In part, yes. In part, it's the natural consequence of over-zealous enforcement of ANY rule. Sometimes it makes the most sense to write a line or two globally applicable to an entire message and then quote the whole thing.
In the cases where you want to make a general response to a whole message, I'd say for a short message, quoting the whole thing and responding at the bottom is better, for a long message, using ellipses to shorten the message and quoting at the bottom is better. Quoting the entirety of a message that is long enough that top quoting would even begin to seem desirable to avoid readers having to page through quoted text is a mistake, IMO, whether or not you top post.
Walter Murch, one of the most technically knowledgeable film editors and sound designers in the film industry today, argues, via Rogert Ebert's journal in the Chicago Sun-Times, that 3D cinema can't work, ever. Not just today's technology, but even theoretically.
Since 3D cinema pretty clearly empirically does "work" for most reasonable definitions of the word "work", arguments that it theoretically cannot work are obviously evidence of either bad theory or pointless misuses of language, or both.
Other problems (but these may be fixable) include the dimness of the image, and the fact that the image tends to 'gather in,' even on Imax screens, ruining the immersive experience.
Experience, including experience of immersion, is subjective. If a sufficient number of people didn't find 3D using existing, non-holographic technology, to increase immersion when executed well, it wouldn't be a successful selling point.
Some people don't like it, and it doesn't work well for some people (just like all the non-movie, non-holographic 3D tricks -- all of them work well for some people, and for any one of them they aren't comfortable for other people.) And, for that matter, things like shaky camera work -- for some people, that induces nausea and breaks immersion, for some people, it increases immersion and the sense of reality.
Movies rely on lots of tricks of the eye -- whether 2D or 3D -- and the experience of movies is subjective. Arguing that something you don't like that lots of people demonstrably do somehow can't work even in theory is rather pointless.
I really hate when I see a long email on a list and either have to hit page down 10 times to find the first bit that I didn't just read in the last 5 messages or when I get to the bottom 30 pages later and still haven't found anything new. It might be there and it might not, who knows?
Certainly this is a problem, but top posting isn't the solution. The solution is to aggressively prune quoted material to include only enough to make clear the immediate context of the response, especially when there are archives available for people who may not have received an earlier message but may have questions about the deeper context of the discussion.
When you upload to Facebook, you are stating that you DO have those rights taken care of.
No, you aren't. Nothing in the Facebook T&Cs requires you to assert that you have the right to use something in commercial advertising to post it on Facebook.
Thus, if your friend takes your picture and uploads it, they are claiming to have your permission
No, they aren't. They are claiming that there act of posting it doesn't violate anyone's IP rights (Sec. 5, Item 2 of the T&C), which, if they aren't using it for commercial advertising when they post it, is correct, whether or not they have permission to use it for commercial advertising.
All FB have to do is write a little extra into the privacy statement whereby users give permission for their faces to be used for commercial purposes.
What if your profile picture includes another person (Something I've noticed is fairly common)? Who may not even be a Facebook user? The Facebook T&C requires you to give a license to the rights you possess in anything you post on Facebook, but it doesn't require you to have the right to use it in commercial advertising in the first place.
Also, the "IP License ends when you delete your IP content or your account unless your content has been shared with others, and they have not deleted it."
Interestingly, since the non-exclusive license is not supported by a written, signed instrument, it will (under US copyright law) also be superceded by a subsequent transfer of the copyright itself (17 U.S.C. Sec. 205: "Priority Between Conflicting Transfer of Ownership and Nonexclusive License.— A nonexclusive license, whether recorded or not, prevails over a conflicting transfer of copyright ownership if the license is evidenced by a written instrument signed by the owner of the rights licensed or such owner’s duly authorized agent, and if— (1) the license was taken before execution of the transfer; or (2) the license was taken in good faith before recordation of the transfer and without notice of it.")
So, what you need to do to get the legal rights out from under Facebook is establish a legal entity separate from the original copyright holder of any photographs on Facebook -- let's call this the "Personal Rights in Images Management Agency, Inc. (PRIMA)", and then set up a process by which individuals can transfer ownership of copyright to pictures and other material already posted to Facebook to PRIMA, with conditions on the transfer covering how PRIMA will grant licenses (including a provision that they will grant licenses back to the original copyright holder at no charge), payments to the original copyright holder based on any license revenue, etc. Then, when you want your stuff off Facebook, you the copyright to PRIMA, and PRIMA sends a demand letter to Facebook to remove PRIMA's copyright-protected material immediately.
(There's no reason this has to be restricted to images, either: it works for anything covered by copyright law that you own the copyright to that Facebook continues to use under the "non-exclusive license" clause of the T&C.)
Don't worry, your friends and family will upload pictures of you and tag them for you so Facebook has photos of you to draw from.
And...exactly where does Facebook get the right to use my likeness in advertising? My friends and family didn't have it when they took the picture, so they can't have transferred it to Facebook by agreeing to the Facebook T&Cs.
As the only legal method of rejecting the current process is to get third parties into power which is the problem you're trying to solve, that only leaves illegal means.
Incorrect, in many states in the US, since they have citizen initiative processes which let you change state laws (which control most voting and elections processes, even for federal offices) without first electing politicians which support those changes. So, you can work for change through those mechanisms as the first step, then elect politicians under the new mechanisms as the next step.
There's more than one other side. You can vote Litertarian, Constitution, or Green. If you buy into the unintelligent argument that voting for any other party besides Reps and Dems is a wasted vote, than all those votes for McCain were wasted, because HE LOST and you voted for a loser!!!
In a plurality election (as most US elections, including the elections of Presidential electors in most states are), voting for a candidate other than your most preferred choice of the top two based on the information you have at the time of voting (particularly when there is a wide gap between #2 and #3) most likely has no effect other than to increase the probability of your least preferred candidate from the top two winning as compared to voting for your most preferred candidate of the top two.
This might be a rational choice if you perceive little real difference between the top two candidates such that the potential longer-range effect of a protest vote in validating a minor party and pushing it microscopically in the direction of displacing one of the two majors might be worth any short-term cost.
Though, really, its pretty much structurally impossible for a minor party in the US to displace a major party short of a self-destruction by the major party creating a vacuum, so the value even in cases where the majors are identical of a vote for anyone else, rationally, would seem to be little different than not voting at all.
Changes to the electoral system itself could, of course, change these incentives.
The commonly-held belief is that the priesthood attracts self-loathing homosexuals and/or pedophiles at a higher rate than other professions.
Please point to any evidence for the effect this "commonly-held" belief explains (to wit, the supposedly greater incidence of abuse in the Catholic Church). You don't even need to support the explanation offered by the belief, just the thing it seeks to explain.
"It is important always to remember that virtual contact cannot and must not take the place of direct human contact with people at every level of our lives."
Said the pope, just before praying to god
I see what you did there, but...it kind of misses the point.
Sure, you can draw an analogy between prayer and "virtual contact", but the Pope isn't condemning virtual contact, he is stating that it is important that it not take the place of "direct human contact with people at every level of our lives". I think you will find that, generally, the Pope and the Church, while obviously supporting prayer, don't advocate it displacing "direct human contact with people at every level of our lives". So, even seeing prayer and virtual contact as related concepts, there is nothing inconsistent here.
It is similar to the Mozilla idea in that it is persistent, but I like that Mozilla's method is 1) generic, and 2) ever-present. Both mechanisms would rely on behavior trackers' voluntary or enforced compliance.
Mozilla's mechanism is better in the long term (assuming people start supporting it on the backend), but Google's mechanism leverages something the big behavioral advertising firms are already supporting, but makes it simple to manage, so it works well right now, whereas sending Mozilla's do-not-track header right now will do nothing.
Isn't it then possible for the developers to set their rate of exchange very high and offer their currency directly for much less?
Possibly; obviously, if you do it through your Canvas-based game, it will break the terms of the requirement. But since it applies only to Canvas-based games (not to non-canvas apps, and not to non-game apps), if you have a shared credit system used in a non-game app or a non-canvas app (e.g., a mobile app that uses Facebook Connect), then you may still be able to have direct purchasing through the other apps. (E.g., many games that are Facebook Canvas games also have iPhone and/or Android versions that use Facebook Connect, and use the same credit system.)
The article seems to suggest that Zynga and the other main social gaming companies are already on board...
Actually, it flat-out states that Facebook has "worked out deals" with Zynga and other large developers. Which suggests to me that they've carved special sweetheart deals with the people making the games that are already popular (the developers that, if they left, would hurt Facebook) and that its the small existing developers and new developers that will actually be paying full charge on this. The bigs will be paying something, but they'll have a built-in advantage over new upstarts, so its a net positive for them, for now.
Zynga isn't going to leave facebook, not only do they consider the cost more then fair and part of how their business operate, but where would they go next?
Well, there is a certain major online company that made a major investment in Zynga last year that provides a unified logon alternative to Facebooks, a large existing user-based, and is also an OS vendor for mobile devices, smart TVs, and very soon consumer netbooks, all of which come with apps that tie to that vendors unified logon system.
Don't forget that you're only having that revenue because of them in the first place.
I don't think the relationship is that simple and unidirectional; even the games that launched through Facebook are now available off of the Facebook UI using Facebook for universal login. (e.g., the iOS versions of many of them.)
If some of the popular game shops extricated themselves from Facebook, they'd take a hit -- but so would Facebook's stickiness. And if Facebook tries to milk them, that creates a bigger incentive for them to split; a new 30% cut off the top is a pretty big hit they'll take to stay.
I understand this move by Facebook avoids user lock-in to one developer but you'd think some credit card model could be implemented by a third party that would take far less than a thirty percent cut.
No, it doesn't.
If I can choose to buy Game Operator A's gaming credits with cash, or some Game Operator B's gaming credits with cash, I'm locked into to one operator at the point at which I choose to buy their particular credits, but until them I am not locked into anything -- I can buy anything that can be bought with cash.
If I can choose to buy Game Operator A's gaming credits with Facebook Credits, or Game Operator B's gaming credits with Facebook Credits, but neither with cash, I am just as locked in once I choose to buy credits for a particular gaming operator, and less free than in the preceding scenario at the step immediately before that where I am locked into Facebook Credits.
Not true. The big behavior trackers no longer rely on cookies and haven't for some time.
I don't think you understand how the extension works. Its not a cookie blocker, its a cookie store that doesn't get erased when you erase your cookies -- specifically, it stores cookies for the cookie-based opt-out system that the big behavioral advertising providers are using.
One problem with this system without an extension like this is that clearing your cookies will clear your opt-outs. This system preserves the opt-out cookies (and ads them for new trackers as they become part of the system) so that you have a durable opt-out.
The actual method used for the behavioral tracking is irrelevant to the extension, what does matter is the method supported for opting out of the tracking.
Clearly not the original design, but very probably in the continued reliance on it. By now, a C++ application platform with no ties whatsoever to Java should have been added to the Android SDK and the fact that it is not suggests some kind of "go slow" order from the top
Its been no secret for quite some time that Android was a bridge OS for Google, with something like Chrome OS where apps are browser-hosted -- even if offline-usable -- as the long-term goal. Adding a C++ application platform to Android clearly does not head in the strategic direction that Google has made clear is their long-term push on the OS front, so, no, it wouldn't make sense to do that, whether or not there was a Java bias.
I'd be surprised if these files were individually registered with the US Copyright Office, but I could be wrong.
It doesn't really matter if they are now or were at the time they were copied; the registration requirement applies at the time the suit is filed, not at the time of the alleged infringement. Its fairly common for registration to occur immediately prior to filing suit.
I'm not really sure what Oracle is going for here, are they really that hard up for cash that they'll spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to squeeze Google for $150k?
Oracle is suing over Android. Some third-party blogger claimed to have discovered Oracle-owned code in the Android distribution with GPL licenses filed off and replaced with Apache licenses. As it turns out, the files do exist, but weren't in the code base for the Android distribution, they were in unit tests that were separate from the distribution.
Oracle, AFAICT, isn't going for anything (yet) with regard to these files.
If Google distributed the source at any point, it's a copyright violation, whether or not it shipped in a handset.
If it didn't ship in a handset, then while Google may have at some point committed a copyright violation, it doesn't show that the Android OS delivered in handsets is a product containing code under Oracle copyrights distributed improperly, and so while it might be a valid basis for a claim against Google of some kind, it isn't particularly relevant to the Android-related claims in the Oracle-Google lawsuit.
They still are guilty of replacing GPL license notices with an Incompatible Apache one.
Right. And Oracle could probably sue them for doing that, and probably force them to stop distributing (which they already have) or to distribute them with the right license notice. They might even be able to get some money, insofar as distributing them with the wrong open-source license caused demonstrable harm to Oracle, but proving compensable harm will be difficult.
But if they aren't part of the actual Android code, but are used in unit tests, they probably don't help Oracle's case that Android violates Oracle patents and copyrights, which was the supposed significance of the original "discovery".
If you take a purely binary view where either it is a violation of copyright or not, and that's all that matters, it probably isn't.
OTOH, if you are concerned with, say, Oracle's lawsuit against Google over Android itself being a copyright, patent, and other things violation, and the relevance of the files at issue to that claims in that case, then it makes a pretty big difference whether the files were part of the Android distribution or, instead, unit tests that were not part of the distribution even if they were publicly available over the web.
Didn't they undergo a massive cave-in to special interests?
We can argue all day about that, but it doesn't really matter since the organization that is putting on pressure for do-not-track mechanisms is the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), not the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) that recently adopted open internet ("net neutrality") rules that have been panned by some neutrality advocates as "worse than nothing" in terms of restricting ISP abuses and by some ISPs and Tea Party types as a totalitarian takeover of the internet by government.
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In part, yes. In part, it's the natural consequence of over-zealous enforcement of ANY rule. Sometimes it makes the most sense to write a line or two globally applicable to an entire message and then quote the whole thing.
In the cases where you want to make a general response to a whole message, I'd say for a short message, quoting the whole thing and responding at the bottom is better, for a long message, using ellipses to shorten the message and quoting at the bottom is better. Quoting the entirety of a message that is long enough that top quoting would even begin to seem desirable to avoid readers having to page through quoted text is a mistake, IMO, whether or not you top post.
Walter Murch, one of the most technically knowledgeable film editors and sound designers in the film industry today, argues, via Rogert Ebert's journal in the Chicago Sun-Times, that 3D cinema can't work, ever. Not just today's technology, but even theoretically.
Since 3D cinema pretty clearly empirically does "work" for most reasonable definitions of the word "work", arguments that it theoretically cannot work are obviously evidence of either bad theory or pointless misuses of language, or both.
Other problems (but these may be fixable) include the dimness of the image, and the fact that the image tends to 'gather in,' even on Imax screens, ruining the immersive experience.
Experience, including experience of immersion, is subjective. If a sufficient number of people didn't find 3D using existing, non-holographic technology, to increase immersion when executed well, it wouldn't be a successful selling point.
Some people don't like it, and it doesn't work well for some people (just like all the non-movie, non-holographic 3D tricks -- all of them work well for some people, and for any one of them they aren't comfortable for other people.) And, for that matter, things like shaky camera work -- for some people, that induces nausea and breaks immersion, for some people, it increases immersion and the sense of reality.
Movies rely on lots of tricks of the eye -- whether 2D or 3D -- and the experience of movies is subjective. Arguing that something you don't like that lots of people demonstrably do somehow can't work even in theory is rather pointless.
I really hate when I see a long email on a list and either have to hit page down 10 times to find the first bit that I didn't just read in the last 5 messages or when I get to the bottom 30 pages later and still haven't found anything new. It might be there and it might not, who knows?
Certainly this is a problem, but top posting isn't the solution. The solution is to aggressively prune quoted material to include only enough to make clear the immediate context of the response, especially when there are archives available for people who may not have received an earlier message but may have questions about the deeper context of the discussion.
When you upload to Facebook, you are stating that you DO have those rights taken care of.
No, you aren't. Nothing in the Facebook T&Cs requires you to assert that you have the right to use something in commercial advertising to post it on Facebook.
Thus, if your friend takes your picture and uploads it, they are claiming to have your permission
No, they aren't. They are claiming that there act of posting it doesn't violate anyone's IP rights (Sec. 5, Item 2 of the T&C), which, if they aren't using it for commercial advertising when they post it, is correct, whether or not they have permission to use it for commercial advertising.
All FB have to do is write a little extra into the privacy statement whereby users give permission for their faces to be used for commercial purposes.
What if your profile picture includes another person (Something I've noticed is fairly common)? Who may not even be a Facebook user? The Facebook T&C requires you to give a license to the rights you possess in anything you post on Facebook, but it doesn't require you to have the right to use it in commercial advertising in the first place.
Also, the "IP License ends when you delete your IP content or your account unless your content has been shared with others, and they have not deleted it."
Interestingly, since the non-exclusive license is not supported by a written, signed instrument, it will (under US copyright law) also be superceded by a subsequent transfer of the copyright itself (17 U.S.C. Sec. 205: "Priority Between Conflicting Transfer of Ownership and Nonexclusive License.— A nonexclusive license, whether recorded or not, prevails over a conflicting transfer of copyright ownership if the license is evidenced by a written instrument signed by the owner of the rights licensed or such owner’s duly authorized agent, and if—
(1) the license was taken before execution of the transfer; or
(2) the license was taken in good faith before recordation of the transfer and without notice of it.")
So, what you need to do to get the legal rights out from under Facebook is establish a legal entity separate from the original copyright holder of any photographs on Facebook -- let's call this the "Personal Rights in Images Management Agency, Inc. (PRIMA)", and then set up a process by which individuals can transfer ownership of copyright to pictures and other material already posted to Facebook to PRIMA, with conditions on the transfer covering how PRIMA will grant licenses (including a provision that they will grant licenses back to the original copyright holder at no charge), payments to the original copyright holder based on any license revenue, etc. Then, when you want your stuff off Facebook, you the copyright to PRIMA, and PRIMA sends a demand letter to Facebook to remove PRIMA's copyright-protected material immediately.
(There's no reason this has to be restricted to images, either: it works for anything covered by copyright law that you own the copyright to that Facebook continues to use under the "non-exclusive license" clause of the T&C.)
Don't worry, your friends and family will upload pictures of you and tag them for you so Facebook has photos of you to draw from.
And...exactly where does Facebook get the right to use my likeness in advertising? My friends and family didn't have it when they took the picture, so they can't have transferred it to Facebook by agreeing to the Facebook T&Cs.
As the only legal method of rejecting the current process is to get third parties into power which is the problem you're trying to solve, that only leaves illegal means.
Incorrect, in many states in the US, since they have citizen initiative processes which let you change state laws (which control most voting and elections processes, even for federal offices) without first electing politicians which support those changes. So, you can work for change through those mechanisms as the first step, then elect politicians under the new mechanisms as the next step.
There's more than one other side. You can vote Litertarian, Constitution, or Green. If you buy into the unintelligent argument that voting for any other party besides Reps and Dems is a wasted vote, than all those votes for McCain were wasted, because HE LOST and you voted for a loser!!!
In a plurality election (as most US elections, including the elections of Presidential electors in most states are), voting for a candidate other than your most preferred choice of the top two based on the information you have at the time of voting (particularly when there is a wide gap between #2 and #3) most likely has no effect other than to increase the probability of your least preferred candidate from the top two winning as compared to voting for your most preferred candidate of the top two.
This might be a rational choice if you perceive little real difference between the top two candidates such that the potential longer-range effect of a protest vote in validating a minor party and pushing it microscopically in the direction of displacing one of the two majors might be worth any short-term cost.
Though, really, its pretty much structurally impossible for a minor party in the US to displace a major party short of a self-destruction by the major party creating a vacuum, so the value even in cases where the majors are identical of a vote for anyone else, rationally, would seem to be little different than not voting at all.
Changes to the electoral system itself could, of course, change these incentives.
> There's no more pedophile priests than there are
> pedophile psychiatrists, teachers, and scout masters
cite, please.
Here's one for starters.
The commonly-held belief is that the priesthood attracts self-loathing homosexuals and/or pedophiles at a higher rate than other professions.
Please point to any evidence for the effect this "commonly-held" belief explains (to wit, the supposedly greater incidence of abuse in the Catholic Church). You don't even need to support the explanation offered by the belief, just the thing it seeks to explain.
"It is important always to remember that virtual contact cannot and must not take the place of direct human contact with people at every level of our lives."
Said the pope, just before praying to god
I see what you did there, but...it kind of misses the point.
Sure, you can draw an analogy between prayer and "virtual contact", but the Pope isn't condemning virtual contact, he is stating that it is important that it not take the place of "direct human contact with people at every level of our lives". I think you will find that, generally, the Pope and the Church, while obviously supporting prayer, don't advocate it displacing "direct human contact with people at every level of our lives". So, even seeing prayer and virtual contact as related concepts, there is nothing inconsistent here.
It is similar to the Mozilla idea in that it is persistent, but I like that Mozilla's method is 1) generic, and 2) ever-present. Both mechanisms would rely on behavior trackers' voluntary or enforced compliance.
Mozilla's mechanism is better in the long term (assuming people start supporting it on the backend), but Google's mechanism leverages something the big behavioral advertising firms are already supporting, but makes it simple to manage, so it works well right now, whereas sending Mozilla's do-not-track header right now will do nothing.
Isn't it then possible for the developers to set their rate of exchange very high and offer their currency directly for much less?
Possibly; obviously, if you do it through your Canvas-based game, it will break the terms of the requirement. But since it applies only to Canvas-based games (not to non-canvas apps, and not to non-game apps), if you have a shared credit system used in a non-game app or a non-canvas app (e.g., a mobile app that uses Facebook Connect), then you may still be able to have direct purchasing through the other apps. (E.g., many games that are Facebook Canvas games also have iPhone and/or Android versions that use Facebook Connect, and use the same credit system.)
The article seems to suggest that Zynga and the other main social gaming companies are already on board...
Actually, it flat-out states that Facebook has "worked out deals" with Zynga and other large developers. Which suggests to me that they've carved special sweetheart deals with the people making the games that are already popular (the developers that, if they left, would hurt Facebook) and that its the small existing developers and new developers that will actually be paying full charge on this. The bigs will be paying something, but they'll have a built-in advantage over new upstarts, so its a net positive for them, for now.
Zynga isn't going to leave facebook, not only do they consider the cost more then fair and part of how their business operate, but where would they go next?
Well, there is a certain major online company that made a major investment in Zynga last year that provides a unified logon alternative to Facebooks, a large existing user-based, and is also an OS vendor for mobile devices, smart TVs, and very soon consumer netbooks, all of which come with apps that tie to that vendors unified logon system.
Given 5 months lead time to prepare...
Don't forget that you're only having that revenue because of them in the first place.
I don't think the relationship is that simple and unidirectional; even the games that launched through Facebook are now available off of the Facebook UI using Facebook for universal login. (e.g., the iOS versions of many of them.)
If some of the popular game shops extricated themselves from Facebook, they'd take a hit -- but so would Facebook's stickiness. And if Facebook tries to milk them, that creates a bigger incentive for them to split; a new 30% cut off the top is a pretty big hit they'll take to stay.
I understand this move by Facebook avoids user lock-in to one developer but you'd think some credit card model could be implemented by a third party that would take far less than a thirty percent cut.
No, it doesn't.
If I can choose to buy Game Operator A's gaming credits with cash, or some Game Operator B's gaming credits with cash, I'm locked into to one operator at the point at which I choose to buy their particular credits, but until them I am not locked into anything -- I can buy anything that can be bought with cash.
If I can choose to buy Game Operator A's gaming credits with Facebook Credits, or Game Operator B's gaming credits with Facebook Credits, but neither with cash, I am just as locked in once I choose to buy credits for a particular gaming operator, and less free than in the preceding scenario at the step immediately before that where I am locked into Facebook Credits.
Not true. The big behavior trackers no longer rely on cookies and haven't for some time.
I don't think you understand how the extension works. Its not a cookie blocker, its a cookie store that doesn't get erased when you erase your cookies -- specifically, it stores cookies for the cookie-based opt-out system that the big behavioral advertising providers are using.
One problem with this system without an extension like this is that clearing your cookies will clear your opt-outs. This system preserves the opt-out cookies (and ads them for new trackers as they become part of the system) so that you have a durable opt-out.
The actual method used for the behavioral tracking is irrelevant to the extension, what does matter is the method supported for opting out of the tracking.
Clearly not the original design, but very probably in the continued reliance on it. By now, a C++ application platform with no ties whatsoever to Java should have been added to the Android SDK and the fact that it is not suggests some kind of "go slow" order from the top
Its been no secret for quite some time that Android was a bridge OS for Google, with something like Chrome OS where apps are browser-hosted -- even if offline-usable -- as the long-term goal. Adding a C++ application platform to Android clearly does not head in the strategic direction that Google has made clear is their long-term push on the OS front, so, no, it wouldn't make sense to do that, whether or not there was a Java bias.
I'd be surprised if these files were individually registered with the US Copyright Office, but I could be wrong.
It doesn't really matter if they are now or were at the time they were copied; the registration requirement applies at the time the suit is filed, not at the time of the alleged infringement. Its fairly common for registration to occur immediately prior to filing suit.
I'm not really sure what Oracle is going for here, are they really that hard up for cash that they'll spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to squeeze Google for $150k?
Oracle is suing over Android. Some third-party blogger claimed to have discovered Oracle-owned code in the Android distribution with GPL licenses filed off and replaced with Apache licenses. As it turns out, the files do exist, but weren't in the code base for the Android distribution, they were in unit tests that were separate from the distribution.
Oracle, AFAICT, isn't going for anything (yet) with regard to these files.
If Google distributed the source at any point, it's a copyright violation, whether or not it shipped in a handset.
If it didn't ship in a handset, then while Google may have at some point committed a copyright violation, it doesn't show that the Android OS delivered in handsets is a product containing code under Oracle copyrights distributed improperly, and so while it might be a valid basis for a claim against Google of some kind, it isn't particularly relevant to the Android-related claims in the Oracle-Google lawsuit.
They still are guilty of replacing GPL license notices with an Incompatible Apache one.
Right. And Oracle could probably sue them for doing that, and probably force them to stop distributing (which they already have) or to distribute them with the right license notice. They might even be able to get some money, insofar as distributing them with the wrong open-source license caused demonstrable harm to Oracle, but proving compensable harm will be difficult.
But if they aren't part of the actual Android code, but are used in unit tests, they probably don't help Oracle's case that Android violates Oracle patents and copyrights, which was the supposed significance of the original "discovery".
So they're just distributing copyrighted files?
Hardly sounds much better.
If you take a purely binary view where either it is a violation of copyright or not, and that's all that matters, it probably isn't.
OTOH, if you are concerned with, say, Oracle's lawsuit against Google over Android itself being a copyright, patent, and other things violation, and the relevance of the files at issue to that claims in that case, then it makes a pretty big difference whether the files were part of the Android distribution or, instead, unit tests that were not part of the distribution even if they were publicly available over the web.
Is this going to affect sites that use a cookie to maintain session state?
No. For more info, see the page for the extension.
Didn't they undergo a massive cave-in to special interests?
We can argue all day about that, but it doesn't really matter since the organization that is putting on pressure for do-not-track mechanisms is the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), not the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) that recently adopted open internet ("net neutrality") rules that have been panned by some neutrality advocates as "worse than nothing" in terms of restricting ISP abuses and by some ISPs and Tea Party types as a totalitarian takeover of the internet by government.