Microsoft's fine had penalties added in for not paying on time, so it's not exactly a fair comparison point. They could have gotten off rather lighter if they'd skipped dicking about.
And the size of the fine is based on yearly revenue, so if Intel's fine is bigger, it just means Intel is bigger.

It is indeed quite obvious that being a leading member of a copyright lobby organization can not in any way be seen as a conflict of interest.

And in other news, Slashdot still fails at UTF8.

Hint: Virus tailored for gene insertion.

There is a general tendency not to admit one has been wrong after having invested in something. A result is that people who have been scammed are generally unwilling to believe they've been scammed, even when confronted with evidence. They'll rather make up flimsy explanations for why the evidence can't be right.

So, no, the sucker won't learn fast, if at all. And it won't be cheap, because those that do learn will end up paranoid, unable to trust other people ever again.

Iraq _had_ WMDs. They did not have any by the time US invaded.
The GP's point, I think, was that if Saddam was subjected to a real trial, he'd have a chance to tell the truth about how he got the weapons and what happened to them. Both points being rather uncomfortable for the US. In the first case for supplying them and in the latter for using them as an excuse to invade even when all evidence pointed at the weapons no longer existing.

Playing go in CGoban (Java program) and listening to music at the same time. Way back when Java did audio via OSS and there was no mixing you either got just the clicks from the game - which are not an enterily unimportant part of the playing experience - or the music.

Or more generally, music and anything you'd expect to get audio cues from.

Writes may be re-ordered as the system sees fit, as long as end result is identical - but all guarantees are void in undefined situations like crashes. If your write order is critical, you have to enforce it by fsyncing.

The "transactional" write & rename behaviour is quite sensible, though. So there should probably be some easier mechanic to invoke it than calling fsync a bunch of times.

write. fsync. rename. fsync.

Oh, hey, look at all that data guaranteed not lost.

It's more like their opponents get to go "Look how $name voted against this very necessary and solid bill!". Which wouldn't be much of a problem if your people weren't drooling morons that can't comprehend anything longer than a 5 second soundbite. Which is incidentally too short a time to defend yourself in by explaining why the evil addition was necessary to stop.

The old definition was pretty much arbitrary. The problem was that a non-arbitrary definition that does leave Pluto as a planet needs to add several other bodies as planets that are rather unlike the other bodies currently called planets. Choices were to expand the meaning of the term or contract it. They chose contracting it and adding new definitions for those objects that didn't fit the new definition of planet, but are still significant enough not to be lumped with the generic small rocks.

But why is that a bad thing that patents are "devalued" thus? I see no problem in only being able to obtain damages relative to the actual value of the patent.

A quibble on Lex Nokia: It's not just employers. It's any "service provider", for pretty nebulous definitions of "service" and "provider". Up to and including the landlord and grounds keeper in case of your home connection.

Because there never is anything one would call "halfthis halfthat". All things are in transition and all things are also things themselves.

So you've got this really spiffy object-oriented OS automatically persisting your objects. What's the serialized representation of those objects? Any answer other than just having the system puke the memory representation of the object onto permanent storage media means that the programmer has to have a say in determining that representation. And this system was all about not having the programmer worry about those messy details. Except having the serialized form be a memory blob means the only thing you can ever deserialize it to is the exact same version of that particular object type.
This is why we have files. Letting the programmer do the de/serialization just means you're calling your files something else and added some mandatory cruft on top. Also, without files (or equivalent), you can't have standard file formats. This kind of system would then be vendor lock-in heaven.