Slashdot Mirror
Domain: .com
Stories and comments across the archive that link to .com.
Stories · 496
-
Buy College Education, Get Free iBook
kraksmoka writes ""The Chronicle of Higher Education has an article about how Saint Leo University in Florida is offering an iBook laptop to every incoming residential student and full-time faculty member. '... the draw of the iBooks has encouraged some of the more than 1,700 students at the university's main campus who would otherwise commute to live in dormitories, which makes the program a success in the university vice president's eyes.'" The students do not keep the computers, unless they finish two years in the honors program. -
Firefly Likely to be Cancelled
rscrawford writes "Zap2It is reporting that Firefly, one of the best science fiction shows to make it on to network television in recent years, is going on hiatus: read, getting canceled. Well, it was an interesting, well-written, provocative and intelligent show on Fox; is anyone therefore surprised that they're doing away with it? It lasted a lot longer than I thought it would. At least they're going to show the original 2-hour pilot in December. (And yet, somehow, Just Shoot Me continues...)" -
Douglas Adams Written Dr. Who Episode Goes Into Production
-
EMI Promises Downloadable Music
SataiCam writes "The Economist has an article up referring to EMI's plans to implement digital music downloading starting on December 1 through a whole host of 'distributors'. They claim it will allow users to get music in 'the formats they are demanding' (ogg?), to burn copies of songs, and download them to other devices. Here's the press release from EMI." -
Where is My Digital Cash?
LinuxTek asks: "Using the IBM commercial as a starting point (the one with the guy from DS9 asking about flying cars), I ask you, where is my digital cash? I remember a couple of years ago all the hype about digital money and several companies that were supposed to make a revolution in micropayment and 'secure' online purchase (i.e. anonymous). I remember Digicash as being one of the most promising companies, and I even remember downloading their digital wallet test app. It seems they went out of business and sold their patents to eCash, but now I can't even acces the eCash site. Does anyone know if there are other projects like this (still alive), and/or Open Source alternatives? Digital money should be a reality by now." -
MAME To Become GPL?
BigJimSlade writes "The 'What's New' file for the latest release of the Multi Arcade Machine Emulator (or MAME, as it is more affectionately known) states that the developers/maintainers are considering re-licensing the not-so-open source code under the GPL/LGPL. Currently the source is under a slightly restrictive licence that prevents modifications to certain areas of code from being redistributed. (L)GPL source for this project would be quite a boon for devlopers, who could reuse the CPU cores and other key components in other OSS projects." -
Australia Plans to Censor the Internet
MAXOMENOS writes "The Australian government is planning to block websites used to organize violent protests, as part of a larger effort to prevent crime from being planned on the 'net." Yeah this is gonna work really really. It's working out great in China after all. -
The Pentagon Wants Your Secrets
Teknogeek was one of the many readers to point out today's New York Times report on what one submitter dubbed "Son of Carnivore." "This should scare you: Vice Admiral John Poindexter wants to create a supercomputer capable of hunting through electronic databases all over the world, looking for suspected terrorists. According to the article, Poindexter outlines a need to '"break down the stovepipes' that separate commercial and government databases, allowing teams of intelligence analysts to hunt for hidden patterns of activity with powerful computers.'" Update: 11/10 16:15 GMT by T : Here's an updated link to the (no-registration) Arizona Star. Update: 11/24 17:42 GMT by T : Thanks to expiring links, here's another updated link to the NYTimes story. -
China Concerned About Internal Copyright Infringers
sfled writes "Audience members at a recent movie preview had ID card numbers stamped on their theater tickets, were videotaped entering the lobby, and had to part with cellphones, watches, lighters, etc. as they passed through a metal detector. Why the big fuss? Because China's movie makers, artists and other creators of intellectual property are finally realizing that China's content-piracy industry doesn't just target imported movies, music, etc. Story at The New York Times, "free" registration, etc..." -
Mac Case Mods
EyesWideOpen writes "Wired News is running two articles about numerous case mods to Macs. The first article is about Japanese mods that include painted PowerBook lids, a black iMac and a 'Beer Server G3' among others. The other article features mods such as the Philco radio Mac, a Mac writing tablet and an awesome G4 tower that lights up with fluorescent blue neon and has a LCD screen mounted in the front panel that can mirror the desktop or display other visualizations." -
DOJ Blocks Satellite TV Merger
EyesWideOpen writes "The Justice Department filed a lawsuit to block a merger between EchoStar Communications and Hughes Electronics that would have created the nation's largest pay-television service, stating that 'This merger would give EchoStar control of the skies for the provision of video programming by satellite, leaving customers to suffer from the resulting reduction of competition'. The FCC had already voted unanimously to oppose the merger because it would create a monopoly that would have 'adverse' effects for consumers." -
IBM Wants CPU Time To Be A Metered Utility
kwertii writes "IBM CEO Samuel J. Palmisano announced a sweeping new business strategy yesterday, pledging $10,000,000,000 towards redefining computing as a metered utility. Corporate customers would have on-demand access to supercomputer-level resources, and would pay only for time actually used. The $10 billion is slated for acquisitions and research to put the supporting infrastructure in place. Will this model revolutionize the way companies compute, or is this plan doomed to be another PCjr?" -
Moving Strategies?
skotte asks: "I currently am in a position where I will be moving my whole set of belongings to a new apartment. But I refuse to just buy a bunch of boxes and start throwing things in. Surely there is a good strategy of how to tackle the act of packing. I'm thinking "Relatively" where everything related, such as CDs, go in one box, cables go in another. Or there's 'spatially', where I pack everything in one bookcase in one box. Or there's 'by Priority' in which important things i'll need right away go in one box...and on and on. There appear to indeed be LOTS of ways to go about it -- and there are big pros-and-cons to each. So what does the slashdot community think? Better yet, is there some management software to help with this sort of thing?" -
Car Digital Assistant
suman28 writes "The Japanese company Clarion plans to sell a car with built-in PC that runs Windows which car browse the web, play tunes and store an address manager. The stats on the computer are nice - a 166 MHz RISC processor with 64MB RAM and 8MB video. That seems like a lot for a car." -
Next Generation of Holographic Images
suman28 writes "Imagine being able to view an image from all sides and have it interact with you. Scenes or images pop-out at you and change on the fly and are viewable in full color. Best of all, you don't need head-gear or any wearable device to make this possible. They are generated by a computer with two cameras that track your eye movement and there is a transparent LCD screen between you and the display that makes the pictures come alive. Though it may be a while before this becomes part of our daily lives, it is interesting to see what the kind of research being done on this. " -
Apple Offers Three-Year Upgrade Plan for Server
davidstrauss writes "News.com is reporting that 'Apple Computer is giving buyers of its Mac OS X Server the option of signing on for three years of unlimited access to software upgrades for the same price it charges for a single, onetime upgrade.' This sounds almost like a push in the direction of Microsoft's Licensing 6." -
How to Sync PocketPC to Linux?
Giggles Of Doom asks: "I am a long time Windows user who is getting ready to make the plunge and move to Linux. Microsoft is just getting on my nerves. Anyway, I have made a little list of things I do in Windows that I will still need to be able to do in Linux. A BIG one of those is syncing the data from my PDA with my main computer's mail program. The mail program will probably be KMail, unless others can suggest a better one and give reasons why, and my PDA is a Audiovox Maestro, which is really a rebranded Toshiba 'PDA-1032' running Pocket PC 2002. It has a USB cradle. What Linux solutions are there for this task? I would hate to have everything else work great, but have to boot to Windows or load VMware just to sync my contact info. Remember, I am a Windows user trying to convert, but any solution would have to be pretty user friendly." -
Patents Choking Off Medical Research
pq writes "The New Republic has an insightful article talking about the "absence of truly innovative drugs in current drug company pipelines. And the explanation for that might well come from the supposed fount of American innovation: our patent system." Apparently they are trapped in a situation where "it's much easier to argue that `patents support innovation' than to try to explain that some patents are good for innovation while others are bad." A long read, but unlike the latest copy-protected mp3 player, this is definitely stuff that matters!" -
Interview Jordan Hubbard, Apple's BSD Tech Manager
Stigmata669 writes "Over at MacSlash the editors have managed to schedule an interview with Jordan Hubbard, Engineering Manager of the BSD Technology Group at Apple to answer questions about BSD, and Darwin in the context of Mac OS X. The interview is being conducted in the Slashdot style, so comment and in a week they will have the highest moderated comments answered. The specific article is here." -
When Do You Really Need a Lawyer?
Dr_Harm asks: "I recently had the misfortune to encounter a CEO who had just received the Klez virus. Apparently, he believed the 'From:' header and accused me of not only authoring the virus, but deliberately and maliciously targeting him and his organization. Normally, clueless people like this don't bother me, except he was inclined to sue me and report me to the FBI. Of course, he's got more money and lawyers than I do, and could probably have made me miserable even though I'm completely innocent... but it raises the question: How do I know when I need a lawyer?""Clearly, once I've been served with legal papers, a lawyer is necessary. But I'm guessing that there are situations where having a lawyer before it gets to that point would be helpful. I'm interested in some general guidelines for when I should pick up the phone and call a lawyer. I'm especially interested in tales of 'I waited to long and got burned' as well as 'I got a lawyer so early it was smooth sailing'. Like most people, I make a decent living, but I cannot afford high legal bills for very long.
For those who are interested, the CEO in question decided to simply report the incident to the FBI. My guess is that the Feds logged the complaint for their statistics and then dropped the matter. However, the brush with someone with enough money and power to drain me financially has left me distinctly shaken..." -
Embryonic Stem Cell Research Legalized in California
Stigmata669 writes "Against the wishes of the White House, it appears that Gov. Gray Davis has passed legislation to legalize embryonic stem cell research in California. The article sheds some light on the nature of this decision, and highlights the difference between this decision, and the continued ban on human cloning in California." -
Microsoft Word Security Flaw
JWL-23 writes: "cnn.com is reporting that a Microsoft Word flaw may allow file theft. Furthermore, they plan on not fixing Word 97, leaving millions of users out in the cold. Yet another reason to try OpenOffice.org." It still takes more than running Word to expose the contents of your hard drive though. -
Tomcat 4.1.10 Released
Roullian writes "The first stable version of Tomcat 4.1 is out. This is a long-awaited version, as it includes major improvements: enhanced administration tools, a new JSP compiler, and many many performance and scalability improvements. For all of us using Tomcat in production, it's time to download!" -
Auburn University First To Offer Wireless Degree
EyesWideOpen writes "Auburn University in Alabama will become the first school in the country to offer a four-year bachelor's degree in the study of wireless technology this fall. Since its inception three months ago an estimated 30 to 50 students have signed up for Auburn's wireless engineering program. 'All engineering students are expected to complete liberal arts and general engineering classes the first two years of school. They then can focus on wireless during their last two years of study by taking courses such as Wireless Design Lab, RF Devices and Circuits, and 3G and 4G Wireless.'" -
fsck-less Booting?
patrick42 asks: "I am working on a project where I'll be replacing a DOS/Windows-based system with that of Linux or FreeBSD. The company for whom I'm working uses cheap PC's running some proprietary software on DOS/Windows to perform a certain task. The machines are deployed in environments where there are no keyboards or displays, and minimum-wage clerks are the people watching these machines. The company has decided to go with a free Unix system because they no longer wish to pay the licensing fees for Windows. The machines get unplugged all the time when they are moved or whatnot. They do not get a proper shutdown procedure ever, and it's not possible to change this due to the environments in which they are deployed. I've been told that they've never had a problem running DOS in terms of filesystem corruption. So I guess I'm looking for the safest filesystem possible that I can use with either FreeBSD or Linux. My head would be served on a platter if I picked something that sometimes requires user-intervention." Note that Ask Slashdot covered a similar question back in 1999, the situations differed, but the need remains the same: can Linux work in environments where proper shutdowns are rare-to-non-existant?"I have run many Linux machines, and I've experienced firsthand (only on occassion) where a machine did not get properly shutdown, and then on the next boot user-interaction was required to run fsck manually.
I really want to use either FreeBSD or Linux, but if there is any chance of this happening (hardware failures excluded) where someone needs to manually run fsck, I will not be able to use them.
I've been reading about the ext3 filesystem, and how corruption is quite rare, but it still seems possible. UFS claims to be quite stable as well, but fsck-less booting will not be available until FreeBSD 5.0 (from what I've read).
These machines aren't doing too much writing to the disk -- they are mostly just reading data, but that isn't to say that there will be no disk writes at all.
Can anyone offer some advice?" -
Going Back To The Past of the Internet
*no comment* writes "deadly.org currently has a story about a new grassroot network springing up. It consists of free shell access, and is trying to revitalize the olden days of the Internet. Free speech, free information are the key features, but I wonder if this is jsut another free DDoS drone as well." -
Three Major Linux Distributions Certified LSB Compliant
KevinDumpsCore writes "RedHat, Mandrake, and SuSE are now certified LSB compliant!" Here's the announcement on the Free Standards Group's site. The Linux Standards Base (check out these related Slashdot posts) has been working for years to perhaps tame the what-lives-where cross-distro craziness. (Of course, distro makers are under no obligation to comply with the LSB's choices.) -
DIY USB Extension Cables Using Cat5/6?
TheDarkRogue asks: "Ok, I have a small USB device that I need to position a distance from my computer, more then the cable, at least 30 feet. The thing is that I don't think it can go that far very well. I looked around for a solution and found a few products I could get for a price way out of my price range, so now I'm looking at this as a doit-myselfer. How can I extend the distance using Cat5/6? Does anyone know of any schematics for something or is that in its self more then is needed?" Extending a USB cable to this length (or more) can't be this easy, can it? What's the maximum length of USB cabling one can get in a single stretch? -
History of the Apple Logo
usermilk writes "There is a great article on the history of the Apple logo running at MacNYT.dk." The story's been translated into English, so no worries. -
Ricardo Montalban Recalls Khan
phyy-nx writes "Scifi.com, in referring to the directors cut of Star Trek II: The Wrath of Kahn (coming out on DVD Aug 6), has quoted clips from an interview with Ricardo Montalban. Montalban portrayed the vengeful Kahn in one of the best perfomances in one of the best of the (almost ten) Star Trek films. He mentions how difficult it was to portray Khan after six years of Mr. Roarke of Fantasy Island and how he overcame that mold to masterfully portray his new character's controlled insanity." Or, as Kirk would say: Khaaaaaaaaaaannnnnnnnnnnnnnnn! -
AT&T Broadband Introduces Tiered Pricing
Joey Patterson writes "It had to happen sooner or later. CNET reports that AT&T Broadband has introduced a tiered pricing plan called UltraLink (3 Mbps down/384 kbps up) for $79.99/month if you buy your own modem and $82.95/month if you lease one of theirs." -
NCSA Releases Beta of Milky Way Galaxy
TellarHK writes: "One of the coolest attractions in New York City, the Hayden Planetarium is working with NCSA to produce a navigable, flexible, and soon to be open sourced representation of the Milky Way Galaxy. Available at this link the Partiview Visualization Software tool is a particle engine using OpenGL to display the galaxy on your Linux or Windows PC. A Mac OS port (presumably for OS X) is also planned. At .5 status, the program already has a very high neat factor and runs acceptably well on last month's hardware." -
Slashback: Apache, DRM, Limbo
Slashback tonight has an important correction about the role of the Apache Foundation (none) vis a vis yesterday's ".NET for Apache" post. Also, another view of the recent DRM (stacked) roundtable in Washington, a review of Red Hat's new beta, and more. Anyone who has successfully downloaded the new Mandrake beta want to comment on that?Those guys did not ride in with us. Sascha Schumann of the Apache Software Foundation wrote to correct the story presented in Monday's post (".Net for Apache"), writing "this is _not_ a joint Apache Software Foundation/Microsoft stunt. It has not been approved or endorsed by the Apache Software Foundation, nor does it require any of those acts -- it is a deal between two private companies, Covalent and Microsoft."
Fly on wall video, anyone? kikensei writes: "DSL Reports has a story summarizing last week's DRM round table that was stacked with corporate panel members. You can read it here. It presents a much more apt framework for discussion than the overly sensitive, passive account from Al3x that defined our discussion last week."
Dancing in limbo, limbo, limbo. Earlier this month, we mentioned Red Hat's new beta, called Limbo. wiredog writes "From eWeek, a review of RedHat 8.0 beta. With gcc 3.1,the latest versions of GNOME, Mozilla and OpenOffice, and Apache 2.0"
The force is strong in these metallic boxes. Verizon Guy writes "CNet is reporting that Industrial Light and Magic, the group responsible for rendering the special effects in the Star Wars films, is moving away from their proprietary SGI/IRIX/RISC based systems and is instead moving to Dells running Linux. This will give them 100% performance at 20% of the cost."
Here's a link to our post with the recent Linux Journal article on same; look for more on this soon.
Wear name tags, please. mpawlo writes "Slashdot meetup day is only a week away. Some 4 500 people have already signed up to meet all over the world on Thursday July 25, 2002, 7 pm. We need more fellow Swedes to meet in Stockholm and I guess the same goes for other cities."
-
WorldCom to File for Chapter 11 Protection
Mantour writes: "To everyone's big suprise ;), Worldcom is going for Chapter 11. 'The Chapter 11 filing by WorldCom would follow once high-flying companies like energy trader Enron Corp. and Global Crossing Ltd., which crumbled into bankruptcy amid a crush of accounting investigations by federal regulators.' You can get more info in this Yahoo story" Update: 07/22 12:21 GMT by T : mnordstr points out a CNN report calling this "the largest bankruptcy ever." -
Video Over IP Permits South Pole Surgery
Henry Malmgren writes "Last week at the South Pole research station, we successfully completed knee surgery using a video over IP link back to the United States. The article is light on technical details, but what we did was to use a Polycom VTC unit to send a video signal to Raytheon Polar Services HQ in Colorado. Our signal went primarily over a Marisat satellite at T1 speeds, and then HQ redistributed the video to Boston via a dedicated ISDN line. We had signal problems several times during the transmission with Marisat, so we had to switch to a NASA TDRS satellite towards the end of the surgery. We also used an Iridium phone as a voice backup for the times when we couldn't get decent quality over either bird. During the surgery there were three cameras that we used to send back video to the states. One was the built in camera on the VTC unit, a second was a handheld Sony 8mm unit, and a third was a black and white "Doc Cam". This was a head mounted camera with a LED light unit that was built on station by our Senior Communications Technican, Jon Berry. This allowed the transmission of video from the Doctor's perspective. Unfortunately, while the Doc cam worked great locally, and we got great recordings of the surgery from it, it didn't work well over the satellite link. The camera view jumped around so much that it didn't compress well over the satellite link. The best video was obtained by putting the hand held camera on a tall tripod which was able to look directly into the surgical wound." -
Clockless Computing
ender81b writes "Scientific American is carrying a nice article on asynchronous chips. In general, the article advocates that eventually all computer systems will have to move to an asynchronous design. The article focuses on Sun's efforts but gives a nice overview of the general concept of asynchronous chip design." We had another story about this last year. -
MPAA Goes After Its Customers
EyesWideOpen writes "The Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) is issuing 'takedown' notices to ISP's to alert them that customers are using their internet service to transmit or post copyrighted movies. The ISP's in turn send a letter to the customers threatening to disable their internet connection unless the offending material is removed. The MPAA is using software that 'cruises file-swapping networks like Gnutella to find copyrighted materials, hunts down the IP address of the poster, then discovers which Internet service provider is being used.'" -
Robot Wars
EyesWideOpen writes "According to this New York Times article (free reg. req.) the Office of Naval Research is coordinating an effort to determine what it will take to build a system that will make it possible for autonomous vehicles (in the air and on the ground), or A. V.'s, to serve as soldiers on the battlefield. The project, called Multimedia Intelligent Network of Unattended Mobile Agents, or Minuteman, would consist of a network in which the highest-flying of the A. V.'s 'will communicate with headquarters, transmitting data and receiving commands. The commands will be passed along to a team of lower-flying A.V.'s that will relay them in turn to single drones serving as liaisons for squadrons of A.V.'s.' The article also mentions that the A. V.'s will have the ability to send high resolution color video as well as still photographs using MPEG-4 compression. Pretty interesting stuff." -
Are Regression Tests an Industry Standard?
Sludge asks: "I just finished leading a team through a software project. It was the first of it's type for our company: financial transactions were involved, and it was therefore very fault intolerant. In order to complete this, a set of regression tests were written. For example, if the amount of money collected doesn't match up to our order table, we get notified via our cellphone's text messaging as soon as the cronjob picks it up. Lots of other implementation-specific tests exist as well. My question is, how common is this for the software industry? My company had never heard of this before I came along. Is it the norm? (When you answer, also say whether or not your company does risk management.)" -
A Quick Peek From the Matrix Set In Sydney
We posted recently about the planned shutdown of part of Sydney for filming of the upcoming Matrix sequel. Now reader zobier points to a followup describing the shooting, and since he was on hand to see it first-hand, writes: "I went along to watch the filming, it was very cool (I love helicopters tho' ;) They didn't block off much city space, maybe (100 - 200m), and the chopper flew down the square (Martin Place) between the buildings about 5 - 10m above our heads. Many onlookers were videoing and photographing the scene. At about 5pm when it got dark the camera flashes started going off, this pissed off the director as it was interfering with his film." GoogolPlexPlex adds a link to coverage in the Sydney Morning Herald. -
Comparison Of Google to Teoma
randomErr writes "SearchEngineWatch.com was compared the good and the bad of both engine. They wrote the cool thing about Teoma is that its community-seeking behavior is both query-specific, and happens in real time. Whenever you type in a query, we're actually looking for the communities after you type the query. Teoma's approach differs from Google's, which uses a similar, but more static ranking system. It's also unlike the approach taken by Northern Light that classify web pages based on pre-defined categories." -
Guide To Designing Low Power Handhelds
randomErr writes "iAppliance had a nifty article about designing handhelds. As the state-of-the-art in low-power CPUs races forward, the CPU becomes one of the most critical components in the design of a handheld. New CPUs such as Intel's XScale, Alchemy Semiconductor's Au1000, and Transmeta's Crusoe provide the ability to scale clock frequency and voltage dynamically. As power consumption varies linearly with clock speed and as the square of core voltage, you'll want to have hardware hooks to be able to adjust both clock speed and voltage as necessary, based on device performance." -
Stem-Cell Advances in Rats
randomErr writes "NY Times wrote that two teams of scientists on Thursday announced they had made important strides towards coaxing stem cells -- the raw material for the "miracle" transplants of the future -- into growing into fresh, healthy tissue." -
Giant Firefighting Blimp
bgood writes: "MSNBC has an article about a California firm's plans for building a firefighting airship. Wetzone Engineering is working on a prototype and hopes to have a production craft in use within three years." Looks like a great way to water the lawn, too. -
Hack Enables Quartz Anti-Aliasing In All Carbon Apps
Xenex writes "With the release of Mac OS X 10.1.5 a few days ago, Carbon applications now have access to Quartz anti-aliasing. However, we have to wait for developers to release updated versions of their applications to take advantage it. The people at Unsanity have decided that they didn't want to wait, and have released a 'haxie' called Silk. It forces Carbon applications to use the new Quartz anti-aliasing, and my experiences with it have all been perfect. So, now you can have a beautiful Snak, Mozilla, IE ... if it's Carbon, it's made pretty." -
How Hard is it to Manage Different Unices?
vrmlguy asks: "Where I work has several Unix-based servers, all running the same vendor's OS. We are getting ready to buy another big server, and management wants to get bids from other vendors. However, our staff is only familar with our current vendor's OS. Yes, I know that any two flavors of Unix are more alike than not, and yes, I know about the Rosetta Stone for Unix that makes it easy to transfer skills. I want to know about the down-side: What's the difference in the cost of operations between a mono-culture and a shop running two or more vendors' OSs?" -
Director Attacks MPAA Piracy Claims
dipfan writes "Alex Cox, the writer/director of cult classic Repo Man and punk movie Sid And Nancy, writes today in The Guardian's media section that the movie industry's real pirates are the Hollywood studios and the MPAA - for squeezing out independents. He rejects the widespread claim that Spider-Man suffered from widespread net piracy, and asks: "Are [the MPAA's] claims of lost billions even credible?" (In a strange coincidence, Cox has another article in the same newspaper today, where he defends using 35mm film rather than digital cameras a la George Lucas, saying digital cinema gives too much power to the distributors and studios because the technology is less portable than 35mm.)" -
XP Service Pack Does the Impossible
Peyna writes "This article over at C|net discusses the upcoming Microsoft Windows XP service pack, which will contain the normal bug fixes, but more importantly, will make XP more modular, allowing you to override their default products. I assume this means Internet Explorer and possibly some other apps as well." -
Future Computers
jethro200 writes "Popsci.com has an interesting story on the up-and-coming silicon replacements, ranging from DNA to a little molecule called thiol to using atoms in a quantum state. Obviously, these are a long way from being your next desktop, but an interesting article nonetheless." -
Eldred Attracts Heavyweight Supporters
dipfan writes: "Opening briefs have now been filed with the Supreme Court for the Eldred v Ashcroft copyright case, arguing that the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act is unconstitutional. The anti-extension case has attracted some big name supporters, including Intel, and Nobel prize winning economist Milton Freidman, who argue it is "highly unlikely that the economic benefits from copyright extension" outweigh the additional costs, and that copyright extension reduces consumer welfare. (Previous coverage of the case on /. here and here)"
