Like a lot of people here, I have a lot of nostalgia for my oldschool CRC handbook. I have many fond memories of poring over its extensive listings of mathematical formulas and scientific tables.

But in a Slashdot discussion of nostalgia over the Chemical Rubber Company, we should not forget the MathWorld debacle. MathWorld was an online math encyclopedia in the mid 90s. It was one of the earliest proofs of the power of the web's collaborative processes for publishing, predating Wikipedia by almost a decade. It started out as Eric's Treasure Troves, hosted by Eric Weisstein on his UVA account page when he was an undergraduate. But with hundreds of submissions by collaborators, it grew into a comprehensive listing of almost any branch of mathematics, a resource which many math students relied on on a daily basis. It eventually got a book deal, and was published into a paper encyclopedia by CRC. After publication, CRC decided that the ongoing web resource infringed its copyright, and shut it down, including content that had never been part of the published work.

Eventually a deal was reached between Weisstein/Wolfram and CRC and the website was restored, but the damage had been done. MathWorld would never recover its status as the premier home on the web of mathematical knowledge. The MathWorld community was shattered and a new GPLed math encyclopedia was started, PlanetMath. And eventually in the mid 2000s Wikipedia exploded, including much mathematical content. CRC's reactions was one of the earliest and most egregious examples of old media companies responding to the rise of the internet in the worst way possible. CRC should no longer be regarded as responsible stewarts of mathematical knowledge.

Ok, I guess I misread. And in fact missed the point entirely. It doesn't say that most stars don't have planets, it says most planets don't have stars. Ok.

summary says there are hundreds of billions of stars, and a million billion (quadrillion) planets, with a thousand billion (trillion) orbiting stars. That's ten thousand planets per star, and 10 orbiting planets per star. Then the conclusion state's most stars don't have planets. I don't follow.

Is Sen. Wyden describing what ACTA is actually doing? No? Then the jussive subjunctive is appropriate (in the US). "Senator Wyden Demands ACTA Go Before Congress" would be better a better headline. For me, it's not just a nitpick; it's a matter of clarity. I had difficulty understanding what the intent of the sentence was until I read the summary.

iOS has parental restrictions. Enable restrictions, enable Safari, leave everything else disabled. No step 3.

"Nginx over the past month has gained market share among all websites, whereas competitors Apache, Microsoft, and Google each lost share." Should read "webservers", not "websites"

Now that we've totally lost the war to reserve the word "hack" for what hard-core coders do only (tinkering with their devices and making software run), and not what blackhat infiltrators do, (accessing systems illicitly), I guess it was only a matter of time before someone started using "crack" wrong too.

Certainly the use of DRM violated GPLv3. Does it also violate GPLv2? Which clause?

The App Store TOS have changed many times since the FSF posted that, and that particular sentence no longer appears. So what is now the basis for VLC's actions? You can see the current TOS at http://www.apple.com/legal/itunes/us/terms.html#SERVICE It does contain clauses about "you may only use this app on a device you own" etc, which would appear to be against GPL. But it also says the App Store license only applies if the app doesn't have its own EULA. Seems to me (though IANAL) that in the case of a GPL app, that would be the EULA, and would hold instead of Apple's terms. Seems to me that VLC's actions were more about publicity and general offense about Apple's DRM than any actual claims that the GPL was violated. Though surely if they'd used GPL3 then they'd have a basis for such a claim.

Back when the iPhone first came out, and people were shrieking for native development, Steve Jobs announced his "sweet spot", which was the ability to write web apps for the thing (??). To support this position, Apple posted on their development site guidelines on best practices for modern web apps. These guidelines specifically advise against using browser sniffing (except under certain rare conditions which are not met here). One should instead use object detection.

Here are those guidelines. The document lists at length all the reasons not to engage in browser sniffing which are rehashed here. Basically there may be low or no correlation between the information in the user agent string and the browser's abilities. For example all browsers claim to be Mozilla, but it doesn't mean they all have the same feature set as Mozilla's Firefox.

Apple's developers who wrote this gallery appear not to have read this document, or more generally to understand the purpose of web standards at all. Apple's new HTML5 gallery touts standards, but it flouts all the goals of standards. The point of standards is that we can target a standard, rather than a browser. Apple violates the entire purpose, and deserves censure for this hypocrisy.