"Tim Cook, Apple's CEO, and Peter Oppenheimer, Apple's CFO, will host a conference call to announce the outcome of the company's discussions concerning its cash balance." Interesting. They have $100 billion on the bank - any guesses? Dividend payout? A large acquisition?

This past week and this weekend I've finally found the time to enter into the colorful world of custom Android ROMs. After figuring out just how insanely great and awesome ClockWorkMod Recovery is, I set about to figure out what the best Ice Cream Sandwich ROM is for the Galaxy SII. While the answer to that question became clear quite quickly, this answer also gave rise to a whole bunch of other questions.

Due to their very nature, custom Android ROMs have root enabled by default. Up until relatively recently, installing custom Android ROMs was a thing geeks did, and as such, this wasn't much of a problem. However, over the past few days, I've found out just how easy installing custom ROMs and modifying them really is (I'm running this one until CyanogenMod 9 is ready for the SII), and it seems like more and more regular users are engaging in the practice as well. Suddenly, having root enabled becomes a security liability.

"In an unexpected turn of events, one of the key committees in the European Parliament voted recently to weaken a reform of the copyright monopoly for allowing re-publication and access to orphan works, pieces of our cultural heritage where no copyright monopoly holder can be located. There's a problem with this. There are 24 seats in the committee, and one group (non-inscrits) was absent, lacking deputies to fill that person's vote. So, there should have been 23 votes at the most. But we just counted 12 votes for reform and 14 against. That's 26." Sometimes, people complain that the EU has a democratic deficit. It looks like we had a democratic surplus this time.

"This American Life has retracted an episode that focused on working conditions inside a Foxconn iPad factory, calling the source material 'partially fabricated'. The episode - the most popular in TAL history with nearly a million streams - was partially based on the work of artist Mike Daisey, who apparently lied to fact-checkers about his experiences visiting Foxconn's facility. Some of the lies were discovered during an interview with Daisey's Chinese translator, who disputed the facts presented in his show and on the air."

"If you download potentially copyrighted software, videos or music, your Internet service provider has been watching, and they're coming for you. Specifically, they're coming for you on Thursday, July 12. That's the date when the nation's largest ISPs will all voluntarily implement a new anti-piracy plan that will engage network operators in the largest digital spying scheme in history, and see some users' bandwidth completely cut off until they sign an agreement saying they will not download copyrighted materials." One day, years from now, historians are going to debate whether this was the point of no return.

Version 0.2.5 of the new Red/System programming language has been released, after it celebrated its first birthday at the third Red Developers Conference. Bindings with the standard C library, cURL, SDL and SQLite that were developed over the past year are now properly supported on Syllable Desktop. Conference videos introduce Red/System and the bindings. Earlier, new floating point support was released (Mandelbrot screenshot; demo source, see the .reds file).

Netflix talks about what it's like developing and testing their Android application. Biggest surprise? They pay specific attention to making sure the applications runs well on popular custom ROMs such as CyaogenMod. Pretty awesome. Now, if only Samsung, HTC, and so on, could do so as well.

"If you follow Arch Planet, you may have already heard the news that we are celebrating a decade of existence, with the release of 0.1 Homer on March 11, 2002. If you haven't already, grab some birthday cake and head over to Arch Planet to read several developers chronologies and wonderful words of praise for Arch Linux. There is also a brief article from The H Open Source as well as discussion on Reddit. With good fortune and a little luck, hopefully we'll be around to celebrate another 10 years!" Happy decade, Arch! My water cooker just pinged, so I'll drink the next cup of tea in Arch' honour.

Ever since it became clear that Google was not going to push WebM as hard as they should have, the day would come that Mozilla would be forced to abandon its ideals because the large technology companies don't care about an open, unencumbered web. No decision has been made just yet, but Mozilla is taking its first strides to adding support for the native H.264 codecs installed on users' mobile systems. See it as a thank you to Mozilla for all they've done for the web.

"Yahoo has made good on its threat of last month and filed a patent infringement suit against Facebook." Yup, another patent battle. Great for innovation, this. Destroying the technology industry, one patent at a time.

"The Google I was passionate about was a technology company that empowered its employees to innovate. The Google I left was an advertising company with a single corporate-mandated focus. Technically I suppose Google has always been an advertising company, but for the better part of the last three years, it didn't feel like one. Google was an ad company only in the sense that a good TV show is an ad company: having great content attracts advertisers." Note we're looking at a Microsoft employee. His points still carry some validity, though.

The Cortex -M0+ architecture is designed to provide chip-makers with the means to build microcontrollers that require "ultra low power" but are capable of 32-bit processing. Arm says it went back to the drawing board to create the new processor cores which measure 1mm by 1mm in size. It says the microcontrollers should draw around a third less energy than their predecessors, which only offered 8 and 16-bit capabilities.

Okay, so this one actually bothers me quite a deal in the Windows 8 consumer preview: the fonts in Metro look fuzzy - they look like fonts on Mac OS X. Because of the Mac OS X resemblance, I had assumed that Metro switched to a shape-accurate rendering method, like Mac OS X uses, but as it turns out, it's a little less exotic than that.