I'm pretty sure PEP 8 makes a sImilar argument for why privacy of underscore variables isn't strictly enforced in python.

Add to that a licensing fee payable to the treasury for commercial use of tax payer funded research, e.g., prescription drug patents.

You mean people shouldn't be surprised when their livelihood disappears after building a business out of shady marketing techniques?

I came to say the exact same thing.

And they still carry "The Hacker Quarterly".

http://www.barnesandnoble.com/c/2600-magazine

They must think it's about woodwork with axes or for people who have chronic coughing problems.

"Skype: patched and recompiled to do other stuff" is a better title. Decompiling a proprietary product, changing a few lines of code, and then releasing that code doesn't make it "open source", it makes it stolen code (semantics of "piracy is not theft" aside, it's still not his code to be releasing in it's entirety.).

You are wrong. Decompiling is just allowing research deeper in skype-black-box. Project itself is here https://github.com/skypeopensource/epycs

If you want to stay within the law my understanding is that you need to distribute patches against decompiled Skype rather than decompiled Skype with patches applied, otherwise you're distributing a derivative work. This may still be a legal grey area though. IANAL, you ANAL, we all ANAL and that.

The name falls under trademark protection and is not related to copyright.

I agree. A lot of the points in this review are simply irrelevant. They're talking about support for HDMI and other features not being available in default Debian distributions, the abililty to render Quake 3 (seriously), and other ridiculous comments.

If you're a hacker/tinkerer/kid learning, the default distribution isn't likely all you'll be using anyway. And if you're buying the Raspberry Pi to try to get a cheap gaming system, you've completely missed the point.

Reminds me of the old adage: You don't learn to hack, you hack to learn.

I hack for fun. Learning is just useful and profitable side effect. xD

There are so many other problems with email that could be addressed by a new protocol, eg: spam, security.

There are measures to address these issues more broadly with SMTP, but they are not widely adopted, something that could be standardized in a new protocol, ie: encryption by default, message signing to prevent spoofing, encrypted transmission, etc.