It's a common tactic to introduce bills like that to make your opinions known on certain topics to the wider House/Senate body, even when the bills have no chance of being passed ever.

That comic had a good story at first, and slowly degraded over time into utter absurdity. I think this was because he had IRL issues he was dealing with. So yes, it was good he finally ended the main story, and got back to the randoms that just make fun of life in general.

That's because they changed the latest VS to match Windows 8 in theme. Yes, stupid, I know.

Technically, they can, but the developers of the device drivers do silly things like hard-coded checks for the operating system version, and refuse to install if the one you're running doesn't match the one that they programmed the check against.

So, let's say Valve goes full-steam ahead on this project and starts actually selling these consoles, and presumably implements Wine to get DirectX games to run. What is going to prevent Microsoft from suing the shit out of them under the DMCA for using Wine (which at best, is in an extremely gray area legally when used on US computers)?

The way the Wine devs develop and implement their code is not "clean", and they pretty much admitted they violate the DMCA in their own posts.

I do believe I read somewhere in the Steam forums that Valve is actively working right now to have the L4D games work on Steam for Linux.

It's abysmal. The sound quality is mediocre at best, and you better hope whomever hosts the call (if you do a group voice chat, the host becomes the "node" everyone else in the group goes through) has good upload bandwidth. If not, the entire thing sounds like shit.

I can see it now, how miserable it would work on XBox Live, with 30+ users and the "host" has a 768kb DSL upload rate.

"Reed Hundt said he wants the FCC to focus on getting better, faster, cheaper internet to 100% of the population."

All of the above is absolutely useless if it is crippled by capricious and artificially low data caps.

They won't hit anything, they are no longer being monitored by the FTC.

Wrong, the government only has the right to do what is delineated for it in the Constitution. All other rights are exclusive to the states and the citizens.

Also, the US is not a democracy, it is a Constitutional Republic.

This makes you ignorant of civics.

Dear AC who submitted this:

Google is useful for this kind of stuff. I found program listings from Oregon State, University of Illinois-Springfield, and MANY others.

Online baccalaureate programs. Several with the option to complete in as little as 1-3 years depending on your ability. And yes, real programs with real degrees, not just those hokey certificates from Coursera or the like.

No offense, but you're a Senior Software Engineer and didn't use at least a Google search first?

Oh my.

GMOs, GMOs... leading producers of such, like DOW Chemical and Monsanto...yes, we should really be trusting such to not harm the food supply or hold it for ransom. Right.

Monsanto is still trying to claim Dioxin/Agent Orange doesn't harm humans, thus they have no responsibility for cleaning up the production sites in the southern USA or the results of that production in Vietnam.

They however, lost a class-action suit in WV this year (one of the production sites for AO amongst many other nasty chemicals).

http://wvgazette.com/News/201202230090?page=1

These are not the people we should be allowing anywhere near this type of research, let alone be granting them patents on organisms.

I am all for doing it in an ethical manner, with reasonable testing, etc. Many of these corporations doing this though, have proven many, MANY times over that they are not in the least bit ethical, and love skipping corners to boost share prices.

Silly me, and here I thought they'd need that $65k or more just to pay the licensing fees for things like libdvdcss. And yes, I know it is not just that one and that there are other free codecs they also use. But to be legal in the USA or France for that matter, unless they pony up the license fees for the codecs (mainly to MPEG-LA).

Microsoft is not about to let a media "app" without the license fees paid for those particular codecs into its appstore.

As we all know anyhow, the VLC people kind of ignore some laws anyhow. Microsoft, however, can't get away with it (at least not with the EU watching for the slightest stumble).

Put it this way...

Comcast has the most compromised user systems on their network in the USA every year since the late 1990's.

I would appreciate it if they actually WOULD do something about it.

I take it these idiots don't even comprehend that now criminals have a nice map to all kinds of legally licensed and owned weapons to steal.

The dipshit who came up with this....ugh.