Adding to above-

The real cause behind all this is the fact that Sony has a legal monopoly on Whitney Houston's music.

If her albums were available through other (legal) means, the free market would work. Sure, everyone would raise prices just like Sony did, but someone would raise them less than the others, and we'd have a price war on our hands. It's entirely possible that Whitney's death would result in *lower* album costs due to the increased attention and volume.

But since there's a monopoly on this particular product, the market can do nothing about it.

Maybe Korea can make some money off of all of this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1RgXC303Q5A

HTC and Samsung are known to be paying Microsoft royalties for the devices they sell with Android.

AC is pointing out that something similar could happen if Microsoft patented ideas it gleaned from the open source community. An "Embrace, Extend, Patent, Profit" modus, if you will.

This story should be coming from the pre-primary-bush-burning dept., as it's old news and therefore occurred before Florida's closed primary.

Does this CO2 scrubber run off of energy that was produced in a CO2-producing generation process?

I could do so many things with one of those...

It's not the languages available. It's the accessibility of the ability to create and execute code.

Jumping through a few hoops to get your code running on the device or, at a minimum, distributed to a wide audience, gives the developer the feeling that someone is watching and therefore ... is supposed to... cut down on malware and generally increase code quality. If it actually works is yet to be seen in my opinion, and even if it does work, I'm not convinced it's worth the functionality loss- but it's where we are in the mobile space.

IMHO, Apple (and to a lesser extent, Google) see any easily user-accessible build-and-run-able code as a potential security hole. Doesn't matter if it's compiled binary or interpreted script, in order for it to do anything interesting, it would need hooks into the OS. And, well, that means holes.

If users can copy and paste a script off a website and run it on their phone, they will. And when that script deletes everything on their phone just after sending everyone in the phone's contact list an SMS to go download the script, people will blame the OS vendor. By making it a bit less accessible, they are trying to make it a bit more 'secure' - and while that may work for a while, it's going to frustrate us who just want some BASIC (or Hypercard, or whatever else) to be available on our platform.

I like KDE. I don't hear that said often, though. So I figured I'd say it, and relate my excitement and thanks for all the hard work that's gone into this impending new release.

Thanks, devs.

I like this play. They've realized they have to open up in order to stay relevant at all. Managing other platforms is a great step one.

Step two, though, is to phase out BleakBerry OS and go to a modified Android for their handsets. They could bring a lot of good, missing functionality (and focus) to Android, and have a killer product. Perhaps they could provide some of the apps to all android users (for a small fee, of course).

Naturally the thing to do is to not announce this path, though. It will just make current users run away faster... but if they are able to bring it up alongside the current ecosystem and shift over to the new one cleanly, it could keep them around.

Who Wouldn't?