Note that the customers are not still paying - assuming TiVo isn't lying anyhow. They say customers have not been billed since November and that service until June 2011 will be free. For a device last sold in 2002, that doesn't sound unreasonable. Sure it's annoying, and the hassle and price-bump may cost em goodwill, but it's hardly an extreme step.

Not that it's likely, but it's possible natural-gas -> electricity -> heat-for-cooking is more efficient than natural gas -> heat-for-cooking. Firstly, the loss due to transport is different (possibly greater), and secondly, kitchen stoves may not be as efficient as the huge power station at collecting the heat from the gas's combustion.

An old dishwasher I had passed 5kW while heating - perhaps intentionally, perhaps due to age+corrosion. Lights would dim when it was on, and turning other things on was generally unwise. I'm not sure whether the power use or the fact that it *didn't* blow the fuse was more disturbing. What do you mean, fire safety?

Well, let's be honest: whatever authorization google grants or doesn't grant is irrelevant: they don't own the data (fortunately!) - which is merely keywords. Even if they did "own" a keyword by virtue of having trademarked it, that only grants limited rights (again, fortunately!) - you can't prevent others from merely mentioning or linking to your trademarked name in general - essentially as long as you're not misrepresenting it.

Users - namely google employees - apparently agreed by means of an absurd EULA (don't we love em) to send click-stream data, and Bing is merely correlating that "freely" given data.

Now, whether an EULA should suffice to permit scraping this invasive (not just the link, but form fields or text elsewhere on the page) is kinda dubious, but heck, companies have long required you to sell your soul as prerequisite to using their software, and claimed that usage means agreement.

They aren't "merely" honoring a take-down request; they're the designers, builders and distributors of a software system that's antithetical to free software; in which users no longer have the right to modify or redistribute software regardless of who wrote it.

The app store is most certainly not GPLv2 friendly.

The point is to just Say No to vendor lock-in; to the benefit of users and small software firms around the world. It's rather noble of him to take this stand despite the unfair vilification he gets for it, don't you think?

The dev asked for the app to be removed because Apple was violating its license term. Apple does not have a license to distribute VLC while imposing additional restrictions beyond those of the GPL, but chose to violate that license.

The fact that Apple claims they don't verify licenses does not make them less legally bound to oblige by them; and in this case the license wasn't a secret, so they can't claim the intermediate distributor (Applidium) misled them either: they willfully (by manually approving distribution) infringed on this dev's license. Of course, they're chosing to ignore licensing issues in their approval process, so it's hard to claim any kind of malice: they just happen to be wrong, that's all.

It is indeed their fault and responsibility - no one elses; not Applidium (who is not violating the license) nor VLC (who isn't party to Apple's app-store in the first place): just Apple.

In common sense terms, Apple is restricting modification and redistribution. After all, you cannot actually run let alone redistribute a modified app without Apple's say-so. Were Apple merely the app-store provider - that is, just one-of-many distributors - this wouldn't be an issue, but with iOS devices, they are the only distributor.

Now, it's fine that some free-software apps don't mind this additional restriction and choose not to take action - but Apple, even as a third party distributor, is violating the GPL by imposing additional restriction on the license.

The GPL is not about zero-cost distribution, the GPL is about the right for downstream users to modify the program. Apple very intentionally disables this; their app-store is the very antithesis of free software: a world in which you cannot run any program without Apple's stamp of approval.

The fact that apple says "we don't verify the license" doesn't mean that's suddenly OK or the law or whatever. It's not as is Applidium lied about the license, so Apple can't claim to be innocent of the issue - they just choose to ignore it; that's their responsibility, even if they don't want it.