Google's methods are to fob off the information commissioners with reassurances that aren't backed by fact. For example in the UK, you can remove your house from StreetView - but only if you send Google, at your own expense, a copy of photographic identification, which they can reject for reasons unknown. The IC doesn't allow any other data holder to place arbitrary, irrelevant restrictions on remove requests like this.

Well, I released the rewrite under the BSD license. I did the rewrite on the weekends, on my time. I cleared that with my boss before hand. He seemed ok with it as long as it wasn't our production code.

The project wasn't licensed as BSD or GPL before hand, but 12,000 lines of it came with me to the job. He seemed to feel that since our product was now based on it, that he should have control over whether it would be open sourced.

They didn't want the responsibility of maintaining an open source project. Given the complexity of the code involved (real-time multimedia processing etc...) they felt that there was a much higher likelihood that instead of receiving the benefits of the open source community, they would instead bare the burdens of it. In hindsight, the point was valid. They had nothing to gain from open sourcing, so they'd prefer that it weren't a distraction.

As a result, I spent my weekends rewriting instead of improving what we had, but it also gave me a great sandbox to experiment in. This way I was making major architectural modifications to the open source project... (which I just check isn't even online anymore :() so this way I was able to prove the code before implementing the changes in the company's product.

I'm doing something similar now, actually writing a C++ alternative to GStreamer, having a blast doing it and although I maintain two copies (one for the office, one for my open source project) it's great since the open source to-be implementation is really very versatile while the one we use at work is more specialized as it is optimized to work on DSPs (which require entirely different optimizations from x86). I'm looking forward to releasing it soon as well. So far, it's a pretty reliable platform for IPTV (transport stream, mpeg-2, mpeg-4 etc...) and it's REALLY easy to code for. It'll be modified BSD something like "if you use it, please put my name in the license somewhere" kind of thing.

their attitude is literally
"You shouldn't complain about it.
Just pay us over and over and over and over.
We're sure you can afford it."

I'm very bad at math, but could the OP value their own work at say... 2, and other peoples work at 0.25? Wouldn't that cause the equation to untrue as well?

and give it to independent studios and offers like that of wolfire's "humble bundle indie" . As if awful DRM and little re-play value wasn't enough for today's games, now this. Pass..

The big bang occurred about 1 femtosecond before "let there be light"

It's because we actually say the 'C' in 'facto'.

But it seems it will be unified: its use will be optional. Which means we'll all probably continue to write as we do now. Also, it'll be valid to either write 'acadêmico' and 'académico', 'oxigênio' and 'oxigénio', etc.

"the particles measure less than 0.25 mm across"; so how the hell am I supposed to turn that into my epic sword?

It's that blasted media franchising culture again, isn't it! CSI, great. CIS-Miami, wall to wall sunglass gestures. CSI NY, ghastly. MPEG, lovely. MPEG-LA, rubbish. And you just know the next one's going to be MPEG-Hawaii or something equally horrible.

That would be incorrect they are put forward by the three main parties.

To be honest I don't trust the cloud for anything more than "instant on" extra processing/serving power on a when-available/as-needed basis, and nothing more. I let Google host my personal email, but only because it genuinely isn't worth the effort to me to host my own mail, especially since I always have other mail accounts and I do actually manage the important ones like my work mail. Still, I'm just not inclined to trust a remotely managed, highly virtualized service with anything either truly important just as easily done with local, dedicated equipment. The outages on mobile devices in the last few years like the T-Mo Sidekick and Blackberries, as well as the occasional service outage even from major providers like Google.

In the end run I want my phone to have it's own local OS and storage, separate e-mail, and I will never trust anything truly important, work related or otherwise sensitive to cloud-based services, especially not with the sole copy. I know the average Google employee isn't ever going to bother with reading my e-mail or Google docs, but it's not the average employee I worry about, or even employee's at all.

Keep in mind what a cloud is: a big, fluffy, floating thing off in the distance that looks solid but is in fact nothing more than vapor, and subject to the whims of the weather.

Um, no.

Ascii, you can open up in anything and read it.

you can't with a pdf.

the UK government is looking to be at risk of getting a hung or coalition government.

Runaway recursion near line 2. Bailing out...

I don't know the numbers off the top of my head, but I would suspect not. You can have orbits higher than geosync (think the moon), so you would need to apply a lot of energy to make the satellite leave orbit entirely.

Edit: (well not really, but Preview to the rescue ;)
Actually, it seems you are kind of on the right track though. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graveyard_orbit Apply energy to push it into a higher orbit and it will still be in orbit, though in an orbit where it is far less likely to cause harm.

I didn't see anyone paying for namespace in p2p networks or on I2P/FreeNet/etc., maybe we don't need to have parent domains?

And you do realize that domains like .biz, .info, .jobs, and all those new weird domain were only created because they knew every company wouldn't risk not registering their name everywhere they could and that would give them a huge revenue source? Centralized political corruption indeed...

And I'm paying already to get connected, everything should be "intelligence at the border", I'm paying by offering others to use my CPU/RAM/Storage.
Do we really need Facebook/Google to centralize the net when we could all do it?

There is such of waste of computer resource!
And while we're at it, i wish more publicly owned fiber were built as a fair tunnel for ISPs to compete.

It's sad that the biggest super computer on earth are botnets, I just wish it was actually a voluntary citizen network instead...