When A Fly Flies Into Coffee

When A Fly Flies Into Coffee The Italian: throws the cup and walks away in a fit of rage The Frenchman: takes out the fly, and drinks the coffee The Chinese: eats the fly and throws away the coffee… The Russian: drinks the coffee with the fly, since it was extra with no charge The Israeli: sells the coffee to the Frenchman, the fly to the Chinese, buys himself a new cup of coffee and uses the...

MPEG-LA owned Patent Troll Sues Smartphone Makers

The company in question is MobileMedia Ideas LLC, a company without any products of its own. It acquired a number of patents from Nokia and Sony, 122 to be exact, and is now using those patents to sue several smartphone makers earlier this year, including Apple, HTC, and Research In Motion. MobileMedia Ideas is owned by the MPEG-LA, and its CEO is Larry Horn, who also happens to be the CEO of the...

General Election Sick Bag

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Another free from Sun is no more

Once there was a way to open ODF (Open Document Format, read OpenOffice) docs in MS Office. You could get a free (as in beer) plugin from sun and open files. Not anymore. Although the Oracle site still, at the time of writing, offers the software for free with the tagline “Get it now: FREE”, users clicking through will find that Oracle are now charging $90, per user, for a right-to-use license for the...

How do you get rid of garbage? Trash Collecting Entrepreneur Squashed In San Francisco

Joe from this story was collecting the garbage of his neighbours charging them third of what San Francisco garbage collecting company does. And he was going pretty good as business. The story did not last for long: When the local garbage company and its union found out about “Joe” they complained to the city. Within a year a law was passed stating that garbage service was now mandatory for all...