Agreed. In my office we've standardized on OpenOffice (or LibreOffice). We write reports, produce spreadsheets and give presentations without problem. The only time I ever need access to MS Office is when somebody sends me an Office document that for whatever reason doesn't render correctly. It's not because the information isn't available. It's always a disagreement between the two programs as to how to render. OO and LO interchange nicely. The Apple iWork suite works as well. In my experience Office is the odd-man out.

At this stage of the game Office productivity is mostly a solved problem. The feature set is known. Now we're dickering over file formats and presentation.

The summary also notes this is savings to the end user. If I don't need all the features found in MS Office I shouldn't need to buy it. If I get what I need and pay $0 I've saved $150.

That's the whole point of the summary. Some segment of the public are getting what they need to get their "office productivity" tasks done for less cost.

Lots of people are noting that we sign these contracts willingly and that the phone is discounted because of the two-year contracts we sign. Many are overlooking two key facts:

1) There's a huge cancellation fee that makes up for the discount on the phone. ATT is up to $350 for cancelling a smartphone contract.

2) Wireless markets are constrained by government-granted monopolies. Monopolist have huge amounts of leverage on their side. Yes, you can buy the phone without a contract...and pay a huge margin on it. You're ostensibly free to go elsewhere...and find the same deal. The numbers are little different (T-Mobile charge $200 for cancelling early). But the structure of the deal is largely the same.

We congratulate ourselves on our free and open markets and put huge political pressure on other countries to do the same, but when you look under the hood we create vertically-integrated monopolies. Who in their right mind would give the same company control of: a) the means of delivery (airwaves or wires), b) equipment to access the service, and c) sale of content to use the service? We broke up Ma-Bell specifically for just this reason. We very nearly broke-up IBM and Microsoft for the same. But for some reason communication services (cellular and internet) are handed over on a silver platter to corporations.

And then we write criminal laws to protect their monopoly.

Is it fair in any meaningful sense of the word? I don't think so.

It's more than that. States and the Federal government have given the telcos and cable companies money multiple times over the past ~15 years to build out infrastructure[1]. In many cases cable companies have received exclusive rights to deliver phone service, cable TV or both.

Despite public largess, these companies come back to the trough over and over poor mouthing how expensive infrastructure build out has been. In Houston we can get up to 100 Mbps downloads but the price is nearly $300/month. To stay under $100/month you have to "settle" for 12 Mbps. That's not bad but when you consider how much money we've spent publicly the ROI isn't great. And let's not forget the gouging the public takes over wireless data.

I'm firmly in favor of for-profit businesses and letting free market work...but when as a society we've decided to hand over full and partial monopolies to for-profit corporations we have every right to participate in setting pricing and profits.

At this point I'm in favor of treating the last mile for internet connectivity the same way we treat the last mile for electricity. Have a poles-and-wires company and separate service providers who deliver content and services. There's too much incentive to drive users to in-house offerings and service when the ISP is also a content company. In other words, if we're going to make the last mile a monopoly then we need net neutrality.

[1] "$7.2 billion for complete broadband and wireless Internet access" See American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 as one example.

The plaintiff will almost certainly seek (and receive) an injunction against further infringement of the work by the defendant. I imagine it would also raise the plaintiff's next complaint against the same defendant to willful infringement with its painful $150,000 per-infringing-work penalty.

Being found guilty and paying a fine is not a blessing to do it again.

The Berne Convention was written and first formally accepted in 1886...but not by the United States. The US steadfastly refused to adopt the convention because it would have required large changes to our copyright laws and acceptance of doctrines like author's moral rights for which we don't have analogous protections.

The US did eventually adopt the Berne Convention and did so in the only way permitted by our Constitution: Congress passed the Berne Convention Implementation Act of 1988. The US Senate then formally ratified the Berne Convention making the US a signatory to the treaty.

So yes, (some) US lawmakers did make a decision that resulted in changing our copyright laws.

The OP, however, is not correct in his oblique suggestion that Sonny Bono is in part or whole to blame. (Though I have no doubt Sonny Bono supported it.) Sonny Bono's name is sometimes attached to the Copyright Extension Act of 1998 but he did not vote for it. (Though he had sponsored similar legislation earlier.) He died nine months before it's passage. His wife Mary, who was elected to his Congressional seat after his death, was instrumental in getting it passed in his name.

Berne Convention
Copyright Extension Act

I live in NZ too, but NZ have treaties with the US to extradite criminals and that is OK. People shouldn't be able to evade justice by simply going to another country.

That's the point, though, isn't it? Dotcom didn't physically perpetrate any crimes in the US. He didn't flee our jurisdiction. Extradition laws are typically about crimes committed in a jurisdiction from which the the defendant fled.

Even more to the point. Dotcom is CEO of a corporation that is accused—not convicted—of copyright infringement. Officers and employees of corporations are usually exempt from prosecution for laws broken by the company. There are ways of piercing the corporate veil but to do so typically requires that the officers and employees in question knew the actions were illegal. MegaUpload and Dotcom are arguing that they adhered to the laws and even helped US authorities gather evidence in other proceedings.

There's a great deal of uncertainty regarding the case...uncertainty that might be clarified during trial proceedings against MegaUpload. To argue that Dotcom should be prosecuted at all would, to me, require that MegaUpload be first found guilt of a crime. Once that had been done the extradition request would have been a mere formality.

But that's not what happened. US authorities have seemingly abandoned the niceties of sending officers to the accused's house or place of business during daylight hours. In many cases they've resorted to a shock-and-awe methodology of pre-dawn raids with smoke, tear gas and loaded weapons drawn. The argue it's necessary to prevent destruction of evidence.

Somehow US authorities convinced NZ authorities this method of arrest was necessary to "capture" a rather portly big mouth who's shot more videos than he has firing-range targets.

I don't believe any of it was necessary. I don't believe there's a viable case of criminal conduct. What I suspect is the whole thing is a botched case that authorities in both countries want to sweep under the rug. And, while we're on the topic...the argument that exposing the case to public scrutiny will "reveal intelligence gathering and sharing methods" is straight from the US playbook.

The real shame is they tried to use criminal-case law and methods in what should have been a civil case, screwed it up and as a result have undermined public confidence in the justice system in general.

"Begun the Clone War has" - Yoda

RTS could make Red Hat happy by running a Black Duck analysis on their proprietary code and sharing the result

Bradley Kuhn addressed this already with two objections:

1. Blackduck can only confirm that the code in question doesn't copy directly from code in it's look-up database. It can't determine whether a given bit of modified code is a derivative work under copyright law and hence a possible GPL violation (where GPL code is involved).
2. The Blackduck software is proprietary. While their clients may feel assured (and are perhaps indemnified against mistakes), copyright holders have no assurance that the software is exhaustive or accurate in its analysis.

In other words, a Blackduck assurance is a proprietary, "black box" assurance...worthless to third parties.

I voted in Houston as well. I hate the jog wheel as well but mostly because it's attached to an all electronic system. There's no paper ballot. The screen *showed* my selections but I have no idea what it sent to the server.

What's wrong with the paper ballot and electronic tabulator?

It's always no.

One thing though: This story is a great demonstration of my maxim that any headline which ends in a question mark can be answered by the word "no". The reason why journalists use that style of headline is that they know the story is probably bollocks, and donâ(TM)t actually have the sources and facts to back it up, but still want to run it.

In other words, Betteridge's law of headlines describes trolling by the writer or publisher rather than a commenter.

One of the reasons I like OpenBSD is the developers are very forthright about why things can't or won't work. Reading the misc@ mail list is a great way to learn about the issues they face trying to get documentation. There are non-trivial issues with both acpi and efi. The developers reverse engineer what they can.

Instead of asking "Why doesn't OpenBSD have better support for $hardware?" we should be asking "Why don't vendors post more public information about their hardware?"

Anyone who grew up in the 70s and 80s buying electronics probably has very distinct memories of getting schematics and diagrams with their new products (or could order them cheaply). My first cw-band radio came with a full electrical schematic. Now, it's a crap shoot. Some of the blame lies with the industry as a whole. Much lies with the USPTO, or more precisely, the laws governing patentability and duration of patents.

The industry is to blame because it's easier to not to. Even if a retail vendor wanted to release good doc sub-component vendors may refuse to allow them. Why? In part to protect themselves from copycats. In part to protect themselves from patent lawsuits.

Patents are the another aspect of the not-so-secret problem. They're all violating somebody's patent on something (at least in the eyes of the patent holder). Whether it's in the fabrication process, a "method" of calculating or who knows what, someone has a claim. The more a company expose about the inner workings of their devices the more information patent trolls and competitors have for pursuing license (revenue), agreements. The smartphone patent war we're seeing played out in the courts is one example of the problem.

Yet another aspect of the problem is self-serving vendor "standards". EFI began as an Intel initiative. Intel later handed control of the spec over to the UEFI Forum, a non-profit corporation. The goal of EFI isn't so much to fix BIOS as to further vendor interests, whether to protect their "IP" or lock customers into using their devices in vendor "approved" ways.

Contrast that to Open Firmware (OpenBoot) which began as a Sun initiative and later became an IEEE standard. Or LinuxBios (now coreboot) which is an open source replacement replacement for both BIOS and EFI. Coreboot has made some progress but it requires vendor participation to make critical details available for implementation. You can guess how well that's going.

If the OpenBSD project were willing to sign NDAs and/or accept binary blobs there would be better support of technologies like suspend/sleep. But they're not willing to do so. Rather they work with vendors who are willing to share details, reverse engineer where possible and do without when neither option is available.