Actually (IIRC), the head of the MPAA thinks that making a backup copy of the DVD you purchased qualifies as fair use. It's the DMCA and the US Federal Government that considers it illegal. The Library of Congress is responsible as the legal authority of what is fair use, and I have yet to see them issue an exemption for making a personal backup. Rules on Blu-Ray are potentially different, as the CSS protection has been given exemptions that don't apply to other DRM. Rules on copying CD's are completely different, as it has no encryption to break before copying, and you are legally entitled to make a personal duplicate of any CD you own.

Reading the official Google Enterprise blog post linked to in the article that slashdot linked to "we’re extending support for Chrome on Windows XP, and will continue to provide regular updates and security patches until at least April 2015."

The official announcement is a minimum date for support, not a date where they plan on killing updates. Google isn't stupid. They make most of their money off of searches, so keeping a healthy ecosystem of usable web pages for everybody is in their best interest. A better web experience->more time online->more searches & visits to ad partners->more ad revenue for Google. A better web experience for more people was their primary reason for pushing Chrome into the market to begin with. I'm sure they would like to stop supporting XP at some point (e.g. Win2k isn't supported), but not if that would alienate too many people from having an up to date browser.

If there are enough computer users willing to buy antivirus for XP, then a company will be willing to sell it to them. Personally, I find antivirus to be too big of an intrusive hassle to deal with, eats too many resources, and does nothing against my primary thread of "potentially unwanted programs." Using Chrome, it has warnings for sites with malware and even once told me when I downloaded a virus. That's plenty for me. On rare occasion, I would like to be able to scan suspicious files on demand, but it's not worth the hassle of maintaining AVG or Avast for a year or two per scan (especially if Chrome did the last one for me). With so much of my computing in the cloud, it's much easier to just plan to reinstall everything when there is a problem or even partially automate regular reinstalls.

I'm pretty sure that the cars are constantly watching in front, back and both sides (too lazy to double check). They have been tested accident free (or at least fault free) in San Francisco, and successfully navigated Lombard Street. There is also driverless technology to allow them to see traffic (possibly just driverless traffic) around blind corners, obscured by buildings.

I cannot believe this one was neglected. Slashdot loses some nerd cred for me having to write in such a vote. Time traveling car is by far my #1 choice. I think self driving (also missing) would be number 2.

I suspect the overall use of office programs is declining, now that we have enough smartphones, tablets and laptops that are good enough to replace printed media much of the time. Such a change is bound to hit tech-savvy & price sensitive markets first. Why use excel when your analytic cloud crunches enough numbers to choke excel, while using live data or Google Docs could turn your spreadsheet into a simple web app? Why use MS Word, when you can either publish directly through WordPress or or through a web template system to deliver the document as a website? PowerPoint is losing some ground to niche presentation software, more novel presentation designs than the boring slide title with bullet points, and zany, Doc-Brown-like scientists who just draw their presentations on their hand (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wue2A4iMV5c -- well maybe 1 license tops).

The report would be more fair if it included some of the major web services replacing uses of office suites (e.g. WordPress, Wikis, custom web app, straight email without attached memo.doc, etc.) or at least presented some information on how much office suites are used.

It's a violation of the DMCA (therefore illegal) for me to even rip my encrypted DVD's to my hard drive, and as of a year or two ago, the Library of Congress had not officially declared this fair use. Thankfully, at least the MPAA does consider this fair use.

MySQL documentation is astoundingly better than Oracle (which actually has problems that could lead to data loss). Most top level Apache projects I've seen have better documentation as well. Also, I generally get better free support from free open source than I got from paid Oracle support.

I will admit that Oracle responses were usually more timely, but mostly useless. The times they were useful, it was an embarrassment to their product that I even needed support for the problem.

The US healthcare system is consistently ranked #1 in responsiveness to the needs and decisions of patients.

We don't score as well on overall health, life expectancy and infant mortality. I'm not sure why on infant mortality, other than seeing a report of very high mortality rate for the first day in the US. We don't score very well on price. I know policies can help, but what do you expect for the best care, other than the highest price? We also don't score well on fairness of pricing because we tend to charge people their actual costs, instead of making the rich pay the bills for those who are unemployed, living in their parent's basement, not even looking for work and divide their time among eating Taco Bell, playing World of Warcraft, and drinking themselves sick.

People often spout information like citing our healthcare as ranked #34, and we pay more than any other country, who all have socialized medical care. If you're just looking at medical care (not overall health), separately from pricing and payment models, then it's fair to say our healthcare is ranked #1, but we pay more than any other country and don't have socialized pricing. It's also fair to say our healthcare is ranked #34 because we pay more than any other country and don't have socialized pricing. The first statement is very misleading, and if you know the reason for the ranking, probably a lie (intentional deception, whether the statement is technically true or not).

In my opinion, avoiding socialism (government paid healthcare, high minimum wage, possibly others) has helped push the US to have the most productive workers (most hours worked and most work per hour). Norway (oil) and Luxembourg (banking) are the only economies with a higher per capita GDP (PPP).

According to the WHO, nobody else produces health care that is as good as the US in responding to the needs and decisions of patients. It's expensive to be #1.

Yeah, I only know of women having legally guaranteed rights to property and real estate as recently as the Code of Hammurabi in the 18th century BC. While the Code of Ur-Nammu (21st century BC) and the Code of Urukagina (ca 24th century BC) both give some property rights to women, I haven't seen any laws specifically giving them concrete, irrevocable ownership.

I know of a company that wrote a system that will run a visio flow chart back in the 90's, so they could run programs from managers "who didn't know how to program." It's probably still in use. My 6 year old is playing with logo on her birthday by moving some code blocks around. GUI based programming is useful because it brings programming to more people.

However, these people would never be able to write something as complex as Google's PageRank. People who can solve complex computing problems can probably type code into a good editor faster than they can manage a cumbersome GUI, especially as program complexity grows and requires you to navigate more code. In my opinion, the speed of keyboard input is a big part of what is keeping the terminal programs so popular in Linux, despite many years of decent or good file managers and other GUI's, so I doubt traditional program editing will go away either, since programmin is more open-ended, making a good GUI-only system more difficult.

The ToS state that they have the right to use this data to improve their services and the right to republish the data to promote their services. I cannot imagine this being outside the terms of service.

We are allowing people to sue because they don't like their contract on a free service.

The problem these companies are facing is that the laws and regulations are so complex that the government can tie any company up in red tape and choke them out of business, if they aren't friendly enough towards government spying. On top of that, failure to comply with the NSA can be considered treason.

To round things off, the government make Google face charges of violating wiretapping law and charges for people being too stupid to read their terms of service.

Facebook uses a NoSQL database (HBase) for their messaging system, and some related tech for data analysis (Hadoop). They also have custom photo serving software (haystack) for their photo storage. The main data (status updates, friends, likes, etc.) is in MySQL with memcache in front of it. There is also a cache layer (varnish) in front of the web servers. They said NoSQL isn't ready and point to the smaller messaging system needing more staff.

Does Oracle even sell support for custom forks of MySQL for Facebook to buy?