I believe that's not restricted to law firms. Anyoune can send a letter telling someone to pay up or they'll sue them. Doesn't mean they have any change in court though.
The claim is that the users of the streaming site were storing, and thus copying, the copyrighted content, which is illegal in Germany. However, that "storing" refers to the caching necessary to play the content while streaming. By that definition, every ISP would be infringing copyright laws everyday too, since, at some point, the packets going through their routers are stored in memory.
I don't believe this would be a valid claim in court. However, IANAL...

I haven't looked up how exactly the signing mechanism works, so please correct me if i'm wrong.
Since you can install your own certificates on your local machine, couldn't you also alter Windows and resign it with your local keys, thus defeating the DRM "feature" of UEFI Secure Boot?

Fire - exclamation mark - fire - exclamation mark - help me - exclamation mark. Looking forward to hearing from you. Yours truly, ...

I can make you a GUI that makes the signal go to 12 bars! Even without beer cans! http://xkcd.com/670/

IANAL, so I might be wrong, but I think software patents are not even allowed in Europe, which means that such agreements probably wouldn't apply in this case. I would actually like to know if this is the case. Does anyone have specific information on it?

Sooo... What they're saying is that a page that links to an 'illegal' page is also 'illegal'. If you follow that chain, basically EVERY website is illegal.
My god, we have to shut down the internet right now!

Can sombody explain why this is illegal? Every highschool student taking a chemistry course 'possesses material useful for acts of terror'. The fact that somebody owns something that COULD be used for some illegal activity doesn't make that person a criminal. Else, everybody would be in prison. Have you ever used a knife? A car? A computer? Thought so.

Thereby increasing the idea that there is no market for commercial games in Linux. I, on the other hand, only purchase and play games with a native Linux client. This means largely supporting indies over big studios, but BioWare got an extra sale they wouldn't have otherwise when they released a Linux client for Neverwinter Nights.

In any case, the idea that there is no Linux market has been disproven on several occasions. 2DBoy reported 17% of purchasers during their birthday pay-what-you-want World of Goo sale were Linux users, vs. 18% Mac users and 65% Windows. Not only that, but we paid about a third more than Mac users and almost twice as much as Windows users.

I'm just saying that .NET adds an abstraction layer, which was already supposed to make this kind of "cross-platform"-programming possible. That's why I mentioned Java. With Java, you can get a program running on, for example, Windows and Linux, since you "compile it" platform-independent, and then run your intermediate language on a virtual machine which in turn is compiled for the specific platform and calls specific API functions. If you have an intermediate layer with a defined language where, for example, you can call a function CreateWindow(size, whatever) and you don't have to worry what that function really does (in terms of OS) or what architecture it was compiled for, then you can't really say you made a breakthrough by making a "cross-platform-app". The real effort was made porting the .NET framework, not making an app that runs on top of it.

Wow, they actually got a .NET program working on several different microsoft operating systems! Now, seriously, where's the news? .NET runs on a virtual machine. It's just like showing a Java game that "magically" works on several differnet PLATFORMS (and with Java they can be called platforms, a program running on several different microsoft products can hardly be called cross-platform).

Especially since China is spying on US companies, while the US is (probably!) only spying on Chinese government/military networks.

Well, in China pretty much everything is controlled by the government, so the US might as well "only spy on Chinese government" to get the same amount of information...

Same here. From 12 to 3am I have my best 'moments of inspiration'. At some point between 3 and 4 (sometimes later, or sooner, depending on how much I slept) that inspiration goes away really fast. Past that point, my code just sucks...
Btw, I like to listen to techno music while programming, since the lack of lyrics and the repetitiveness of it don't distract me while the fast beats keep my adrenaline level (and thus my concentration on the task) relatively high. What kind of music do you like to listen to, if any?

So, the government is just assuming that NONE of the 390.000 employees will fall victim of a social engineering attack, EVER? I don't think that even fits into the definition of optimism...