Valve are going to be pushing a lot of these changes in the coming months because they can. Now they have L4D2 working on Linux, making the other Source engine based games Linux-compatible is likely only going to be a case of changing a few variables and hitting the magical Build button. And why wouldn't they push everything they could and sell a load more Orange Box bundles?

Anyway, my point is as Linux users we shouldn't wet ourselves every time we grep the latest binaries for instances of "linux" and find something new. It's happening.

I'm certainly no Apple fan and this might be deliberate by way of judicial finding but Samsung definitely has the better deal coming out of this spate of bans:

  - Samsung has their old-generation stuff banned from sale.
  - Apple has their current-generation stuff banned.

To me it seems like Apple are the only people walking away from this with a ban that means anything.

... They'll pass on super-powers!

But seriously, who thought that leaving something like fathering a child would lead to fewer or the same number of mutations? Everybody who's everybody knows age and telomere shortening leads to a higher rate of mutation... That's why if we didn't otherwise get killed, wear out or otherwise malfunction, we'd eventually die from all the cancer.

That's certainly an idea but consider it from the website owner's point of view. They're already making their website less competitive (globally) with annoying pop-over nonsense. Some websites actually don't work until you've explicitly agreed to have cookies (a poor interpretation of the law, IMO).

What do you think a user is going to do if they have to sit through a five minute, hell, even a 30 second political complaint before they can even use the site? Well, if that site, like many sites, has a billion competitors - the user can go back and click the next site on the Google listings. That's what I do when a site isn't doing what I explicitly asked for, or doesn't load fast enough.

No, most websites in the EU are doing as little as possible to draw clients attention away from the product; inferring "implied consent" with a cookies link somewhere on the page is a common design metaphor, maybe a position:fixed link-image in a corner. Otherwise it's business as usual, thankyouverymuch.

What surprises me most about this story is that there are actually complaints in the first place for the ICO to investigate. Why don't people have better things to do with their time?

Completely agree but to extend this, you have to make it available to everybody, at the same time, at the same price, anywhere in the world.

A lot of piracy stems from people not waiting to wait days while US fans are backflipping in ecstasy about the latest episode. Or they just can't get it. Personally, I'd have to subscribe to Sky and then Sky Atlantic and then buy the HD upgrade. All so I can receive 900 channels I don't give a flying toss about and one where there's 10 hours a year worth of programming I'd like to pay for. I'd be paying £360 a year, just for a season of GoT. Something isn't right with that.

If you ignore the problem and stagger international releases (or don't provide them), people are going to turn to what's easiest: torrents. The faster media companies recognise that the internet, its netziens and their commercial demands are all international, the quicker they'll make a superbuttshitload of money.

$1 for mobile/SD. $1.50 for 720p. $2 for 1080p. Even if you say only 50% buy a copy, that's still tens of millions of dollars you wouldn't neccessarily be getting otherwise.

As much as I hate to say it (as a N900 pre-orderer), the N900 is dead. The community is split between fourteen different forks and forks of forks and most of its users seem to have moved on to more popular devices (Android and iOS - I doubt too many bought another Nokia/WP7 after what Nokia did with the N900).

Anyway all these together make for a rather unwelcoming development platform. You can't blame people for dropping it.

No.

Probably could play it over Onlive (et al).

Well, quite. International companies use exchange rates changes as an excuse to slowly edge the price up across the board.

And just to echo some of the other /.ers - I really do hope UK companies give Ubuntu (et al) a decent evaluation before they make any licensing decisions.

Just a note on the final dig about drivers: when HL2 first came out, there were plenty of video driver issues on Windows. It's not a phenomenon isolated to Linux.

But yes, distros need to start turning on S3TC support for the Intel drivers. It can be done with PPAs or manually building the driver but it's such a pain in the bum for something that should "just work".

You're not even talking about the same event! Ian Tomlinson died two years before the 2011 London riots at an EU Summit protest. The police there messed up. Way too much violence. The officer who contributed to his heath is facing manslaughter charges (goes to court in June) and the entire method of protest management (kettling, here) has been given serious scrutiny.

But what does this have to do with what we're talking about? Please try to stay on topic!

The London riots example is not great here. There was a relatively small protest followed by a shower of complete asshats (with no political agenda on show) essentially just trying to burn down London, and steal whatever they could. These morons *were* using social networking sites to organise that violence and that's what the police wanted to stem. That's how a lot of them have been prosecuted for it.

A good government can't always approach things from a freedom standpoint. They are there to maintain a peace and quality of life for people. They have to balance freedom against the ability for people to break the law (yes, inciting violence, conspiracy, etc are all against the law here) and during the riots thousands of people were being put in direct danger from these twatscroungers' want of anarchy. Stopping their ability to do that may have limited the damage.

Naturally I'm completely against trying to stop people protesting or organising their peaceful protests online but I don't think it's as black and white as you're making out. I think there might be plausible situations where certain blackouts might be the better evil.

However, copyright infringement is not one of those situations.

You need legal advice. Talk to a lawyer.

But to try and stop this you could hamper your terms and conditions so that it has certain immutable clauses. Most services' T&Cs have a ambiguous little clause in them that essentially allows the owner to change any clause in the document without notification or permission. If you excluded certain clauses from this the people who bought the service from you would still have to follow those terms for them to be binding. That is to say they'd either not change them or if they did, they'd have to get people to re-agree to the new terms (allowing them to jump ship).

When you're selling the service, you're as much selling the userbase as the service itself. A user in sale terms is essentially this agreement with the user so that's why the terms matter so much. Much, much more than a promise between you and the buyer, pointedly because your users can see it! If they care, they'll be thankful for you taking this step.

Oh and you'll want to take into account how prospective buyers are going to view this hand-tying. It may lower the saleability of your product.

Polo drivers don't care about 0-60. If they did they'd buy a Golf.

You'd think database experts would know how to keep their site up, wouldn't you?

Sorry that's unfair. The site is still up but I can make and eat a sandwich between pageloads.