"Realistically this is the end of the line for the case."

SCO has not been realistic at any time during this case.

I join F-Secure in asking, "why the heck does Excel support embedded Flash"?

You forgot the other obligatory XKCD reference for this topic.

Even if the patent has expired, the code is presumably covered by copyright (which has a much longer term than a patent). You can use the underlying method described in the patent, but you'll have to write your own code implementing that methodology.

From reading the article it seems like everyone involved with this is a pretentious twit.

TFA talks about Alvaro's efforts to obtain information about U.S. access to his account data from the German Federal Commissioner for Data Protection and Freedom of Information (BFDI). From the article BDFI seems to be some Kafkaesque bureaucracy. He submitted the original request in October. After repeated requests for more and different personal information, the BDFI finally forwarded the request to the U.S. authorities at the beginning of this month. The hang up here does not seem to be on the American side.

It's not Congress opening up these records, it's the Library of Congress.

As someone who grew up in the southwest and spent a lot of my childhood hiking and camping, the best part about this game was the setting. The developers obviously made a huge effort to make each area of the game's world realistic. Each region has it's own flora, fauna, and geology, all drawn from real life. I can match every region up to part of Arizona, Utah or Colorado that looks just like it. Outstanding work!

The decision today doesn't have anything to do with the the fundamental ability of the government to indefinitely detain sex offenders after they've served their sentence. The court decided that back in 1997 in Kansas v. Hendricks. Todays decision was just about whether the federal government has such power. This is a federalism case, not an individual rights case.

So, Monty uses dual licensing to turn his open source software into a profitable company, sells that company for a billion dollars, and now he's suddenly concerned with freedom. Oracle buying MySQL may be bad, but I don't think Monty has much credibility in opposing it.

"I've generally tried to keep a low profile online and until recently there's been very little information about me available from the major search engines."

This is your problem. If the only thing about you on the web is this report from fifteen years ago, that's the only thing prospective employers are going to find on Google. Start a blog, use your real name in discussion groups, write letters to the editor, start a StackOverflow account under your own name (this is my highest ranking Google hit). You've got to put good stuff about you on the web if you want to drown out the bad stuff.

Actually, all the content on StackOverflow is licensed under the Creative Commons CC-Wiki license. They make monthly dumps of the entire question and answer database available. If SO ever folds, it would be quite easy to use the data dump to put up a new site with all the accumulated knowledge

StackOverflow has been running for over a year, long before Jeff and Joel thought about selling hosted version. StackExchange is basically a way to shut up everyone who kept asking for a "Stack Overflow on Topic X".

'Google employees can read your stuff'

Even if these clients are currently running their own e-mail server, employees at the local ISP could use DPI to read their stuff. Anything you send on the internet that isn't encrypted can be read by lots of different people at lots of different points. Unless the clients are currently encrypting their e-mails, I don't see any privacy reason not to use gmail.