Bizarre. You think I just made that up? Go read the summary on Wikipedia and in particular pay attention to the following section:

On August 24, 2012 the jury returned a verdict largely favorable to Apple. It found that Samsung had willfully infringed on Apple's design and utility patents and had also diluted Apple's trade dresses related to the iPhone. The jury awarded Apple $1.049 billion in damages and Samsung zero damages in its counter suit.[51] The jury found Samsung infringed Apple's patents on iPhone's "Bounce-Back Effect" (US Patent No.7,469,381), "On-screen Navigation (US Patent No.7,844,915), and "Tap To Zoom" (US Patent No.7,864,163), and design patents that covers iPhone's features such as the "home button, rounded corners and tapered edges" (US D593087) and "On-Screen Icons" (US D604305).

Apple claimed, and got a court to agree with them, that any rectangular phone with rounded corners violated their patents.

There's no standard that says phones should not slice your fingers when you touch the edges, but it is nevertheless an essential design property. That's not a requirement of GSM, that's common fucking sense.

If you think Samsung is somehow the aggressor here and Apple is a poor hurt little child, you need a serious reality check. Ever since it became apparent that the iPhone had a real competitor in Android, Apple has been trying to shut down the competition left right and center with bogus patents that should not exist.

Firstly, a US court with a Silicon Valley jury found for Apple despite serious juror misconduct (to the extent that their judgement made no sense and they had to be told to do it again). Then after Samsung managed to hit back Obama himself vetoed the punishment.

These events have made the US look like a banana republic where the justice system is weak and laughable.

Given they apparently haven't even switched on any computers there yet, presumably the cyberattack fun still hasn't begun.

This raises the question of where they're processing all their existing data. Fort Meade ran out of electricity some time ago, from what I understand, so presumably they have some other big datacenters in other places.

You're hurting an animal for the wrong reason! Quick, get the morality police! This person sprayed Raid on a roach and enjoyed it!

Yeah, you put in words what I was thinking for a while now. It's obvious that these problems aren't specific to the NSA or GCHQ. Rather they're due to a cold war mindset that too many senior civil servants and politicians seem unable to break out.

GCHQ has been hacking Belgacom to spy on the EU in Brussels. WTF? Why?! If they want to know what's going down in the EU then they can just ..... go ask. I mean the UK contributes its fair share of money to the EU, so what possible benefit is there to treating it as if it was the KGB?

These agencies need to be stripped down, badly, and the money saved reinvested into other things. The staff that are left can be given a purely defensive mandate (w.r.t internet stuff at least). But I don't think it will happen whilst the current lot are in charge. They seem to like the power too much. And maybe they are also trapped in a cold war mindset. Perhaps it will take my generation, the first post cold-war generation to enter politics before these problems get really fixed.

BTW the UK announced today that it was renaming the national police squad again. SOCA no longer, now it's the National Crime Agency, formed from merging several agencies together ...... and slashing the budget by 30%. So it is spending money to record all internet traffic, every last TCP ACK, but the actual police who deal with practical problems on British streets, like gang warfare, they're having their budget murdered. 999 response times have doubled since austerity began. It's obvious that a working national police force and working emergency services save more lives than GCHQ hacking oil firms and telcos.

Good point, this is actually covered in separate articles. Giving a false "statement" (= going to the police station to officially report a crime) is punishable. "Raising a false alarm" is punishable, as is prank calling the emergency number. Falsely telling the police that they saw a crime in progress is punishable only in certain cases. But there is definitely no article that covers lying to the police in general.

How is that even a rebuttal? The devastating effects are the result of criminals, not of Prof. Duane's position, and it in no way invalidates his statement. If the police want people to talk to them, they need to make very, very sure that innocent people truly have nothing to fear from them. A lot of people probably follow his advise because it it necessary.

Is it really a felony to lie to the police in the US? That stinks, and even worse if they truly prosecute otherwise innocent people for it. Over here (NL), lying to the police is not punishable, whether you are lying about a case that involves you, or one that you merely witnessed. The only times you are obliged by law to tell the truth is when the police ask for your identity, or when you're put under oath.

Well, this is the peak oil argument - more oil can always be extracted, but at what price? The price is high because extracting oil from shale rock is significantly harder than getting the old fashioned stuff, which is why it's been left till last and it took many years of high prices to cause a surge in production. I don't think prices will fall again back to where they were pre-2004, ever.

Had a quick peek. It looks... different.

Ironically, Facebook's advertising is amongst the least intrusive around - for now. They also provide means to give them feedback (on the website - sadly, their mobile apps are lacking on that account, amongst many others) about which ads you prefer and which you don't want to see. Mind you, their lack of profiling data can show up at times, usually in the form of repeated generic ads being served up.

SocialFixer is a browser add-on, it runs inside of your browser on your computer. You're thinking of Facebook Apps, which interact with Facebook's back-end through the Facebook Platform, either as web services, traditional software or mobile/tablet apps.

Agree with your comment about us getting what we paid for with Facebook. Still disappointing, nonetheless, if only because of the potential longer-term repercussions for Facebook's viability - they seem to be increasingly undermining the service's usefulness in their quest for profits. :(

The actual problem are the passive-aggressive douchebags who make it a contest to see who gets to pay for everyone's meal, and later whine about how some people never pay for everyone's meal, so that they can be both the altruistic Christian hero and the exploited supply-sider hero.

Author page, with links - http://demontjoye.com/projects.html
Their video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eS1LgeQTO1A
The product page - http://openpds.media.mit.edu/

It reduces the maximum resolution of the system and means some prices would be too small to represent on the wire.

Should the Bitcoin community one day be so successful that the system being unable to represent prices low enough is an actual problem, a flag day can be scheduled which changes the wire-size of the value units in the protocol, thus adding more "decimal places" (they are not really represented as floats).

The nice thing about Bitcoin is that it's a consensus system, so scheduling flag days is quite straightforward as long as you do actually get a majority of people to upgrade by the given date. As long as a majority do, the rest of the nodes will be automatically disconnected from the system and have to upgrade to rejoin.