According to an opinion poll commissioned by the Catholic Church itself, hardly anyone remembers that the Pope's 2011 visit to Britain actually happened. And 91% said it made no difference to their moral outlook at all. Strangely, the Church doesn’t seem anxious to draw attention to the results of this poll, which was carried out by Opinion Research Business among 2,049 adults.

What I would really like to know is how much of BV’s effort actually goes into lobbying and into advancing the welfare of cyclists i.e. activities that can’t be funded from other sources, or essential activities that can’t done by anyone else. I wonder if such a large organisation is necessary to deliver these core functions. And I also wonder how much senior management and board attention is distracted by the many essentially commercial activities that BV now engages in.

It took a bit of extra futzing around to get it working under Linux (Fedora 14 in my case), but I got there in the end. Amazingly it supports all my devices (TV, PVR, DVD, RX) despite some of them being ancient and obscure.

The 45-year-old father of five was arrested in the city of Medina on November 14 while making the hajj pilgrimage and accused of insulting companions of the prophet Mohammed.

It's reported he was reading and praying in a group when accosted by religious police and arrested.

It was never obvious what exactly they wanted from me, when they advised that I “try to complete my family”. My condition – especially given what was happening at the time – made it unlikely that my body could sustain a pregnancy beyond the first trimester. And if I could manage to carry a pregnancy to term, it would be very dangerous for me, and would likely cause me permanent harm. It seemed that I was being told to undergo a series of frustrating miscarriages in pursuit of a dangerous pregnancy I didn’t want. When I asked my primary care physician why this was happening, she sighed, rolled her eyes, and said “They want to be able to say that they told you to try.”

It's not clear just how complicit Apple is in Digitude's business, but EFF staff attorney Julie Samuels told TechCrunch that if Apple was deliberately aiding Digitude's patent trolling, "it would be horrifying." And even if Apple were somehow coerced into settling with Digitude, Samuels doubts that "Apple didn't have any other options."

We encourage everyone who is interested in the future of Creative Commons, and open licensing generally, to participate in this process. The more voices that chime in to raise issues and debate the merits of various proposals, the stronger version 4.0 will be, helping us achieve our goal of creating a set of robust licenses that will endure long into the future.

Unless, of course, the MPAA hires you for a salary upwards of a million dollars. Then your principles go right out the window and your commitment to not censoring search results does a 180, and suddenly you're demanding that Google censor results at home, and highlighting the censorship in China as if it's a positive example.

The RIAA now says the goal has never been to end piracy, but to "bring it under sufficient control" and they claim they succeeded.

If the RIAA truly believes that it successfully brought piracy under control via these lawsuits that ended a few years ago... why is it supporting things like SOPA and PROTECT IP? After all, isn't the problem solved?

“Nobody wants the easy stuff anymore and there is no point spending effort and money collecting it,” said Sir David, who was giving the annual Mountbatten Memorial Lecture at the Institution of Engineering and Technology.

“Many of the sort of things for which [officials] once would have turned to the intelligence agencies are now readily available to them online,” he said.

The MPAA has been sending around a sort of "top 10 list" to folks in Congress about why they should vote to censor the internet via PROTECT IP (PIPA).

Paul Vixie, who has been a very vocal opponent to DNS blocking, explained why it wouldn't work, and how it would cause a lot of other problems... but he also noted that he was probably going against his own self-interest in making this argument. That's because the problems caused by SOPA/PIPA's DNS blocking would need fixing... and he suggests lots of folks would come to his company and pay for fixes. So it's a pretty principled stand by Vixie.

The Chinese government has long been criticized by Americans for obstructing the free flow of information through a filtering system popularly known as the Great Firewall. Now it is Chinese neitzens' turn to sneer at proposals for a Made-in-America Great Firewall.

Do consider alternatives before taking your business to this bloated, slow, and unsupportive behemoth. The small guys are going to want your business more, and do more to keep it. Few can go toe-to-toe with PayPal on a per-feature basis, but rarely do you use even the majority of the feature set.

Because that's the thing about Scooby-Doo: The bad guys in every episode aren't monsters, they're liars.

I can't imagine how scandalized those critics who were relieved to have something that was mild enough to not excite their kids would've been if they'd stopped for a second and realized what was actually going on. The very first rule of Scooby-Doo, the single premise that sits at the heart of their adventures, is that the world is full of grown-ups who lie to kids, and that it's up to those kids to figure out what those lies are and call them on it, even if there are other adults who believe those lies with every fiber of their being. And the way that you win isn't through supernatural powers, or even through fighting. The way that you win is by doing the most dangerous thing that any person being lied to by someone in power can do: You think.

Admittedly, this is a different vision than webOS had for themselves. That was more akin to a closed-loop system, more like Apple in many ways, and now we're going to an open system. So we will keep the core group together, there will be leadership as there has been, and HP will continue to invest in this. The exact organizational structure we do not know yet — we've looked at Mozilla, Hadoop, Red Hat, and we want to think through that. Many of those models have been successful, we may come up with an alternative model on how we want to organize this. But there will be a dedicated team of resources to this, with the first backer being HP.

HP will make the underlying code of webOS available under an open source license. Developers, partners, HP engineers and other hardware manufacturers can deliver ongoing enhancements and new versions into the marketplace.

The nearly weightless $24 gadget, which will officially launch in about six weeks, automatically creates a social network of relevant people carrying the same nearby. It compares your profile, in which you’ve explained what characteristics you are looking for, with that of others. When two devices make a mutually satisfying match, they alert their owners via SMS message or mobile app, ranking the strength of the match and delivering whatever contact information the device owners have allowed in their privacy settings.

Yes, I used the wrong button. Not that it says anywhere on Paypal that this button can’t be used by a corporation to assist individuals in need. This is just something you get to find out after collecting thousands of dollars that you now have to manually return $2 at a time.

Yet the report argues that the spread of file-sharing is no great cause for concern. It argues that consumers spend a roughly constant share of their disposable income on entertainment expenses. Money saved on buying CDs and DVDs are instead spent on "concerts, movies, and merchandising."

The report argues that piracy is only a significant concern for "large foreign production companies," and that these large companies need to adapt to new consumer behavior rather than seeking further legislative changes. And, the report says, "fears that these changes have a negative impact on the Swiss cultural creativity are unfounded."

The root of the color management problem is that no two devices have exactly the same color reproduction characteristics: monitors and printers vary wildly in the tonal range and gamut that they can reproduce; similarly cameras and scanners vary wildly in what they can pick up. As a practical matter, when a user makes a printout and finds it too dark, or orders a piece of clothing online and is surprised at its color when it arrives, lack of color management is the problem.

But color management is essentially a solved problem that has yet to be implemented system-wide on Linux.

So starting next month I'm going to kick-off the pay-what-you-want experiment and see if I can start using this a method to increase visibility. My hunch is that I can sell a little bit more music if I can get a lot more people listening.

The system works through a growing number of self-publishing websites that host thousands of constantly evolving, free-to-read stories posted on the sites by their authors. These websites are incredibly popular with consumers, attracting over 40% of all China’s internet users every month, who come to read web serials that can be anything from realistic novels to historical epics, comics, sci-fi and fantasy.

The ingenious part of this publishing model comes in when an individual author’s serial gathers a critical mass of readers. At this point the self-publishing site invites the author to become a VIP, and their serial moves to a different section of the site where readers can sample some chapters of their work for free, but have to pay if they want to read the latest installments.

From the ruling, it was clear from the start that the ECJ was not amenable to rule in favour of indiscriminate monitoring as it would go against Art. 15 of the Electronic Commerce Directive 2000/31, which states unequivocally that Member States shall not require intermediaries “to monitor the information which they transmit or store, nor a general obligation actively to seek facts or circumstances indicating unlawful activity”. Any filtering system would be in violation of this rule

The European Court of Justice ruled that forcing Internet service providers to monitor and censor their users' communications violated EU law, and in particular the right to freedom of communication. At a time of all-out offensive in the war against culture sharing online, this decision suggests that censorship measures requested by the entertainment industry are disproportionate means to enforce an outdated copyright regime.

Now, I know that this is Gamestop and Warner Brothers probably trying to work some synergy mojo. The likely thinking is that binding a hot game with an associated film property will generate interest in the new UltraViolet media streaming initiative. If the movie were good, well, then, sure. But, Batman Forever's widely regarded as the worst of all the cinematic interpretations of the Caped Crusader.

“A couple of days later, I got another e-mail containing 4 recordings that the Narrator had done for us and was just amazed and honored that Supergiant Games would do this for me.”

Greschner set up the audio, and his brother would play each audio clip at certain points during the ceremony. The narrator talking about the wedding as it happened was a major surprise for his wife.

Content Provider Union (CPU), which represents developers of games for mobile devices, has accused Baidu of providing unauthorised downloads for more than 350 games designed by member firms, said Tian Lifeng, a CPU spokeswoman.

Really Ubisoft, this is getting old. I feel like a parent scolding his child for the 20th time about hitting his sister. You think the child gets it after the first time and that the second time is an honest mistake. But, when the child continues to hit his sister, you need to take drastic disciplinary action. What will it take to get the message through to those in charge at Ubisoft? Gamers want your games and will buy them, but you have to provide the service they want. That is the only way you will succeed.

But let's ask ourselves, is the current copyright system the right and only tool to achieve our objectives? Not really, I'm afraid. We need to keep on fighting against piracy, but legal enforceability is becoming increasingly difficult; the millions of dollars invested trying to enforce copyright have not stemmed piracy. Meanwhile citizens increasingly hear the word copyright and hate what is behind it. Sadly, many see the current system as a tool to punish and withhold, not a tool to recognise and reward.

Speaking of economic reward: if that is the aim of our current copyright system, we're failing here too.

The YaCy search engine runs on each user's own computer. Search terms
are encrypted before they leave the user and the user's computer.
Different from conventional search engines, YaCy is designed to protect users' privacy. A user's computer creates its individual search indexes and rankings, so that results better match what the user is looking for over time. YaCy also makes it easy to create a customised search portal with a few clicks.

Kindle Fire just started shipping yesterday and a super easy one click root / jailbreak solution is already available. We went through the steps, were able to reproduce it and duplicate the end result and we also streamlined it a bit especially for the ones that do not excel in computer skills so here it is for your Kindle Fire rooting / jailbreaking pleasure.

What is the root process bringing to the table? The possibility to install Google Android Marketplace (remember, by default Kindle Fire only comes with Amazon Marketplace), sideloading books on Kindle Fire is another enticing possibility as well.

So I was messing around with different one clicks since I got ADB going on my kindle fire and I was able to Successfully use SuperOneClick 2.2 to root my kindle fire!

The court rejected AVM's claims according to which no third party shall be permitted to alter their products' firmware, even if the GNU GPL components are concerned. Thus, Cybits or anyone else may perform such modifications. Furthermore, under the judgement, Cybits is not prohibited from distributing its software that assists users in making and installing modifications to GNU GPL licensed software (Linux kernel used in the Fritz!Box device).

Convicted conman Peter Foster has been arrested on the Gold Coast over his alleged involvement with a controversial diet spray company.

Australia's consumer watchdog began legal action in July against Sensaslim Australia, Foster and other company officers over alleged misleading and deceptive conduct and false claims about the weight-loss spray.

The South Korean manufacturer sought evidence that Apple had "contractually obliged" Australian carriers Telstra, Vodafone and Optus to provide greater subsidies for the iPhone than for competing smartphones.

Those subsidies, it alleged, improved the attractiveness of all four generations of the iPhone released locally since 2008.

It makes sense that Samsung's source code request was granted — it's how you evaluate patent infringement claims when you're dealing with this type of technology. Apple apparently began handing over the iPhone 4S source code yesterday, and while disputes over whether Apple's code production is adequate will surely be raised by Samsung in the future, it seems that this particular discovery argument has been resolved in Samsung's favor without too much fanfare.

As we expected, though, the more controversial issue was over whether Samsung was entitled to the agreements between Apple and the regional telcos.

Miller had, admittedly, created a proof-of-concept application to demonstrate his security exploit, and even gotten Apple to approve it for distribution in Apple’s App Store by hiding it inside a fake stock ticker program, a trick that Apple wrote violated the developer agreement that forbid him to “hide, misrepresent or obscure” any part of his app. But the researcher for the security consultancy Accuvant argues that he was only trying to demonstrate a serious security issue with a harmless demo, and that revoking his developer rights is “heavy-handed” and counterproductive. “I’m mad,” he says. “I report bugs to them all the time. Being part of the developer program helps me do that. They’re hurting themselves, and making my life harder.”

Visual navigation is performed using onboard cameras to observe the overhead marker system located above the test area. This replicates how spacecraft would use points in the solar system to determine their orientation.

The perfectly-balanced model satellites, which rotate around a pivot point with mechanical properties similar to real satellites, are placed on the table and glide across it on roller bearings almost without friction to mimic the zero-gravity properties of space. Each model has eight propellers to control movement, a set of inertia sensors and additional cameras to be ‘spatially aware’ and to ‘see’ each other. The model’s skeletal robot frame also allows various forms of hardware to be fitted and experimented with.

There are many Types of Intellectual Property, and all of them are bad, and most of them are getting worse and expanding. The worst two by far are patent and copyright.

Over the years I have vacillated on this issue. But I am becoming convinced that copyright is worse than patent, for the following reasons:

In short, the idea of a sliding camera sling isn’t an amazing new invention. It’s just a really good idea that’s been around for a while and which has been iteratively developed. Neither we nor our lawyers believed that the USPTO would grant a patent for the claims related to this concept. It was a surprise, then, when our competitor was granted a patent covering the concept on November 1st, 2011. To say that we’re disappointed that the USPTO couldn’t find the prior art around the idea is an understatement.

Our disappointment doesn’t matter much in the scheme of things, however. Our competitor now has a legal tool and we’re pretty sure that they desire to use it. This is, as they say, a problem. We and our counsel are more than confident that we can defend ourselves, and will do so vigorously if necessary. On the other hand, we’re a very small company that sells our products in limited volumes and mounting such a defense would consume the majority of our resources. After all, it took three years to rescind a patent about a method of using a swing. In other words, we have a Hobson’s choice on our hands. We could very well lose everything even if we won.

Claims that the police aren’t helping led several artists supporting “Shoot the Pirate” to take to the streets last week to confront the pirate vendors. It didn’t go well.

A brawl ensued which at its height involved artists, vendors and police, who reportedly beat up the artists’ supporters. The protesters then moved on and had another brawl with more pirates at another location.

The computer model the researchers built sifted through a decade's worth of crime data in search of patterns and relationships between gangs undetectable to a person. From that analysis, the program was designed to identify which gangs were most likely involved in particular crimes.

To test it, the researchers created an imaginary set of crime data that closely mirrored the shootings, assaults and other gang-on-gang crimes that occurred in Hollenbeck. They then removed pieces of important information, such as the name of one or both of the involved gangs, and tested whether the computer algorithm could come up with the missing data.

About 80% of the time, the computer calculations were able to identify the three gangs most likely to have committed a crime against a rival, the researchers said.

While this may seem like the plotline from some lost Philip K. Dick short story — logging into a website in order to look up the future geopolitical climate — it turns out that one man is conducting research today that’s poised to make it a reality. And all you need is access to a database of a couple million news articles and about one thousand cores worth of computing power. Simple, right?

Tepenensi led me to a field near her home where she found the body of her six-year-old grandson Stephen, dumped in the reeds. She trembled as she pointed out the spot where she found his decapitated body; he had been missing for 24 hours.

Clutching the only photo she has of her grandson, Tepenensi sobbed as she explained that although the local witch doctor had admitted to sacrificing Stephen, the police were reluctant to pursue the case.

"They offered me money to keep quiet," she says. "I refused the offer."

I think the main reason why so few people chose to pay for Proun is this: the free version did not require a Credit Card transaction and was thus way easier to download.

That is quite the lesson and quite true. Users want things to be as convenient as possible when making a purchase. The more steps you add to the process, the less likely someone will make it to the end. This is a very difficult lesson for some game developers. Many game developers are adding more and more steps to not only the process to purchase the game, but also to the process of installing and subsequently playing the game.

Ask any gamer and they will most likely tell you, they simply want to get, install and start playing the game as soon as possible. Anything that slows that process down is a no go.

The ruling by Judge Liam O’Grady came in the case of three WikiLeaks associates, and related to government bodies seeking information relating to their Twitter accounts, including IP addresses of mobile devices that had accessed those accounts. According to O’Grady’s ruling, the accused “vountarily chose to use Internet technology to communicate with Twitter and thereby consented to whatever disclosures would be necessary to complete their communications.”

The ruling would seemingly make it legal for the government to ask websites for personal information on users without cause or oversight, a fact pointed out by Birgitta Jonsdottir, one of the three WikiLeaks associates named in the case, who released a statement saying that “With this decision, the court is telling all users of online tools hosted in the U.S. that the U.S. Government will have secret access to their data.”

In the meantime, those who continue to insist that music is "licensed" and not "bought," can you explain what happened here? If the music was truly "licensed," why can't Rhapsody just provide non-DRM'd versions of the same music? Once again, all this really does is make you wonder why anyone "buys" any DRM'd product.

As we noted at the time, what consumer problem does UltraViolet actually solve? The answer is absolutely none. It only attempts (and fails) to solve a perceived studio problem. Meaning that it was destined to piss off customers.

And that's exactly what's happening.

Companies "have figured out how to fight 'free'", Montgomery said, by making it illegal. In order to fight back through the courts, there would be an endless series of cases that would have to be won, and each of those wins would not hurt the companies at all. There is a "presumption of credibility" when a patent holder makes a claim of infringement, and the press "plays along with that", he said. But Eben Moglen has pointed out that an accusation of infringement has no legal weight, so there is no real downside to making such a claim.

The Irish justice minister has said that forthcoming child protection measures, including mandatory reporting will "apply regardless of any internal rules of any religious grouping".

Alan Shatter was responding to comments made by Cardinal Sean Brady who defended the seal of confession.

Cardinal Brady stressed it was a "sacred and treasured" rite.

In the end, I came to the obvious conclusion: pure capitalism could only possibly work if everyone acting within it had access to perfect information — if you could look up in half a second every relevant fact about a company, how it treated its workers, how it polluted, how it did quality control, etc. etc. — and if everyone in the world had the knowledge and master of all subjects necessary to make judgements based on that information. However, given the value of that information, in capitalism information itself becomes a commodity, and companies do their best to hide all relevant facts about themselves other than the ones they represent for PR purposes.

And in the end, I came to the conclusion that there was no way I could separate my natural talents (and why should I feel I deserved anything from my natural talents, anyway) from what I had gained through my upbringing. There was no way for me to judge the success or failure of others from afar, or to conclude that someone did not deserve my help.

To quote their TV commercial: "The instruction we find in books is like fire. We fetch it from our neighbours, kindle it at home, communicate it to others, and it becomes the property of all."

This device does not kindle that fire -- it extinguishes it, with more of the same digital restrictions.

GNOME 3.2 is the first major update of the GNOME 3 platform. It builds on the foundations that we have laid with 3.0 and offers a much more complete experience. The exciting new features and improvements in this release include new contacts and documents applications, a new login screen, an on-screen keyboard, color management support, and many more.

Because each entry is individually checked and tested, users know that any program they come across in the Directory will be free software with free documentation and without proprietary software requirements. Programs that run on proprietary operating systems like Mac and Windows are listed, but only if they also run fully on GNU/Linux. The new version of the Directory will continue to provide users these same assurances, but it has been rebuilt so that members of the free software community can become familiar with the criteria and then work together to curate and grow the catalog.