I doubt that these people know anything about technology. The governments generally hire some companies to do the obscure technology "magic" thing. As for people, most of them have probably never learned a thing about the technologies they use.

Actually, it's all about slowing innovation, so it can very well be used as "enforcing bogus patents": Apple is famous for recently suing competition over abstract ideas. They don't even try to hide that fact.

Still, its useful keeping "patent troll" separate to describe a particular type of company. The own patents (mostly acquired from dead companies), don't make anything and live off squeezing other companies. Most trollish in that they live off extorting "license fees" with the threat of legal action, rather than actually winning lawsuits. They are structured in ways that makes them unafraid of lawsuits and use that to intimidate companies that are.

Patent Trolling is just another means to the same end.

For Google, I don't truly have a choice because there is no serious competitor for both the quality and the privacy, so I just ticked a.).

For Ubuntu, a.) and b.). Shuttleworth's childish attitude is shocking.

Can't you compile the source, run a checksum on all the files respective files and check if they're identical for both versions?

Can we keep a sort of page where we put all the commands to remove the bullshit from Ubuntu? I think it's starting to grow and stink more and more.

You imply that "the community" changed opinions... but "the community" is not a person. It's not necessarily minds that change rather than the people. The readers of HN are the teenagers of yesterday, who have never stopped disliking Apple.

That's not "political pressure", is it?

I don't think President Bush asked him to switch to Intel, no.

>Anyone could copy-paste a news article verbatim.

Yes, andrewljohnson agrees about that. However, his point is:

>Linking to copyrighted material should not be illegal

And I have to concur. This should not be a copyright violation.

So... what of TPB? All they do is link to copyright material; none if it's hosted there.

TPB is legal. And they don't even link to copyrighted material, they link to a swarm from which you can git information on where to download copyrighted material.

It was implied 'link to legally copyrighted material'...

The Pirate Bay does not have to worry about the DMCA, they were originally (are?) hosted in Sweden, and US law like the DMCA doesn't apply there.

Why on earth should TPB be illegal! You know, not every torrent on there is illegal.

Agreed. We're not used to see modern works reused freely because it has never happened. But with an open mind, I can easily see it. 28 years after your death, the world well deserves to finally use your work.

I stupidly tried to do that some time ago (got confused juggling with my spammed mail addresses that are all forwarding to my main email address), and Google told me it was a bad idea.

Was that just a warning from Google, but still allow you to do it?