With fish darting amongst them in a blue lagoon, the Maldivian president and his top team have staged an elaborate stunt to publicise climate change.

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While officials said the event itself was light-hearted, the idea is to focus on the plight of the Maldives, where rising sea levels threaten to make the nation uninhabitable by the end of the century.

It's almost a truism in the tech world that copyright owners reflexively oppose new inventions that do (or might) disrupt existing business models. But how many techies actually know what rightsholders have said and written for the last hundred years on the subject?

In the most profound financial change in recent Middle East history, Gulf Arabs are planning – along with China, Russia, Japan and France – to end dollar dealings for oil, moving instead to a basket of currencies including the Japanese yen and Chinese yuan, the euro, gold and a new, unified currency planned for nations in the Gulf Co-operation Council, including Saudi Arabia, Abu Dhabi, Kuwait and Qatar.

Among the toughest questions posed to the Chicago bid team this week in Copenhagen was one that raised the issue of what kind of welcome foreigners would get from airport officials when they arrived in this country to attend the Games. Syed Shahid Ali, an I.O.C. member from Pakistan, in the question-and-answer session following Chicago’s official presentation, pointed out that entering the United States can be “a rather harrowing experience.”

Yarynich is talking about Russia's doomsday machine. That's right, an actual doomsday device—a real, functioning version of the ultimate weapon, always presumed to exist only as a fantasy of apocalypse-obsessed science fiction writers and paranoid über-hawks. The thing that historian Lewis Mumford called "the central symbol of this scientifically organized nightmare of mass extermination." Turns out Yarynich, a 30-year veteran of the Soviet Strategic Rocket Forces and Soviet General Staff, helped build one.

Enligt skivbolagens internationella samarbetsorganisation IFPI kopierades 40 miljarder musikfiler olagligt under 2008. Om varje låt var värd 160 000 kronor skulle det innebära att den totala skadan var 6,4 miljoner miljarder kronor.

När skivförsäljningen i världen nådde sin topp i början av 2000-talet sålde man enligt samma organisation skivor för 27 miljarder dollar, cirka 200 miljarder kronor. Den påstådda förlusten av fildelningen som man grundade skadeståndsanspråken på var alltså drygt 30 000 gånger större än vad skivförsäljningen någonsin inbringat. Domen mot Tenenbaum handlade alltså inte om ersättning för en skada, den är en del av en ny affärsmodell för skivbolagen.

A proposal by the Homeland Security Advisory Council, unveiled late Tuesday, recommends removing two of the five colors, with a standard state of affairs being a “guarded” Yellow. The Green “low risk of terrorist attacks” might get removed altogether, meaning stay prepared for your morning subway commute to turn deadly at any moment.

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The new system, if approved by the agency, would consist solely of Yellow, Orange and Red.

The internet agency Kavkaz Centre provides reporting of events in the Islamic world, the Caucasus, and Russia. One of Kavkaz Centre's chief objectives is to report events in the Chechen Republic of Ichkeria connected to the Russian military aggression against the CRI. Besides we also provide international news agencies with news-letters, background information and assistance in making independent journalistic work in Caucasus.

Myhrvold’s firm illustrates in a way that no law review article could the extent to which the patent system punishes firms that actually produce useful products. Firms whose business models involve actual innovation have to show restraint in exploiting their patent portfolios. If they don’t, there’s a high probability that some of their adversaries will countersue and both firms will be dragged into a legal quagmire. But if litigation is your only business, then you’re not vulnerable to retaliatory infringement lawsuits, so you can exploit your patent portfolio much more aggressively. Many small “patent troll” firms have exploited this flaw in the past, but Myhrvold is the first person to recognize that it can be exploited in a systematic, large-scale fashion.

Reckless and misguided laws, often originating at the state level, threaten to undermine the foundation of the free and open Internet. Some of the most serious threats to the Internet come in the form of lawmakers trying to 'fix' it.

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NetChoice is dedicated to fighting these attacks on core Internet principles. Through this site, the Internet Advocates' Watchlist For Ugly Laws (iAWFUL) will track dangerous legislation and mobilize citizens to defeat bills and proposals that threaten the future of ecommerce and online communication.