FTA: "Google lost its bid to claim the protection of the E-Commerce Directive's safe harbour provisions, which partly shields hosting and ISPs from liability for content held on or transmitted over their systems."

Obviously the suggestions shown were generated by Google and transmitted over it's network, as opposed to indexed content not owned by Google. So know wonder Google lost, maybe the lawyer(s) should have argued that the content produced by the auto complete feature is solely based on data supplied by it's users and the internet, maybe the same way a newspaper generates headlines based on what sells!.

The funny thing is I bet if he'd put "You're at the [XYZ Street] Starbucks on an insecure connection, and absolutely anyone here can access your account with the right (free) tool." followed by a nice image implying "Click here to install a tool to protect yourself", a very good percentage of them would have clicked it!.

I was just about to rant about how "if I wanted to contribute to say... OpenOffice, because I saw something I could improve upon during my daily usage, I'd have to follow the mass of instructions in the OpenOffice building guide to do so. I can't just point my development environment at OpenOffice.org, open the project and start debugging. which for an OS that encourages contribution to the development of it's applications... seems to fail on the ease of contribution.", then add about contributing to a desktop environment say Gnome, and just getting the info took to long.

Yet another concept developers/software innovators have to avoid or ask Microsofts permission!. I can see that the concept is a good one and how useful it will be, but for it to be patentable or least patentable for profit is absurd. Is it so different from de/emphasizing Peoples Names, Date's of Birth(Covered by patent?), Countries and such like or even IP Addresses(Covered by patent)!. All of those are viable concepts to be implemented by a computer process, a computing system, or as an article of manufacture such as a computer program product or computer readable media!.