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"The Bush administration is objecting to the creation of a .xxx domain, saying it has concerns about a virtual red-light district reserved exclusively for Internet pornography." http://news.cnet.com/2100-1028_3-5833764.html

One of many, I'm sure. The conservative arguments about porn have historically been contrary to common sense. When it comes to sex, giving kids access to condoms and vaccines against STDs is immoral, but teaching abstinence and watching the teen pregnancy rate soar is just fine. With porn, it's easier to deny that it exists (or place the burden of filtering upon ISPs, or grant the govt the power to snoop through your internet records to search for pedo material) than it is to simply allow them all to (voluntairly!) migrate to an easily filtered domain.

What's sad, virtually everyone else - ESPECIALLY THE INDUSTRY - wants this. Few people are *trying* to show that stuff to children. Only the producers of (highly ineffective) blocking software stands to lose here.

Blaze backed away from its conclusion in light of the new data. Chief Technology Officer Guy Podjarny told CNET in a statement:
This test leveraged the embedded browser which is the only available option for iPhone applications. Blaze was under the assumption that Apple would apply the same updates to their embedded browser as they would their regular browser. If this is not the case and according to Apple's response, it's certainly possible the embedded browser might produce different results. If Apple decides to apply their optimizations across their embedded browser as well, then we would be more than willing to create a new report with the new performance results.

Read more: http://news.cnet.com/8301-30685_3-20044325-264.html#ixzz1GtaYoees

Has everyone forgotten about the 1995 consent decree?

Or am I conflating ethical with legal?

http://news.cnet.com/8301-31921_3-20043421-281.html

The White House today proposed sweeping revisions to U.S. copyright law, including making "illegal streaming" of audio or video a federal felony and allowing FBI agents to wiretap suspected infringers. In a 20-page white paper, the Obama administration called on the U.S. Congress to fix "deficiencies that could hinder enforcement" of intellectual property laws. The White House is concerned that "illegal streaming of content" may not be covered by criminal law, saying "questions have arisen about whether streaming constitutes the distribution of copyrighted works." To resolve that ambiguity, it wants a new law to "clarify that infringement by streaming, or by means of other similar new technology, is a felony in appropriate circumstances." http://news.cnet.com/8301-31921_3-20043421-281.html

Why is there a problem creating a copy? Because, then you are not sharing. When two people share something, a single thing is used by both. When creating a copy, two things are used by two people, that is not sharing.

It figures you have never shared an idea. Software is much closer to an idea than a physical thing.

The person who cares is the copyright holder whose livelihood depends on the creation distribution of said copies. Or, do you suggest that those who create should not be compensated? How long do you think people would continue to create works if they had to work full time doing something else to support themselves? Perhaps, they should resort to patronage, creating works solely at the whim of and for the use of a patron and whomever the patron dictates.

Study: File Sharers spend more money on music.

And if sharing hurts content creators, then since file sharing has been rising year after year, content creators profits should be down, right?
MPAA celebrates 5th consecutive year of record profits.
Swedes confirm UK study: Artist income rising.

Has for software, creating and adapting OSS is a valid business model for thousands of companies. I'll be working on one a few weeks from now.

How much does it cost to higher a programmer?

How is that relevant? Is it or not an advantage for the buyer, which you claimed not to exist?

So, you would do away with trade secrets too. Nice to know.

How the **** did you read that? If competitors can buy a copy of the program and study the code that reads the files, they can implement it in their programs.

Who is going to pay for a modification when one can purchase something that works the way one wants?

I don't get your point. Do you mean that the existing software already covers all the the needs for all the users, forever?

And, what of the one who invents the wheel? How does the inventor of the wheel gets recompense for his time, effort, and materials used to create the wheel?

First, that wheel was already created from other wheels. In fact, huge amounts of proprietary software are made using open source languages, libraries and tools.
Second, there are other ways of making money. Do you think the companies who develop Linux, just because it can be used for free? Or do you think that Java isn't lucrative just because you don't have to pay to develop software in it?
Or to move to applications, do you think Oracle does not make money from OpenOffice?

Your car analogy fails because we are talking software and not computers. Each component of a car would is the equivalent of a piece of software. So, when a computer breaks, you take it to a repair person who finds the problem and fixes it. This can be as simple as a "tune up" by cleaning out old files, registry entries, etc. It could be by replacing a broken component such as a hard drive, faulty ram, re-installing a corrupted program or removing malware. It could be something serious such as a bad motherboard, processor, or having to reinstall the operating system. Really, try to use a valid analogy because I have no problem pointing out your failures.

Yes, if you apply my analogy to something different than I did, no wonder it fails.

Cars are like applications, which is what we were talking about, not computers. Now go re-read the analogy.

I see, so I should be able to call you an evil person because you do something I don't like and if you don't like it, you just don't have to read it and all is well, yes?

Ahem. Alien Swarm is free because it's not very good.

What about Portal? Last year it was offered for free for a few days. And it was not only a "come-on" for me, it was a big red carpet welcome.

Fortunately people don't want that $50 over-priced nonsense and show otherwise....

So you're saying no one wants $50 games? How did GTA4 make a half billion dollars in it's first week then?

One way was by not releasing it on PC for a while. That prevented a lot of ordinary people (who haven't modded their XBox) from getting a pirate copy.

Ah, now that you finally got it, a subtle switch of argument from the App subscription rules to the App sales rules. Anyway, I will bite

The new rules won't take full effect until June. WIll be interesting to see if Amazon and Netflix relent or tell Apple to shove it(iUsers won't be happy to see Apple pull Kindle and Netflix). Most users dont' know and don't care about DRM, but if it affects them, they will be mighty pissed. Anyway it's not an easy switch from a 2 year contract with AT&T or Verizon and the otherwise nice Apple hardware.

Obviously, that's not happening....

http://news.cnet.com/8301-13579_3-20032012-37.html [cnet.com]

"iUsers" have made a choice to be "iUsers" and to spend over 17x as much buying apps. Apple must be doing something right...

Microsoft must have done something right to get 90%+ share... right? Windows and IE6 users made that choice right?
Why did they get smacked for it?

And before you say 'monopoly according to the law', your own link(and other recent articles saying Apple had 93% of the tablet market) proves that the App store has a monopoly on app sales for mobile developers. Isn't Apple leveraging their monopoly to disadvantage Kindle to push iBooks and Netflix to push ITunes streaming? This is worse than Microsoft with IE6, they just bundled the browser, neither prevented Netscape from running on Windows nor demand 30% of Netscape's revenue. So shouldn't the same rules apply to Apple as well?

"The difference is that ANYBODY IN THE ENTIRE WORLD can compete with Readability by providing the exact same service taking only 29%, 5% or 0% or -30% , whereas iUsers are locked into a walled garden by Apple, so NOBODY IN THE ENTIRE WORLD can set up an alternative App Store and compete by charging less because of DRM lockdown. (Note the difference with Android and the Amazon App Store). Hence iUsers+iDevelopers must combinedly cough up the 30% surcharge."

And if Readability provides such a great service, Apple's "lockdown" is so draconian and Android provides a much better experience because of it's "openness", it seems like the Android Market should really be taking off and should be a godsend for both developers and users....

Obviously, that's not happening....

http://news.cnet.com/8301-13579_3-20032012-37.html

"iUsers" have made a choice to be "iUsers" and to spend over 17x as much buying apps. Apple must be doing something right...

Did a quick check to amuse myself. Hmm, first 6 adds on every Bing search result are spam, pretty much guaranteed. Beyond that definitely more spam on Bing than on Google, oh wait, I am using https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/optimizegoogle/ to filter out crappy sites (including ebay). Well since you seem to be doing M$ advertising, is there a similar addon for Bing on IE to Optimize Google on Firefox.

Back on topic, I guess Ballmer's uncle is going to be really really disappointed to hear no more Zune, their number one customer. Using you phone to listen to music and watch streaming video is neat and convenient, apart from battery life and data download limits http://reviews.cnet.com/cell-phone-battery-life-charts/.

Making it even easier for folks like Iran and Egypt and Saudi Arabia to control information and (lack of) freedom...

Um, you did notice that the US not only blocks domains in their own country, but prevents other countries from seeing it as well?

Hate to break it to you, but the US has lost the moral high ground when it comes to internet freedom.

We tolerate this mostly because of the magical "I" word, infrastructure. It was only recently that mobile providers were told to open up their towers to other carriers, allowing local service providers like MetroPCS and whatnot to participate in what used to be dominated by ATT, Verizon and T-mobile. A big push for that came thanks to Google'lobbying, and right now the people that own the phone and cable lines are still making that exact same argument as was made for the cellphone towers, and they're winning.

However, I posted earlier that this might be just the impetus necessary for companies like google to once again come to the rescue.

http://news.cnet.com/Google-lobbies-for-open-wireless-networks/2100-1039_3-6190863.html

Here were the top cell phones in 2004....

http://reviews.cnet.com/1710-5-0.html?year=2004&node=6454

So do you think that Motorola and Samsung should be porting Android to these?

There were, however, lots of Pentium MMX laptops. They also made Pentium II-based Celeron laptops and Pentium III and Pentium III-based Celeron laptops. Some people applied the "P6" moniker not only to the Pentium Pro, but also to the Pentium MMX, Pentium II (which was basically a Pentium Pro + MMX), and even up through the Pentium M and Pentium IV. The new families of chips since would be the Core, Core 2, and Core i series.

CNet confirms it.

Also, despite some poser on IMDB saying that the PCI bus underlaid all Pentium systems and that therefore the statement about the PCI bus affecting the screen refresh is wrong, not all Pentium systems in fact used the PCI bus. Some used VESA Local Bus, which was admittedly outdated. Some used EISA. IBM had MicroChannel (MCA). In fact, many laptops of the time didn't use the PCI bus that was common among desktop Pentiums because they weren't upgradeable anyway and the graphics performance on laptops was often bottlenecked by either a proprietary graphics chip outside any standard interface or an old ISA interface.

There are plenty of errors in the film, which is still a pretty enjoyable thing, IMO, to watch despite (and sometimes because) of them. There's no need to go looking for errors that aren't really there.

It seems IE9 performance is coming through also in tests made by others than MS and to mimick real world use (if you count web gaming as such :) http://news.cnet.com/8301-30685_3-20029827-264.html

Back in 2004 I've read a quite interresting article on ARM. http://news.cnet.com/The-unheralded-monopoly/2010-1006_3-5262581.html As you can see, the strong position of the ARM is not new, maybe just a bit more visible these days.

Prof. Brian Derby of the University of Manchester was printing bone scaffolding in 2005. He was a finalist for the Saatchi and Saatchi World Changing Ideas Award in 2008 for that work (full disclosure: I was a finalist as well, but for something else).

Here's but one link to the press coverage of that particular idea from 2005.
http://news.cnet.com/Paging%20Dr.%20Inkjet/2100-1041_3-5656823.html

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-04-07/apple-ipad-parts-may-cost-as-little-as-260-isuppli-says-after-teardown.html
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13924_3-20037865-64.html

The 32GB ipad costs 730 and according to these sources the parts cost at or below 300. So the gross margin before labor and FOB china is between $400 & $500. I stand by my original comment.

I'm not sure how it was on IA64, I guess it was a virtual machine kind of thing, but I remember people not being that happy

(guess what http://news.cnet.com/Intel-scraps-once-crucial-Itanium-feature/2100-1006_3-6028817.html)

The Android way: There's an app we don't aprove of? Just download it from one of the other stores - where there is even more malware than on our store.

You know that Android isn't the opposite of Apple, right?

(There are more than 2 big players in the smartphone market. For example, RIM, according to the most recent Nielsen report, has as many post-paid subscribers as Apple!)

Additionally iOS isn't immune to malware -- and "apps" aren't the only attack vector smartphone users should be worried about.

Last August, for example, simply visiting a website was enough to jailbreak your iPhone. If that can be done by visiting a website, what can't be done?

The illusion of perfect security that Apple provides is really quite dangerous for their users. This becomes increasingly more important as Apple gains market share and becomes an larger/more attractive target for malware authors.

Suppose Joe Q User got a high n < 50 emails from Spammer King per day. A few cents a day in 'damage recovery' won't be worth suing for when courts/lawyers charge in the thousands, and he's not the one paying for bayesian algorithm research and footing the power / maintenance bills for monthly SPAM filtering appliances.

WebMail providers and ISPs are the only parties that could USE your so-dubbed 'BS metric' to litigate any useful net values in the high Millions of dollars for millions of filtered emails to their millions of worldwide users. I would support their initiative... but they just aren't interested. It's the same apathy that Microsoft shows by caring only once or twice in ~20 years to sue malware creators who case real damages in IT time, ransomware actually paid, and data loss caused from poorly planned fixes and emergency restores.

How much less could a Webmail provider care compared to giants like MS, when spam is so hard to track that they're gladly footing the bulk-filtering bills mentioned and still giving millions of us "free" webmail?

How is a full body pat down any different from this? You gave up your right to privacy when you chose to fly. Otherwise, seizing and inspecting the laptops of traveling US Citizens would not be legal.

Get a 10 on the Cool Meter!

If an emulator, however cool, gets a 10, then Steve "Slug" Russell playing it last month on the original hardware at the Computer History Museum, definitely goes to eleven.

If Gates really cared in that way, would he have stepped aside? And left the shop to "the Ballmer monkey"? Hewlett & Packard I'll grant you since they create a great company that was the favorite place to work of all IT guys, and it took Carly Fiorina to undo their work. But Ellison & Gates? I just can't find it in my heart to extend any benefit of any doubt for those two.

Don't get me wrong... I'm no fan of Gates (quite the opposite) but I'm willing to at least acknowledge that he started off as a geek unlike Ballmer. As for Larry Ellison he occasionally has amusing things to say (eg. http://news.cnet.com/8301-13953_3-10052188-80.html) and unlike Jobs, Gates, etc. he seems to actually take the time to enjoy his billions (yaht races) which gives him a couple of brownie points in my book (I get the impression that the others just like to sit at home and count the money). OTOH I think that the following defintion is apt:

ORACLE = One Raving Asshole Called Larry Ellison

The only problem I have with your statements is while OSX is based on Unix, Apple hasn't been the most proactive in keeping it's security up to date/maintenance. And when they do patch the holes, 2 3 the list of holes tend to be quite large which means they are doing quite a large backlog (with some of the holes being months overdue, like in the first example having a security hole known since August and not patched until January the next year).

You can take something very secure but if your falter in it's maintenance then it won't be of a lot of use in real world usage. And its due to issues like these that make me believe the opposite. Sure, due to it's Unix background, OSX could be very secure, but its not. And as long as these issues keep happening then people like Charlie Miller will keep breaking into Macs and showing that they are in fact less secure then Windows. And while Microsoft isn't always patching security holes on day 0, they are much more likely to address the holes a lot faster then Apple has.

http://news.cnet.com/8301-10789_3-9973703-57.html

BEGONE FANBOI BEGONE!!

Was Steve Jobs right? Is a single, restrictive & tested, marketplace the way to go?

No. Malware can get into a single market just by businesses rather than "cybercriminals" http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/dear_iphone_users_your_apps_are_spying_on_you.php [readwriteweb.com] And of course all platforms have had some sort of remote exploit http://news.cnet.com/8301-27080_3-10299378-245.html [cnet.com] Conclusion: a "single, restrictive & tested, marketplace" just provides a feeling of security, while giving up the user-freedom of installing any app. I prefer the freedom and am (so far) very happy with the homebrew community support offered by Palm (and now HP) http://www.precentral.net/hp-donates-server-homebrew-webos-internals-group [precentral.net] Techy users should be able to install whatever homebrew app they want...just understanding "no lifeguard on duty."

Say what you will about Apple's "walled garden" but I don't hear of such things on their AppStore.

It happens just by businesses rather than "cybercriminals" http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/dear_iphone_users_your_apps_are_spying_on_you.php And of course all platforms have had some sort of remote exploit http://news.cnet.com/8301-27080_3-10299378-245.html Conclusion: "walled gardens" for apps just provide a feeling of security, while giving up the user-freedom of installing any app. Personally I prefer the freedom and am (so far) very happy with the homebrew community support offered by Palm (and now HP) http://www.precentral.net/hp-donates-server-homebrew-webos-internals-group

http://www.examiner.com/gadgets-in-san-francisco/motorola-droid-owners-reporting-issues-with-android-2-2-update
http://www.androidcentral.com/evo-4g-update-pulled-over-problems
http://www.cnet.com/8301-17918_1-20019676-85.html

Just a few quick search examples.

You select it in the menu.

If you use KDE, and insert a CD, or connect a USB drive you get a popup offering things like opening it in a file manager, or looking for photos on it, and it makes an icon in the systray too.

I don't have an ubuntu box on hand right now to make 100% sure, but I'll try to get back to you later.

You're totally right! Showing a commercial during the Superbowl that treats the users of competing devices/OSes as being trapped in an oppressive 1984 type world they need to be rescued from ALWAYS results in anger and ultimately leads to the total failure and bankruptcy of the company that sponsored the ad.

All the popular ones like Netflix? Oh wait, no it doesn't and as I pointed out Janus has been here OVER five years and all FOSS "hackers" have to show for it is a giant FAIL next to their score. Next!

BTW you want to see "the ultimate future" of FOSS? Do you? It is kinda sad but you can see the end result today of the "never compromise, down with the great Satan!" holy war pushed by RMS. All you have to do is look up what "PC" RMS uses to see how FOSS will ultimately end...in case you don't know he is stuck on a Loongson "netbook" that only supports a teeny tiny niche of software, no flash, no web video, hell I bet the man can't even listen to music unless it is a specially crafted Vorbis file, and frankly the machine is probably illegal in the west due to the fact the Chinese incorporated x86 instructions into their ARM chip without a license.

And your big "savior" is Android? BWA HA HA HA! You ever see "Pirates of silicon valley"? Remember the scene where Jobs is rallying against IBM and his engineer is pointing to the IBM video and to Gates, who is about to fuck him raw? Well guess what? Notice anything...funny...about Android? Like how Google refuses to allow ANY GPL V3 code into DroidOS? Why do you think that is? It is because Google is gonna buttfuck FOSS by pulling the TiVo trick which they can't do if they allow GPL V3, that's why! Your "savior" is gonna be about as useful to FOSS as TiVo! It is SOOOO funny!

As for Janus now who is spreading FUD? In case you haven't heard The EU busted MSFT and made them open their protocols so all the Linux foundation would have to do is ask for a Janus binary blob (and Get Linus to quit acting like an ass and support a stable driver API) and the EU would make MSFT cough one up or drop the banhammer on them to the tune of a couple of hundred million.

And again you go "la la la" and refuse to accept reality. In reality The ONLY reason the music companies allowed MP3 is because Apple has a monopoly with iTunes which means there was simply no way to offer DRM, since Apple refuses to license Fairplay and doesn't support Janus on WMA. Which means if they want Amazon and other music retailers to compete with Apple it HAS to work on an iPod and frankly the ONLY format that fit that bill was either MP3 or WAV, so it wasn't like they had a choice.

Now compare that to video where the studios have gone out of their way to ensure that Apple doesn't get squat since they don't want a repeat of the music debacle where Apple could pretty much dictate terms and could kill an artists sales by simply burying their ads to the back of iTunes, and where the X360 owns a significant share of the living room. Here you will simply never see a repeat of MP3 because MSFT has licensed Janus liberally, with the X360, PS3, Wii, and numerous set top boxes supporting Netflix and by extension Janus DRM. Google tried to force the issue and got the banhammer dropped on them making Google TV worthless when compared to even CCC (Cheapo Chinese Crap) set top box, so frankly this battle is over, like Mp3 VS Vorbis.

But in the end thanks to the militants wing of FOSS the future of FOSS is bleak with corps like Google "TiVo Tricking" away your four freedoms on one side (and which is being assisted by Linus who refuses to go GPL V3) and online DRM Video being "the killer app" which will ensure that not a single B&M will carry your product. Not Walmart not Best Buy not a single one shall be had. In the end without the ability to compromise FOSS will simply stay locked into an increasingly small web server niche because thanks to t

I'm pretty tired of Slashdot allowing any twat to plagiarise a story, (in this case from CNET at http://news.cnet.com/8301-13924_3-20033940-64.html )and screw up a few facts (eg, they confuse Gigabits with Gigabytes; only out by a factor of 8), submit it "anonymously" and then drive traffic to their crummy site.

"NetBeans is not owned by Oracle"

Sun bought Netbeans up a while back. They tried to make a commercial version of it called ForteCE or something dumb like that before trying to rebundle it as a SunOne stack. I download Netbeans from Oracle's website today.

The iOS app store can have it's fair share of malware too. It's easy to hide snooping software behind a simple game for example. In fact, all apps can access the contacts list, recent youtube searches, email settings and even non-password field keystrokes.

So are you trying to claim that Android actually has a much higher market share than iOS because it is hit by more actual malware? Or are you just whistling in the woods?

The iOS app store can have it's fair share of malware too. It's easy to hide snooping software behind a simple game for example. In fact, all apps can access the contacts list, recent youtube searches, email settings and even non-password field keystrokes. When developers submit apps they only submit the binary and not the source code so Apple's app approval monkeys basically only cover what they can see. This "walled garden" argument is stupid for this reason.

However, although you may very well be correct about the technical potential being there; why don't we keep seeing a monthly parade of the same sort of stories of ACTUAL, REAL-WORLD examples of THEORETICAL iOS vulnerabilities ACTUALLY being exploited to steal user data, like we do with Android?

Maybe something to do with the fact that the DEVS. must first REGISTER with Apple, before they can get their App. even CONSIDERED for inclusion in the iOS App Store. That process alone apparently is enough (I would wager even without Apple's code review process) to make crooks think twice about even TRYING to publish malware on the App Store.

Kind of the same reason why a bank robber (at least a sane one) would never attempt to rob at gunpoint, the bank at which he has an account.

The iOS app store can have it's fair share of malware too. It's easy to hide snooping software behind a simple game for example. In fact, all apps can access the contacts list, recent youtube searches, email settings and even non-password field keystrokes. When developers submit apps they only submit the binary and not the source code so Apple's app approval monkeys basically only cover what they can see. This "walled garden" argument is stupid for this reason.

...And while it lost market share to some of its mobile rivals, Apple still captured 82.7 percent of the app store market last year, down from 92.8 percent the prior year.

So that's what, 17.3% left for Android, roughly a 1:5 ratio to Apple? Yes Android is growing quickly, and it has a long way to go to catch up. That could happen, sure. Let's look at this from another angle -- what is the per-user value on both platforms? Apple's users spend more. http://www.businessinsider.com/chart-of-the-day-iphone-android-revenue-per-user-2011-2

Uninformed is not the correct term. Realistic is more apt -- if you're an app developer you typically want to get the largest market possible, and the Apple store is the largest market today. The 30% fee is an entrance fee to this quantity of people... people who generally spend more on apps. It's like complaining that advertising via generic "occupant" coupon books through the mail is cheaper and you'd rather do that than buy a TV or magazine ad. It's cheaper for a reason -- the number of qualified buyers you reach. The Apple store is king of that area today.

No, I mean about a billion.

Not successfully, but the Moorestown atoms were targeted for smart phones and tablets.

What's preventing them from using POTS to do BGP updates periodically to create the separate network required? Some routers still have built-in ISDN links. You don't have to build a 2nd internet to have it work. btw, McLean, VA where that incident occurred is suspiciously close to Langley It's mentioned in the cnet reference article.

It is not illegal until you say "I plan to" or "I am going to."

Not true. Speech is not protected if a court finds that it incites violence:

The more than 12 defendants in the case were ordered to pay $100 million in damages to abortion clinics and doctors. They had argued that they have a free speech right to publish details about the doctors, but after a three-week trial, an eight-person jury found that such sites were a "true threat" to physicians who perform abortions, according to the Planned Parenthood Columbia/Willamette (PPCW) in Portland.

Note that the Christian web site in question never said that they planned to or were going to carry out acts of violence - it merely collated information about what they termed "baby butchers" and called for them to be "brought to justice".

come off it... Apple only exist now because Microsoft pumped money into them to keep them alive so that:

1) they could continue to claim they weren't a monopoly

and

2) to keep a safety valve open for the arty types who couldn't stand windows to prevent them from running to Linux and picking it up and making it beautiful...

If Microsoft was really playing to win the entire market, they'd have allowed Apple to go belly up

History leason: http://news.cnet.com/2100-1001-202143.html

MS got: IE as the default browser on the Mac, and the end to patent lawsuits. Where those worth 150M investment and a 5 year commitment to Office? Monetarily MS certainly ended up way ahead, and in 97 they were so blinded by a desire for browser dominance its not out of the question that was their motivation.

Apple's main win was the public 5 year commitment of MS Office. The investment was not a significant amount of money for Apple. From TFA:

Apple, which ended its third quarter with $1.2 billion in cash, will use the additional $150 million to invest in its core markets of education and creative content, Anderson said. He added that the company expects to gain a higher percentage of its revenues from software and services in these core markets in the future.

Of course its a PR win for MS, for the next 20 years they get people spouting off misremembered things like 'MS saved Apple'.

Not long ago Opera and Chrome seemed unbeatable on Javascript speed (Sunspider). Quite impressive speed on IE9, coming out and beating them all, even for the people not caring about hardware accellerated graphics.

No matter what your browser of choice is right now, IE9 is adding to the competition in a good way - even following standards more strictly than some others (eg. not implementing non-standards/unfinished standards).

Or a Bandaid: http://reviews.cnet.com/8301-19512_7-20011050-233.html

DARPA is more or less trying this again. With better results.

Did it involve cruise control at any point? There was an article a while back about Woz saying he had found a specific software bug with the accelerator. According to him the NHTSA dragged their feet on investigating it. If I had one, I'd probably stick some DAQ hardware on the ECU buses to see if I could record the problem.

betamax cassettes don't have the capability to see exactly what you are copying and determine if it should be allowed or not.

Nor does a file sharing service. Without a database of every non-free copyrighted work ever published, it can't determine whether the VP8 frames and Vorbis MDCTs of the .webm video that you uploaded represent a non-free copyrighted work. Relying on title matching leads to the Usher debacle. An automated process currently can't detect nonliteral copying either, such as adaptation of a non-free copyrighted book into a film. And even if an automated process could reliably identify all non-free copyrighted works used in a given work, no automated process can make judgments about the purpose and character of a particular use. That's why the law relies largely on takedown notices.

I think you're confused on the point of "attack".

For example, I can post a link to this page. Google can now see the page. Of course, it could get to that page from within shopper.cnet.com, anyway, but the robots.txt file or NOINDEX/NOFOLLOW tags may be warning it off. (So Google has to walk the URL back up to http://shopper.cnet.com/robots.txt, to make sure, and it may not see http://www.shopper.com/robots.txt, by the way.)

More to the point, I can post a link to this page of a search result on shopper.com. Then Google can see that search. And, in an hour or two, it might show up in a google search of "wall wart servers", which would be useless, but anyway.

I can post a link to this query, however, and, not only might Google's spider collect it (from here), but it might not even have to get it from here. I'm probably not the first person to search shopper.com for "Small office home office server".

I can't see there being an ethical issue here, because those links feed people to shopper.com. In fact, cnet likely has some agreements with Google on that. And many such search sites (well, smaller ones) deliberately use Google's search engines to save themselves a bit of infrastructure cost.

Google, on the other hand, may prefer not to put some of those small search sites results on their general search pages, but that's a side issue.

Now, how do you suppose that bing picks up a query like, "m4-7734-6al 63363r"? Unless someone posts that (like I just did), how does bing get that query just from my using it in a Google search a few minutes ago?

To say this is a case of the pot calling the kettle black, you'd be accusing google of planting code in Chrome that watches for bing search results and feeds them back to google's search engine optimizer on the sly. (A new way for a browser to call home!) And/or of making deals with the Mozilla team. But the evidence you mention doesn't really support that, as someone else points out.