There is a legal mandate: suitability to task. TOS/EULA be damned (or at least finally tried properly in court), they have contractually obligated themselves to provide the necessary materials (hardware/firmware) in making a sale/lease/licensing agreement and, as bugs are exposed and updates required, demonstrated a failure at the "manufacturing" level for which they are liable. It's only going to take one large customer and an otherwise slow news week to resolve this one.

I see SOMEbody wasn't paying attention to a Java update and got a dose of the Ask foolbar.

It sounds like all Oracle is doing is following the license.

I'd go with "enforcing" over "following", which is what they demand of others. I don't see any difference between this and the whole TomorrowNow fiasco. For those who weren't playing along back then, TomorrowNow was a company which grabbed up a bunch of Siebel people and tried to compete with Siebel supporting Siebel software. At the time, support contracts were required and cost an additional ~30% on top of the insane annual license fees. Dumber still, SAP bought TN knowing exactly what they were doing.

TomorrowNow (illegally) downloaded every last bit of Siebel software, first from Siebel's servers, then from Oracle's after the take-over. They also got their customers to download customer-specific and locked software (special builds and patches) for them <boggle>, which they'd diff against the previous patches so that they could provide their customers with updates outside of official channels (which were unavailable because the customers had stopped paying for support). And in the end they were doing it from a bank of SAP servers on a single IP block.

Fast forward to today. Another company is taking another company's proprietary software, and this time there seems to be a bit of whack-a-mole in play, since players in the current suit target may have come from previous defendants. If you read the linked articles, you see that the only claim dismissed in a previous suit was about the third-party provider "transferring" credentials; simply obtaining and using them on behalf of the customer as an agent wasn't illegal and so the charge was tossed while the rest of the claims are in litigation.

Copyright. Property laws. Oracle may be all sorts of evil but this one doesn't appear to be overreach. Anyone is allowed to provide Solaris and Java support but they can't do it with someone else's stuff.

The "denigration of religion" is a messy situation which still needs clear legal decisions; this case might lead to one.
Denying the Holocaust is illegal here in Germany not because of opinion but because it is a false statement, clearly and irrefutably documented. However, what was supposed to be the big deciding case -- Elisabeth Sabaditsch-Wolff in Austria -- was denied because her statements weren't determined not to be simply thoe of fact:

It is the opinion of the Court that defaming Mohammad was a primary purpose of the seminars, rather than the purported purpose of providing factual knowledge of Islam. Thus, the seminars have made no meaningful contribution to discussions that would be of public interest, but instead had a primary purpose of defaming Mohammad, an icon of a legally recognized religion.

Secular as so many EU countries are, there are problems due to "legally recognised religion", a natural progression stemming from the inclusion of some sort of religion in the countries' constitutions.

EU law covers freedom of speech/expression. The question is whether he can stay out of jail while appealing this bullshit. The Mediterranean countries are our own domestic third world, but with really good food.

You'd think NASA didn't know about taking baby steps, as if they'd gone to the Moon first and decided to work on that boring stable orbit shit later. They should be growing crabgrass, dandelions, and kudzu first. Shit that you have to fight like hell to get to stop growing. Shit that doesn't care how badly you treat it or how poor the conditions are. Bonus: dandelion leaves and kudzu are edible.

While regolith ain't soil, it can be used as a basic substrate which hearty weeds wouldn't complain about.

Tens of millions spent on new screens which provide less information than the old flippy-type info on upcoming and incoming trains/subways and they're down all the fucking time. ALL the time. Usually with the typical NT error message in a grey box on a blue screen. Or there's a dump and some module names.

Why the FUCK was this broadly released instead of tested and stepped? Even people firing up PrestaShop sites aren't this cavalier.

I can hear someone screaming about how to choose to/for whom and where to release first: how about by acceptance/ratification/support of the program?

So GM is getting back to basics, returning to their old system of charging at multiple tiers for phony differentiation of a base model which is technically inferior to pretty much everything out there. I can't wait for AMC to return with coal-fired Pacers and Gremlins.

It ain't news, especially not nerds who understand the concept of "constant dollars". It certainly ain't any sort of stuff that matters. It's time to change the tagline to:

Look! Shiny!

This place isn't even SCO/GNEW-Lunix advocacy anymore. "Quickies" were long ago ceded to reddiggit and stories about Microsoft are neutral to positive/pleasant. Five bucks says Taco is running Win8.

You should really pay more attention. Do try to keep up.

Because privatisation has worked so well in other countries, as it has in other sectors in Britain.

Follow the money: from whence comes cash the proponents of this collect? If only I'd been in on a stake in "Railtrack", the company which got to own the tracks the broken-up British Rail trains would run on with no requirement to actually maintain them.

It still remains unclear as to exactly why this bill was proposed and what its objectives are.

The objective is to make money for the company which paid into Ben Hueso's campaign fund and which, shocker!!, just happens to make exactly this sort of item or has "key patents" on it. Whenever something smells fishy, follow the money. Just ask yourself, "Who stands to benefit financially from this?" and you'll have your answer.

Are you that mind-blowingly ignorant or are you just so stupid and lazy that you haven't bothered to glance over anything avbout the subject?

Dunning-Kruger is becoming the new Godwin.

Without known-secure hardware and and OS to run it, all the fucking encryption in the world don't mean squat. And before the fanbois scream, "Lunix is Teh Shiznit Seckyoor!" remember that you have to know the compiler is safe as well (*cough*Ken*Thompson*cough*).