The company I work for (IBM) require me to
a) Disclose I work for them when relevant to the discussion and order to potential hidden bias
b) State that what I am saying is my personal opinion, and not the IBM opinion.

That is IMO a good rule.

No, the US would not accept that at all. Neither does Europe.

US companies may however be more willing to secretly break EU law by handing data to US, than breaking US law by handing data to China...
All this is theoretical, based on a research paper. If proof surfaces that Amazon, Google et al. passes European Data to the US Governemnt against EU privacy regulations, it would be headline stuff for a long time, weeks and have huge international diplomatic and business repercussions.

According to TFA, it does not matter where the data is stored. It matters if you do business with the country issuing the law...
Of course, almost no US companies does business with China, so no worries there.

"Not missing any drones" == "All drones accounted for"
That may well be "200 in our bases and one shoot down and in the water at coordinates (...)."
It is all a matter of interpretation.

This the bill also outlaws laws that affect:

1) Data Retention checks and privacy controls
2) Removing surveillance powers, claims, etc.
3) Reducing existing intelligence powers "securing the net" - (think the staggering amounts of warrant-less information requests sent today)
4) Preventing doubtful domain name from existing players.

Always look at the other side of the coin before buying it... And never take at political statement at face value.

Same here - and I check the folder once in a while before purging it. It is no great chore since I get less than one spam mail a day. There used to be much more spam, but after the recent botnet slayings, it has really dropped.

And having a vague standard that only MS can follow will allow MS to "rightfully" claim "Our is the only product that implements the whole standard", thus FUDding the market.

While balkanization is part of the problem, it if not the complete picture. The other part is greed (or rather, adjusting you prices to what you think the local market can support.). Buying this DVD in US? 8$. In Denmark? 14$. In china? 3$). If I buy from online software vendors, their european stores are more expansive than the use stores. Lokalization/translation and tax can not explain the whole difference.

Granted, some online software stores give the same price globally, and even let me choose if I want to pay in USD or Euro.

Good luck of getting Netflix to Europe for a USD 8 / month. My local ISP will charge me the almost the same for rental of a single movie. Localized subtitles does not warrant the added cost.

That is why I wonder why MS hasn't added WP7 as a controller option on the xbox. Using the the phone would be an interesting options as it has features the traditional controller and Kinect does not.

Seems that everyone else seem to interpret the word "dedicate" differently from you and I. Or have they really a fixed daily slot dedicated to gaming?

Also, the poll leaves me with no answer if I dedicate 1.5/day hour to gaming. I can choose a) Less than 1, b) 1 and c) 2-3.

Ah well - I never saw a perfect slashdot poll.

The SCO case (Darl McBride) was not setteled. It never will be. It is on hold, after Novell sued and proved that SCO didn't hold the UNIX copyrights. SCO then went bankrupt, but are trying to open specific claims against IBM.

SCO will fail, probably because the judge will disagree on allowing SCO to attack without IBM being able to defend. Even if the are allowed to proceed, they will fail, as their claims have no merit whatsoever.
It is trup SCO hoped for a settlement or buyout, but IBM never bent to their empty threats.

>Don't be so hard on yourself. With tens of thousands of security cameras across your cities,
That is mostly the brits. But I grant you the point.

> rampant hoplophobia,
With a murder rate less than a 6th of that rate in gun loving USA, I consider this wise.

>courts that favor criminals over anyone even thinking of defending themselves,
You lost me here. Self defense is legal. Courts are tough on crime (at least where I live). Corruption is almost nill, Last I heard it was in the us a burglar could sue the owner of the house he broke in to if he broke his leg during the heist. And win.

- soon to be followed requests to report by child abuse, drug trade, piracy, and general critique of the EU and government.
We are slowly learning from the US laws.

> So instead of simply paying a fee on everything, and then hand out the money to companies and people who have published very good designs and/or research

Are you proposing an alternative involving fees to all products and the fees returned to the deserving? Interesting concept, but more details are needed in order to evaluate.

> you honestly think it's a good idea to go medieval and hand out state enforced monopolies

Nothing new. Patents are old man. SW patent are a never abomination that should never had been allowed. I agree that patents as a whole kill innovation, but unless some sort of protection was in place (patent, your fee/award system or whatever) some expensive R&D would completely stop (unless it was state sponsored).

Yeah, but drugs are not protected by copyright. It is relatively easy to coyp pill and sell at lover price. In software, the competition will have to spend a similar amount of $$ and TIME as you to make a competing product. Tame you could spend fortifying your base and improving the product.

But never mind, we obviously both agree that SW should not be covered by patents. It seems that some SW execs do not agree with us. I guess they would rather fight a known evil (trolls) than a unknown (a free, competitive market).