Truth is we've had ZERO cases of GPL violators being sued for more than just compliance. And, in any case, here's the logic I don't understand:

  - This license from the FSF says I can do whatever the hell I want with the software, except for a few restrictions, and the developers have a history of no litigation, plus they are not looking for profit. They also don't own patents in addition to their copyright, so If I need to ever replace the component, I should be able to write my own.
  - This other license from Microsoft says I can't do anything, and the few things I can do might still be restricted by microsoft at any time, and the developer has a huge history of litigating against everyone with their team of ruthless lawyers. Profit is their main interest, and if I need to ever replace their component, they can still use their patents to prevent me from doing so.

Replace Microsoft with just about any other software company. How is the GPL so bad compared to most proprietary licenses?

We invade punta del este every year, but we do it with the white, fat, rich cocksuckers that exploit Argentina until the last fucking dime.

Taking the Malvinas back by force is fucking propaganda, and every government has used them for that purpose. Only Galtieri was insane (and drunk) enough to actually do it.

Oh, what a great idea! Menem did almost that for a decade. Wanna know how it went?

The US keeps going to war and threatening countries to keep the dollar as the worldwide currency. What a great idea! Use this fiat currency everywhere, and we'll keep the printers right here!. We're subsidizing your lifestyle.

It won't last very long. The oil market is steadily moving towards the Euro, and bombs won't help the US this time.

THIS. I own a software company in Argentina. We used to design our own hardware too, and we manufactured overseas. We did some manufacturing and all of the assembling in Argentina. We were steadily moving towards more local manufacturing. The low Shenzhen prices made it hard, but we where making progress in that direction. All of a sudden, getting dollars and sending them overseas was more expensive and harder every month. Then the overreach of non-automatic licenses destroyed us (you have to request permission 90 days in advance to maybe get a limited import quota of certain items). In the meanwhile, the big hardware stores (Garbarino, Fravega, etc.) continued to bring all-chinese products into the country without issues, even those competing with our products. We had to shut down most of our hardware operations. We put more emphasis on our SAS products. We almost went bankrupt several times, in the end, we made it, but it left us weak and in debt. Some of that debt where taxes. They quickly froze our accounts and took their toll. We've paid most of it, and we're growing again. Well, until the government decides to change the rules in favor of the owners of this country again.

I hear people accusing the Kirschner administracion of being socialists. This isn't fucking socialism, this is a systematic plan to destroy what's left of our economy, while spending more and more money every day on free lunches for the unwashed masses that keep voting for this fucking stupid cunt.

I will be very fucking surprised if anything is left after this bastards are done with our country.

No, it hasn't been blocking third party cookies for years. This is the core of why such policies are a bad idea. It says it blocks third party cookies, but there are actually lots of exceptions to that rule in order to avoid as the summary says "false positives". You can read about what really happened with Google on Lauren Weinstein's blog, it's very different to how you paint it (there was no "trying to circumvent" involved).

The only thing 3rd party cookies are useful for is tracking you. Anyone who says otherwise makes their living out of stripping you of your privacy.

Reading fail! The summary itself says the policy is being delayed because of false positives, ie, things that they are blocking that is causing users to complain.

This is exactly what happened with Safari. Somebody decides that "privacy" can be viewed exclusively through the lens of particular technologies, that advertising is bad and they will "save the users" from targeted advertising that's wrecking the web (or relevant advertising that funds the web, depending on your perspective). Then they discover that 3rd party cookies are not exclusively used for advertising, and start punching holes in the policy, until it gets to the point where any site that wants to can set a third party cookie by writing their code in a different way. Then some company offers their users a feature they can opt in to that requires third party cookies, so the documented workarounds for the blocking policy are used to make it work, then there's a big media story about how said company is "working around privacy protections".

For example, this happened with Facebook and Safari. The Safari guys got bug reports that their users were being randomly logged out of Facebook but not when other browsers were used. After a long time, they tracked it down to third party cookie blocking interacting badly with the Like button, which is the sort of thing that uses them. So they added yet another heuristic to try and distinguish "good" stuff such as Like buttons from "bad" stuff such as adverts, and ended up making the policy so weak it could even be triggered by accident!

Google does not use stack ranking in the sense you are referring to it (the form that promotes competition between employees to avoid being in the bottom X% that gets fired or top Y% that gets promoted).

(usual disclosure: I'm a Google engineer).

Those are all really bad examples.

Retiring ActiveSync for consumer accounts is not "trying to prevent Windows Phone from syncing calendar and contact data". Not even close. ActiveSync is a Microsoft-specific protocol which is so heavily protected by the patent system it requires fees. There are open equivalents for all its functionality. Perhaps if Microsoft doesn't want to implement CalDAV or CardDAV like its major competitors do and would rather its competitors pay them per-user license fees for the privilege of using a crappy syncing protocol, they should not be surprised when support for said protocol goes away. They can catch up with everyone else and support the non-licensed calendar and contact syncing protocols instead. For corporate users, well, they pay so the costs of ActiveSync can just be passed straight through.

By "hindering the development of a YouTube app" you actually mean requiring Microsoft to obey the terms of service, right? The sort of co-operation Page was talking about doesn't mean Microsoft can do whatever they want, demand whatever they want, and everyone gives it to them on a plate for nothing. It means cooperating to find a reasonable solution that works for everyone. In this case, there's already an HTML5 website Windows Phone users can access, and if WP becomes popular enough then probably Google would make a native app that follows content creators requirements and allows the site to be funded. Or maybe provide the access they need to build a proper app that does follow the ToS. After all, that's what happened with the iPhone app despite the iPhone being Android's biggest competitor (it started out written by Apple and later moved to being written by Google).

The sort of thing Microsoft does here is exactly what Larry was talking about. They must have known when they were developing the YouTube app that the features they added were not allowed - because it says so right in the YouTube ToS. So what was their goal here? Apparently to try and confuse people and try to score points when they got inevitably told to stop. And it's working on you, isn't it? It's exactly the same kind of immature behaviour they're pulling in so many other ways. This is not co-operation. It's playing politics instead of building better technology. Larry isn't the only one that's sick of it.

Yeah, I thought about that, but the meter had a screen on the front that counted down the amount of time remaining. When you point coins in, the time goes up. Pretty simple actually. So I am not sure how I could have been accidentally cited for that either because there was over an hour left on the meter when I left. I suppose there could have been some other infraction I'm not aware of, though.

I had two weeks to file an appeal, only one of which I was going to be in the country. That's filing, it doesn't mean it's resolved within two weeks. Also, unfortunately I only noticed the ticket under the wipers after driving off. So I didn't take a photo of where I was parked. Apparently the guy who issued the ticket is supposed to take a photo, but I have no idea how to see it (probably can't).

There doesn't seem to be any online appeals process. I was told I'd have to send them a letter by the post. If there was an online process I might have been tempted to use it. The City of Santa Cruz website only has the ability to pay tickets, not file an appeal or complaint.

I don't think it's just Florida that's abusing traffic citations for profit. I visited Santa Cruz, CA on Sunday and parked by the beach. There were cars on either side of me, white space dividing lines and a meter right in front of the space where I parked. I got a $48 citation for "parking in a red zone". So I called them up and asked what this meant, it means "no parking at any time under any circumstances". That means the ticket was quite obviously wrong as no-parking zones don't have parking meters in them.

I don't see any way this can be an honest mistake. You can't write out a ticket saying a car parked in a no parking zone whilst standing next to a meter with plenty of time left on it.The ticket itself, their contact line and their website all make the appeals process rather prominent so apparently they get a lot of appeals. Unfortunately you only get two weeks to appeal, I'm not staying in California, I'll be on vacation next week and then I return to my home in Europe. So I'll probably just pay the $48, there's no way it makes sense to appeal a parking ticket for a rental car from the other side of the world whilst on vacation.

This whole incident leaves a bad taste, it appears to be open and unchecked corruption on the part of municipal governments. The kind of thing I expect in a banana republic, not America.

Um, you have no clue what you're talking about. Mt Gox has bent over backwards to comply with all these rules. They not only do ID verification, they freeze accounts suspected of criminal activity, they have co-operated with the police in the past (notably, the German police), they do risk analysis of transactions and all the other things that banks do. This is by no stretch of the imagination "not even pretending to comply with the law". If you're really going to try and paint Mt Gox as some kind of rogue outfit, all you're arguing is that AML rules are so opaque, complex and difficult to comply with that it's impossible for a small company to work with money no matter how good their intentions are.

Actually that's not the case. For apps running on your phone, they are using simplified payment verification in which the contents of the blocks are not validated (the block headers themselves are). So they are agnostic to the kind of issue that led to the unexpected hard fork. Yes this kind of consensus failure is pretty disastrous but it didn't actually affect many end users, and will only get rarer in future as testing improves.