"The Supreme Court on Wednesday ruled that AT&T - and indeed, any company - could block class-action suits arising from disputes with customers and instead force those customers into binding arbitration. The ruling reverses previous lower-court decisions that classified stipulations in AT&T's service contract which barred class arbitration as 'unconscionable'."

This is interesting. I've been saying for a while now that both Apple and Microsoft are hard at work making Android as undesirable as possible. Sadly, they're not doing this by making their own products better, but by trying to make it seem as if Android isn't free due to patent costs and such. It looks like Barnes & Noble is the first company to openly say the same.

Yeah, it's the day of double-dippin' today. And, the contradiction couldn't be bigger. In one corner we have one of the oldest and most respected distributions, and in the other corner we have the sometimes controversial but immensely popular relative newcomer. Slackware 13.37 and Ubuntu 11.04 have been released.

Well, this is a pleasant surprise. This weekend, we ran a story about the carrier situation in the The Netherlands. The largest carrier in The Netherlands has announced it's going to charge for services like IM and Skype, while the other two carriers were thinking about following suit. I stated I expected little from our politicians - but boy, turns out I was wrong. Basically the entire lower house - left to right, progressive to conservative - is not happy with the carriers' moves, and are now exploring options to prohibit them from implementing their plans - including the option to embed net neutrality in our telecommunications act. Go go... Politicians?!

Nokia announced yesterday that they will transfer the Symbian Developers to Accenture. Regardless of what one feels about the merits of Symbian, this does seem like the end of the road. The proverbial selling of the horse to the glue factory.

This release supports a much larger variety of hardware and multiprocessor systems than previous releases, thanks to updates of ACPI and APIC and ACPI interrupt routing support. Hammer volumes can now deduplicate volumes overnight in a batch process and during live operation. The 'hammer dedup-simulate' command can be used to estimate space savings for existing data. DragonFly now uses gcc 4.4 as the default system compiler, and is the first BSD to take that step. DragonFly now offers significant performance gains over previous releases, especially for machines using AHCI or implementing swapcache(8).

This year's Wakefield RISC OS computer show has given enthusiasts of the niche platform much to talk about. The show featured the release of new hardware in the form of the ARMini, a 'Beagleboard inside' computing system optimised to run RISC OS. A full account of the show has been published on RISCOScode, one of the RISC OS rolling news websites. Note from Thom: Sorry for the headline.

"Amazon today responded to Apple's trademark suit over the term 'App Store'. Interestingly, Amazon's answer made use of quotes from Steve Jobs to prove that the term 'app store' is generic and not subject to trademark protection."

A common argument has always been that the only reason Android is as popular as it is in the US is because people are buying Android solely because they can't buy an iPhone (i.e., because they don't want AT&T, or because Verizon is their only carrier, and so on). This line of thinking would imply that now that the Verizon iPhone is here, Android would be in trouble. Well, it turns out that might not be true, exactly. For the first time, more people desire Android for their next smartphone than iOS.

And the fight continues. Only a few months after the desperate move by the MPEG-LA to get anyone - anyone - to submit patents to a possible WebM patent pool, Google and the WebM community have struck back. A whole slew of major companies have formed the WebM Community Cross-License initiative, basically a sort-of Open Invention Network for WebM.

Ah yes, this was pretty inevitable. Nintendo is facing dropping sales and earnings for another year, and as such, it should come as no surprise that they have just announced the Wii's successor. The Japanese gaming giant will unveil the machine during E3 in June, and the device is scheduled for release in 2012.

You know all that talk about net neutrality in the US? How for instance Verizon and Google want net neutrality to apply only to something they call the 'wired' internet, which is apparently somehow different from the 'mobile' internet? Well, while you Americans are only talking about it, us Dutch are once again way ahead of the curve: the largest of the three main carriers has announced its intention to start charging extra for services like VoIP, instant messaging, Facebook, and so on, with the other two carriers contemplating similar moves. The dark future of the web, right here in my glorified swamp.

"VP8 is an open source video compression format supported by a consortium of technology companies. This paper provides a technical overview of the format, with an emphasis on its unique features. The paper also discusses how these features benefit VP8 in achieving high compression efficiency and low decoding complexity at the same time."

"Intel has confirmed that it has received the Android 3.0 Honeycomb code from Google, and that it is 'actively' working on porting the tablet-centric platform to run on x86 chips like its Atom processors."