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And that's why I continue to use Windows – horrible Windows – even though I hate every second of it. It's grim, it's slow, everything's badly designed and nothing really works properly: using Windows is like living in a communist bloc nation circa 1981. And I wouldn't change it for the world, because I'm an abject bloody idiot and I hate myself, and this is what I deserve: to be sentenced to Windows for life.

That's why Windows works for me. But I'd never recommend it to anybody else, ever. This puts me in line with roughly everybody else in the world. No one has ever earnestly turned to a fellow human being and said, "Hey, have you considered Windows?" Not in the real world at any rate.

Until now. Microsoft, hellbent on tackling the conspicuous lack of word-of-mouth recommendation, is encouraging people – real people – to host "Windows 7 launch parties" to celebrate the 22 October release of, er, Windows 7.

Enligt skivbolagens internationella samarbetsorganisation IFPI kopierades 40 miljarder musikfiler olagligt under 2008. Om varje låt var värd 160 000 kronor skulle det innebära att den totala skadan var 6,4 miljoner miljarder kronor.

När skivförsäljningen i världen nådde sin topp i början av 2000-talet sålde man enligt samma organisation skivor för 27 miljarder dollar, cirka 200 miljarder kronor. Den påstådda förlusten av fildelningen som man grundade skadeståndsanspråken på var alltså drygt 30 000 gånger större än vad skivförsäljningen någonsin inbringat. Domen mot Tenenbaum handlade alltså inte om ersättning för en skada, den är en del av en ny affärsmodell för skivbolagen.

Myhrvold’s firm illustrates in a way that no law review article could the extent to which the patent system punishes firms that actually produce useful products. Firms whose business models involve actual innovation have to show restraint in exploiting their patent portfolios. If they don’t, there’s a high probability that some of their adversaries will countersue and both firms will be dragged into a legal quagmire. But if litigation is your only business, then you’re not vulnerable to retaliatory infringement lawsuits, so you can exploit your patent portfolio much more aggressively. Many small “patent troll” firms have exploited this flaw in the past, but Myhrvold is the first person to recognize that it can be exploited in a systematic, large-scale fashion.

But why not the Internet?

The reason is that it’s the most aggravating place in the world to write commercial software for.

You have, off the top of my head, 4 major web browsers to deal with across at least two operating systems.

Each of these scenarios requires its own set of tests, and each browser will behave slightly differently depending on what OS it’s running on and what browser version it is running.

And then there’s mobile.

Translation: I work at Microsoft and all this pesky choice, and the lack of the monoculture I'm used to, is scaring me.

Librarians call it the 20th-century black hole. The overwhelming force is not gravity but copyright law, sucking our collective culture into a vortex from which it can never escape.

Mr Murdoch said free news on the web provided by the BBC made it "incredibly difficult" for private news organisations to ask people to pay for their news.

The lesson in all of this is that little we do is ephemeral anymore. We leave electronic audit trails everywhere we go, with everything we do. This won't change: We can't turn back technology. But as technology makes our conversations less ephemeral, we need laws to step in and safeguard our privacy. We need comprehensive data privacy laws, protecting our data and communications regardless of where it is stored or how it is processed. We need laws forcing companies to keep it private and delete it as soon as it is no longer needed, and laws giving us the right to delete our data from third-party sites. And we need international cooperation to ensure that companies cannot flaunt data privacy laws simply by moving themselves offshore.

Thus, the Pirate Party's proposal would give proprietary software developers the use of GPL-covered source code after 5 years, but it would not give free software developers the use of proprietary source code, not after 5 years or even 50 years. The Free World would get the bad, but not the good. The difference between source code and object code and the practice of using EULAs would give proprietary software an effective exception from the general rule of 5-year copyright — one that free software does not share.

I obviously won’t ever charge an open source project, since they are honoring the unwritten contract: If I give, you give.

But the days of quick-flip corporations and ingrate programmers making money on my software are over. My new motto is:

Open source to open source, corporation to corporation.

Apollo 11 astronaut Buzz Aldrin has a problem with NASA’s current manned space plan: Namely, the five-year gap between the shuttle’s scheduled retirement next year and the debut of the Ares I rocket and the Orion spacecraft, which will take us no further than the moon—a place we’ve already been. Aldrin thinks NASA can do better. His plan is to scrap Ares I, stretch out the remaining six shuttle flights and fast-track the Orion to fly on a Delta IV or Atlas V. Then, set our sites on colonizing Mars. Here, Buzz challenges NASA to take on his bolder mission.

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