Agreed. I'm British, and was watching the debates in 2008 (I didn't in 2012, too busy at work). McCain seemed entirely reasonable before and after the election, but during it, he was insane, presumably in an attempt to win the Republican vote. At the moment, I'm not convinced it's possible to win the Republican primary and also win the election. Perhaps that will change over the next few years.

Hopefully the rules will require them to be no louder both in terms of peak level, and in terms of root-mean-square. That shuts down most of the potential abuses.

The reasoning behind the vote is to help them determine who should win their competition for a new logo. You can't announce a competition, and then decide that the old logo was best and nobody should win; that'd be pretty deceitful, and probably also illegal.

No, the problem is that if other people are selling, your optimal way to make money is to sell first but slightly before they do.

The real problem with the markets is that the way you make money on them is to do the same as everyone else, just faster

The actual reason is so that specific versions of Ubuntu are easy to search for; it's using much the same principle as the googlewhack. Completely invented words would be better for that, but words that are merely rarely used work well enough in combination with the rest of the search term. You can search for version numbers, but it's often confused by other numbers that happen randomly on the page.

It's almost certainly someone trolling. If Slashdot's corporate owners were genuinely trying to censor it, either they'd make the message that a post had been censored impossible to fake, or they'd simply delete the posts and hide the fact that there'd been something there, or they'd just give themselves infinite modding ability and mod it down to -1 so hardly anyone saw it. There'd be no point in making the message fakable.

Microsoft owns the font, IIRC, but they've distributed Linux and Mac versions of it in the past, under free-as-in-beer licenses, and it's pretty easy to get a copy of it if you want to as a result, because the licenses don't expire. (It's even in the non-free repositories of several Linux distros; Ubuntu calls it ttf-mscorefonts-installer, for instance. As well as Arial, you get Times New Roman, Courier New, Verdana, Georgia, Trebuchet, Andale Mono, and even Webdings and Comic Sans.)

This sort of thing happens quite a lot in the UK, it's one of the more common outcomes to civil libel cases in my experience. (I heard of something like this happening to someone locally, who made a statement that was found to be libellous, and was forced to take out advertisements to retract it.) The judge actually discussed "publicity orders" in the ruling, and pointed out that the laws in question expressly suggested them as part of the typical punishment when there had been infringement (although not the opposite situation, for when there hadn't been, and the judge spends quite some time talking about that as a result).

Compulsory advertisements are also quite common more generally in the UK (although more usually they aren't forced by a court order, but rather part of seeking permission to do something; it's quite common for people who want to build a new building to advertise the fact beforehand, for instance, as part of seeking planning permission, so that people have a chance to object). It's even reached the points where many major papers have a dedicated section for legal notices, although the court-ordered version has to be rather more prominent.

Oh, and apparently the judge owns an iPad, although he said that it was irrelevant because he was comparing the Galaxy Tab to Apple's design registrations, rather than to the product Apple actually put on sale. So unless he dislikes the way it works or something, I doubt he has a particular hatred of Apple.

I just came here after finishing reading the ruling itself, [2012] EWCA Civ 1339. I find UK legalese rather easier to read than US legalese (not being a lawyer), and it's interestingly informal in some parts. It's also quite informative (the judges pointed out specifically which differences they found to be relevant, such as the iPad's registered design being intentionally symmetrical, and the Galaxy Tab having an obvious intended orientation due to the addition of the word "SAMSUNG").

Unity Dash is what Unity (Ubuntu's default window manager) uses as a start menu substitute/replacement: it's basically a set of specialised search engines (one for applications, one for files, one for videos, etc.). They search within your computer, but also into repositories (so you can search for a program you don't have installed and will be given the option to install it. The individual search engines are referred to as lenses and scopes; there's some sort of technical difference that most people don't care about.

The controversy is about the addition of a new search engine to the Unity Dash that searches Amazon (and, by implication, sends Amazon your search terms). Part of the issue is that the default lens/scope, "Home", just aggregates the results from all the others, so if you're trying to start a program, or open a file with a particular name, Amazon will indirectly learn the fact that you're doing that. Now, they might not care, but presumably they record the data, and the issue is that they might either do something with it themselves, sell it to someone else, or provide it to governments on request.

You can easily work around this simply by uninstalling the Amazon lens/scope; part of the argument is centered around the fact (and the fact that it's installed by default, so this is an opt-out not an opt-in).

It depends on how you do it. The UK banned smoking in most public places and advertising cigarettes, and it hasn't increased the number of smokers at all. (Partly it's because you can get and use cigarettes entirely legally, so it hasn't created a black market.)

Perhaps not, due to the existence of "respawning" in such games (basically, automatically resurrecting a short time after death, typically at a penalty that's significant but not crippling). The virtual pandemic can sustain itself effectively infinitely, as people respawning can catch the corruption again. On the other hand, if everyone is killed instantly as a one-off event, they'll all respawn again some time later; inconvenient but hardly game-ruining. (The problem is more if people do it over and over again.)

Interestingly, one possible cure for a widespread pandemic in an MMO would be the simultaneous death (and subsequent respawn) of everyone involved.

Switzerland is a direct democracy, which may have something to do with it. (Although it has a reasonably normal sort of democratic government, laws can also be passed via a petition followed by a referendum.)

I thought that it was much more common for people to go after uploaders than downloaders (including people uploading as part of a torrent, rather than leaching), because it was much clearer that copyright infringement was happening on uploads. For a download, you have the issue of when the copy was created and who did it.

You probably want to use DejaVu Sans Mono instead. It's basically the same font (and was based on it), but has much better Unicode support.