a lawyer. If you're running a software business it's even more important because software is a freaking minefield of legal actions these days and you need an expert to help you wade through the crap. Even if "conventional wisdom" tells you that you should be in the clear, you should have an expert examine their claims against you. You may actually not be in the clear despite what conventional wisdom and your review of layman websites suggests. Having a lawyer look over what your game does and what their claims against you are can protect you in a lot of ways. He'll be able to point out ways that you might be in violation and how you can fix it (for example if you're using their trademarked name "Tetris" in your advertising or your descriptions of the game, you may not be violating their trademark). And if you are in the clear he can craft a response to them bullet-pointing exactly why you're not in violation and why it isn't a problem. That way their lawyers know that you're serious about protecting yourself and that if they want to take it further you're going to be competently represented and that they're probably not going to have an actual case.

If you can't afford a lawyer, you may want to seriously reconsider your business model. Writing clones of games is a nice exercise for learning how to program, but if you're selling them you are definitely opening yourself up to the potential for legal action. Even if the legal action is frivolous, if you can't defend yourself it doesn't matter. That's not how it's supposed to work ideally, but it's a cold hard fact of life (at least in the US) that the business world is mostly a "might makes right" arena and "might" is measured in dollars. You could end up wasting a lot of time and money over something that isn't worth wasting the time and money on if you aren't careful.

I think this comment just made me feel old. Very, very old.

You think the backlash is going to cause Sony to not put the capability of using Linux on the next gen of Playstations?

News flash - once Sony decided to remove the option from devices that already had it installed, they committed themselves to not having Linux boot as an option on any of their future PS models. There's no way in hell you can use that as a marketing point when everyone knows that Sony can revoke it any time they feel like it and there's not a damn thing you as a customer can do about it.

If they'd just said "not supported on the new slim models" then the OtherOS option might have still shown up on the PS4. But by actively screwing with the models people had already purchased and removing the functionality, they pretty much ended any ability they have to market a PS* model as "capable of running Linux". Which means the whole point of offering it is killed dead - if you can't use it as a selling point for the device, what purpose does it have?

That's wasting money, and no self-respecting capitalist pig would let that happen!

I hope that you meant that as a joke because right now as we speak money is being wasted into the Gulf of Mexico at a rate that makes capitalist pigs the world over weep in pain. Short term profits will often trump long term gains, and if you're losing a few pennies off into space but it would cost you a few million to fix the system, the system isn't likely to get fixed outside of a government regulation requiring it. And then they start weighing how likely it is they'll get caught and what the size of the fine will be if they do...

What the hell are you talking about?

With used games the copyright holders already got paid - by the person who bought the game new. They played it, finished with it, and got rid of it. They no longer have the ability to use the game, so there's no "stealing" from the authors here - just a passing on of ownership from one person to the next.

To make the obligatory car analogy - this is like saying that a car dealer selling used Mustangs is taking money that rightfully belongs to Ford. Or that if I sell my TV on craigslist I'm stealing money that rightfully belongs to Magnavox. How is selling my copy of Mario Kart to Gamestop any different?

The linked article does use the title "Scroogle has been blocked" when, really, they haven't been blocked at all. They're free to change their code to work with the various other methods of accessing Google - like perhaps using the publicly available API that Google provides. Since I've never used the API I'm not sure exactly what technical limitations it imposes that make screen scraping a better alternative to the API for privacy concerns. Anyone have an idea why they would need to use a screen scraper to anonymize connections instead of using the API?

What's more, the link they were scraping off of [www.google.com/ie] seems to be related to Google's support of Internet Explorer. Since it's been replaced with a "go get IE 8" page, it's probably been dumped to encourage people to dump their older versions of IE and get something newer.

Whether or not this would be useful for spam, it would be more profitable for Twitter to be able to control it, rather than letting individuals force other people to follow them. This is clearly a bug - there's no financial benefit to Twitter with this and if it went on for too long they'd lose users (which is probably why they shut off the follower mechanism as soon as the bug was publicized).

Not to say Twitter couldn't introduce their own advertising scheme. Just that if they did they'd want it to be one they controlled - and took payments for - not one that random spammers could exploit for free.