Steve Jobs felt that Android was a rip-off of Apple's iOS and wasn't going to settle any lawsuits with Google or its partners no matter what.

"I will spend my last dying breath if I need to, and I will spend every penny of Apple's $40 billion in the bank, to right this wrong. I'm going to destroy Android, because it's a stolen product. I'm willing to go thermonuclear war on this."

House bill 195 basically says those who buy and sell second hand goods cannot use cash to make those transactions, and it flew so far under the radar most businesses don't even know about it.

The law states those who buy or sell second hand goods are prohibited from using cash. State representative Rickey Hardy co-authored the bill.

Hardy says the bill is targeted at criminals who steal anything from copper to televisions, and sell them for a quick buck. Having a paper trail will make it easier for law enforcement.

Diaspora* the open source social network that arose out of privacy issues associated with Facebook last year, recently reached out to the community for donations to sustain the network, which was all well and good until PayPal shutdown their account.

"We immediately made several phone calls, and were told they needed additional documentation, such as our certificate of incorporation, which we supplied," Peter says. "It proves we're legitimate. Yet this morning they emailed us that our "appeal" was denied and that our money is locked up for 180 days(!). We called them again and were told that they had now blocked all incoming donations."

The company is currently working on a solution by using Stripe, a new payment startup, and they expect to have payments back online soon.

The Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) has now been signed by several nations – even if its actual status is by no means clear. But that doesn't mean governments have finished with their trade negotiations behind closed doors. As Techdirt reported earlier this year, the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) agreement is, in some ways, even worse than ACTA, and looks to be a conscious attempt to apply the tricks developed there to circumvent scrutiny yet further.

The parties have apparently agreed that all documents except the final text will be kept secret for four years after the agreement comes into force or the negotiations collapse.

Like the recently-signed bilateral trade agreements with Colombia, Panama, and South Korea, these treaties are incredibly one-sided, essentially giving the US media companies everything they are demanding in an attempt to prop up their dying business models through disproportionate copyright enforcement legislation around the world.

You probably heard a few weeks ago about how an astrology software company, Astrolabe, claimed it now controlled the copyright for the historical time zone database that nearly every Linux and Unix system uses to set clocks to local time... and was suing the two individuals who maintain the database.

"We are aware of the lawsuit," [Kim Davies, a technical manager at ICANN] said. "We believe it's important to continue the operation of the database. We'll deal with any legal matters as they arise."

The Document Foundation, which is developing the LibreOffice software suite, has demonstrated the business software working entirely in the browser for cloud applications, and has announced that it will also port it to Android and iOS.

The French government has also thrown its support behind the LibreOffice project, specifying the software for all its future Windows systems, and transitioning 500,000 existing Windows users from OpenOffice.

Mozilla has decided that when it comes to Android devices, performance is more important than the wealth of add-ons that can be used to customize Firefox.

Yesterday, Mozilla Director of Firefox Engineering Johnathan Nightingale announced on a mailing list that Firefox will move to Android's native user interface, ditching the XUL technology that's been in use by Mozilla since before there even was a Firefox.

One possibility, according to some meeting notes on native-UI Firefox, is blunter: "Extensions are gone."

From the moment the so-called "voluntary" six strikes agreement between the RIAA/MPAA and various ISPs came out, it was obvious that the Obama administration, in the form of VP Joe Biden's office and IP Czar Victoria Espinel, were involved.

Both of those organizations were regularly in touch with the administration, including planning about how the deal was going to be announced.

It was clear from the beginning that the White House was heavily involved, and was very much backing the entertainment industry's viewpoint. In theory, the government should be representing the people, but the cozy nature of the relationship suggests it was exactly the opposite. The government was representing industry against the public interest.

Lady Gaga has won an injunction at London's High Court to stop animated character Lady Goo Goo from releasing a single, its makers have said.

According to Mind Candy, an injunction was granted at London's High Court on Monday preventing it from "promoting, advertising, selling, distributing or otherwise making available to the public The Moshi Dance".

"We've had a huge amount of public support. I think this could be a worrying precedent for other parody acts and tribute bands."

Ritchie, the creator of the C programming language and co-developer of the Unix operating system passed away on October 8 at the age of 70, leaving a legacy that casts a very long shadow.

Ritchie didn’t invent the curly-bracket syntax—that came from Martin Richards’ BCPL. But the C programming language, which he called “quirky, flawed, and an enormous success,” is the basis of nearly every programming and scripting tool, whether they use elements of C’s syntax or not. Java, JavaScript, Objective C and Cocoa, Python, Perl, and PHP would not exist without dmr’s C. Every bit of software that makes it possible for you to read this page has a trace of dmr’s DNA in it.

In that way, Ritchie has shaped our world in much more fundamental ways than Steve Jobs or Bill Gates have. What sets him apart from them is that he did it all not in a quest for wealth or fame, but just out of intellectual curiosity.