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OJ was able to get off because he hired an incredibly talented set of lawyers.

It makes sense that those with a lot of money would hire the best lawyers. Now that Obama chooses the cream of the crop, suddenly these guys are somehow no good?

How naive you are:
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-10024163-38.html
http://www.osnews.com/story/21190/Obama_s_DOJ_Sides_with_RIAA

It's cute defending your man to the last. I still have my Ron Paul sticker proudly displayed and can proudly say I did not vote one democrat or republican the last election. Yeah, my candidates lost, but at least I didn't buy into bullshit. Like George Carlin says, the people who run this country just don't give a fuck about you.

Yes: http://news.cnet.com/2300-11386_3-10000718-7.html?tag=mncol

I can imagine this device looking like a magic number to engineers 9,000 years from now as they try to figure out how the thing works.

Google's response to such limitations was to cease uploading altogether. "We have a bias in favor of freedom of expression and are committed to openness," YouTube Asia spokeswoman Lucinda Barlow, told Yahoo. "It's very important that if users want to be anonymous that they have that chance."

It's surprising that Google ejects South Korea while continuing to hand over its user information to Brazil and India and kowtowing to Chinese for Censorship .
Very odd.

Oh no, I got it. Obama has no control over state and local taxes. However, he should has specified that when he said "...not ANY of your taxes..." He could have said, "...not any of your FEDERAL taxes." or "not any of your INCOME taxes." He didn't. He said, "not ANY of your taxes".

This is a classic case of a straw man. Pretty much everyone understood the context this was in. Except you decide to remove context, ascribe intent to lack of context, and go on your merry flaming ways.

Nice try.

Strawman? Yeah, probably. I can see that. I would call it a nitpick as another poster did. When I read NO taxes, I expect NO taxes, but I live in a practically NO tax state.

So, I'll give you strawman. Not on the cigarette taxes though, although that is Off Topic.

Ah, here we go. The scarecrow has come to life:
http://news.cnet.com/Video-games-in-Congress-crosshairs/2100-1028_3-6079654.html

While not exactly taxes yet, it is not something that is out of the question. You can bet that if legislative restrictions fail, expect taxes.

"Not every contact between supplier and retailer regarding resale prices constitutes an illegal concerted practice within the meaning of Section 1 ARC. However, this must not lead to a form of coordination where the supplier actively tries to coordinate the pricing activities of the retailer and thus retailer and supplier agree on future actions of the retailer. In the present case, this boundary has been crossed"

Uh, he's asking about ripping the DVDs *TO PUT ON A MEDIA PLAYER*. Last I checked, no media players play ISO formats. I dunno, maybe I'm wrong and they added ISO support to iPods

Well, iPod was never mentioned but supersloshy wasn't very specific. Many portable DVD players might be described as portable media players in which case, copying a DVD to a DVD-R would certainly be an option. For example, my own portable media player is a Philips DCP750 It's cheap, plays DivX from SD cards, video from iPods and (surprise) plain-ol-DVDs.

Also CNet has a category for ISO Portable Video Players. There are a few.

Windows is as secure
                  http://news.cnet.com/8301-13860_3-10156617-56.html/ Windows UAC flaw
                  http://www.istartedsomething.com/20090204/second-windows-7-uac-flaw-malware-self-elevate/ Windows UAC flaw
                  http://www.linux.com/feature/131059/ Only Ubuntu survived Pwn to Own contest.

has more products
                  http://stommel.tamu.edu/~baum/linuxlist/linuxlist/linuxlist.html/ Linux software encyclopedia
                                There are literally millions of unix scripts, programs, and utilities for Linux.
                                I will concede that there are several 3rd party tools that are windows-only, and limit the adaptability
                                of some business's switching, but you'll never win the "more products" argument in windows favor.

Easier to install
                  This will vary with the flavor of linux. Some are definitely more challenging to get functional. If
                  you compare the installation / setup time for 50 computers, with ease of installation being a priority in your
                  choice of distributions, then you can have them up & running quicker, and more consistently with Linux than
                  with windows.

There is a Mac version of Daz, no need to use Windows if you do not want to.

It's much nicer working on a real UNIX system.

I guess we were all hoping he would stick to his original 'principles':

For one thing, under an Obama presidency, Americans will be able to leave behind the era of George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and "wiretaps without warrants," he said. (He was referring to the lingering legal fallout over reports that the National Security Agency scooped up Americans' phone and Internet activities without court orders, ostensibly to monitor terrorist plots, in the years after the September 11 attacks.)

It's hardly a new stance for Obama, who has made similar statements in previous campaign speeches, but mention of the issue in a stump speech, alongside more frequently discussed topics like Iraq and education, may give some clue to his priorities.

In our own Technology Voters' Guide, when asked whether he supports shielding telecommunications and Internet companies from lawsuits accusing them of illegal spying, Obama gave us a one-word response: "No."

Openoffice is written in c++.

http://download.cnet.com/OpenOffice-org-Windows/3000-2064_4-10263109.html ...OpenOffice.org runs on Solaris, Linux (including PPC Linux), and Windows. Written in C++ and with documented APIs licensed under the LGPL and SISSL open-source protocols, OpenOffice.org allows any knowledgeable developer to benefit from the source...

Here you go from 2007, Apple inc bought the mark outright from Apple Corp and leased rights back to Apple Corp.

First of all, I'm not entirely sold on the source of this story, since it does come from Opera's website.

Okay, try this: "Apple refusing royalty-free license to widget patent". The CNet article says nothing about Opera.

Assuming this story is true, and while I normally rush to Apple's defence, this is totally unacceptable.

Yea, it is unacceptable.

This sort of patent stockpiling is getting as bad as that of Microsoft or IBM.

Software should not be patented period!!!

Worse, at least IBM uses some of their patents to protect open source projects

Apple supports open source projects as well. Apple Developer Connection has a website for open source. And if you search Apple's download section you can find a lot of open source software.

Falcon

http://news.cnet.com/8301-13526_3-10214556-27.html?part=rss&subj=news&tag=2547-1_3-0-5 A quick view of the day's top selling tracks reveals several at $1.29 (which earlier today were under a dollar)

We have Amazon.

Except that.... Amazon also started selling tracks at $1.29 today. Granted, Amazon's $0.79 songs seem to be more frequent than Apple's $0.69 songs.

The only thing keeping iTunes relevant is the fact that Apple won't let anything else talk to the iPhone, and they refuse all other music players for the device.

It seems you are mixing up iTunes (the media player) and the iTunes Store, which you access through the iTunes player.

You need iTunes if you have an iPod or iPhone. But you don't need the iTunes Store, which is the topic of discussion, since you can use Amazon's MP3s (or any other non-DRMed files) in iTunes and in your iPod/iPhone.

Similarly, you can use your iTunes Plus files on any player that plays AAC, i.e., most players sold nowadays.

Amazon has followed suit with $1.29 Here

No big deal anyway Amazon US just followed suit Here

I'd say don't keep logs. not for a year, a week, an hour, or even a minute. Because if you do a setup like that every 3 letter agency is going to come to you constantly looking for fishing expeditions.

You see, the problem is right now we are all caught in a battle. One side is the "if you aren't doing anything wrong then you have nothing to hide" government never does anything wrong with their power types. On the other we have the "we need anonymity to preserve democracy" types who point out(and I believe rightly so) that is everything you ever said on the net could be tracked to your door it would have a chilling effect with folks afraid to speak freely. The whole child pron thing is frankly a red herring. It is an excuse for a power grab, nothing more. How do I know? Because if we were serious about stomping out that crap we wouldn't be giving a flying crap about some fat perv in his basement in Omaha and instead would be building cooperation with the EU to go into these former eastern bloc countries where cash will pretty much buy you anything and shut this shit down.

But that is not YOUR problem. Your problem is that every 3 letter agency is going to be looking at your servers like a fat guy looks at an all you can eat buffet. if your service gets popular it will be because people think it is safe to use, yes? People who feel safe aren't looking over the shoulder thus it is easier to "catch" them for doing what the government considers naughty. You see they have a big list of websites that they don't like and probably figure that only bad people would look at. Some are cp sites I'm sure, but there are sites that are considered "terrorist leaning" and then I'm sure there are others on that list that would make you go WTF because the reason the site was on there would make no sense except for the paranoid PHB who put it on there in the first place. And in case you missed the stories nowadays child porn can be teens taking pics of their OWN bodies and sending them over your network, or a a dirty Simpsons cartoon and thanks to the FBI running child porn honeypots where they don't even record the referrer a rickroll can get someone thrown to the ground and drug off to jail. And let us not forget a company just had their servers snatched by the feds because someone that used them dared to put up a pre release of a crappy Xmen flick. What if that had been YOUR companies servers? Do you have enough capital to keep going if one of those users did the same to you?

For the above reasons I would not even THINK of building what you are purposing in the USA. The risk to reward ratio is simply too great. Either you spread 'em for every cop that walks through your door, which will get back to your customers who will avoid you like the clap, or you will spend all your time and money on lawyers fighting subpoena after subpoena for your records. if you do build it you better spend a LOT of time doing CYA like making damned sure nothing is logged. Because with the craziness of child offender laws nowadays pretty much anything could be labeled as child porn depending on whether a judge thinks they "look lolita" or not. And that encrypted tunnel will give your customers a false sense of security which I'm sure will make the feds and any other 3 letter agency just drool at the possibilities. So let me put it this way: Good luck with that and I'm glad I'm not you. Because I wouldn't want my ass in any way shape or form connected with what you are purposing. Because until some sanity replaces the mob mentality we got going over terrorists and cp it is simply too dangerous. See? There is that whole "chilling effect" deal, only instead of the users it will be YOUR companies ass that will get the crosshairs first. No thanks.

Particularly brain dead politicians. Wasn't it also a local Italian prosecutor that decided the best way of dealing with a video of some kids bullying another one, was to sue Google?

I'm not saying Italy has a monopoly on boneheaded politico's but their particular brand of antics seem to stick on my mind.

Retired? Really? Not a week ago. He may have given the CEO reins over to our favorite chair tosser, but he's still Chairman of Microsoft. No doubt his stock option package is quite good.

That's good for Microsoft, too. Three nines of companies don't long survive the loss of their founders. As Damon Runyon said, "The race may not always be to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, but that's the way to bet".

The fall may have even begun before he retired as CEO. When SCO's backstop with Baystar dried up, Microsoft lost all of its credibility in the smoke filled rooms where the real money makes deals. Who knows how much this cost RBC and the other partners? Gates will spend the rest of his life trying to make amends, but those who suffered will never forget. You can't swing a billion dollars without somebody dies, and the dead stay dead no matter how many soup kitchens you volunteer in afterward.

Eventually, pigeons come home to roost. The devil will have his due.

This is the same state where the owners and operators of the New Times were arrested for exposing extreme judicial misconduct by prosecutors;

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoenix_New_Times

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/19/business/media/19cnd-arrest.html?_r=2&hp&oref=slogin&oref=login

http://www.eastvalleytribune.com/story/99912

http://news.cnet.com/8301-13508_3-9800829-19.html

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/21376598/

Between "speed tax" photo radar on freeways and "Nickel Bag" Joe Arpaio in Arizona, I would definitely call the state highly prosecutorial against it's citizens.

No, it recently became a bigtime federal felony to have anything to do with pirating of unpublished materials.

See the Family Entertainment and Copyright Act of 2005. That was the carrot that congress gave hollywood in exchange for not stopping them from specifically legalizing "edit lists" for those ultraconservatives who want to watch DVDs without all the good parts. Note that "edit lists" were probably legal to begin with since the original DVDs were never copied or modified. So, it really was just your standard congress sells out on copyright laws once again situation.

It would be nice if we could use this new wireless network on our smart phones and then let us tether our phones to our computers so that we could use it on the go and at home for one "reasonable price."

Yea, I read in an article on CNet broadband will be fixed not mobile.

Falcon

From the second link in the summary:

Melone said it's too early to say if Verizon will request money from the government as part of the package to fund building its network in rural communities. But he said that with or without government money, Verizon is committed to providing service in rural areas via its 4G network. "At this point we haven't made any attempt to get stimulus money for the LTE build-out," he said. "But it's still early in that process and there's not enough clarity around the stimulus package. We don't know what strings will be attached to that money. Regardless, we plan to blanket the country over a period of time with 4G. We bought the licenses to cover the entire continental U.S., and we plan on building the network where ever we have a license."

Verizon did win the bid to get the 700 mhz spectrum but that is not what will elevate them into rural america alone.

Verizon merging with Alltel will be a big factor as Alltel has had a presence in a lot of rural and small city suburbs.

Based on their comments so far, Solaris will mostly be living on x86, AIX will live on Power, and IBM will turn to third parties for legacy Sparc support. I think Solaris will survive, as a commodity offering. But this is probably the death-knell for Sparc.

Somehow, I don't see much of Solaris on Power. If there had been any customer demand for it, either IBM or Sun would have provided it by now. Sun would have been happy to sell IBM an OS, and IBM would have been happy to sell Sun some chips. Neither one of them did it, which inclines me to believe there wasn't enough customer interest for it to be profitable.

My guess is that Solaris will become a commodity offering primarily on x86. AIX will remain the premium offering on Power. Over time, I'd expect most of Solaris's most compelling features will wind up getting migrated to AIX. The statements made on the matter so far tend to back that up.

For more info on this very subject, check out Could NetApp suit throw a wrench in Sun-IBM talks?

Neither did I but Kodak does have patents on some technology in Sun's Java.

Falcon

...and every day, the world gets one step closer to being able to do just that... reference

http://news.cnet.com/8301-17938_105-10210085-1.html?tag=mncol;title another site to compare with.

Do you prefer the OMG Ponies! approach?

http://news.cnet.com/8301-10784_3-6056735-7.html

Actually, I'd seriously like to know if there is a preserved version of the OMG Ponies Slashdot.

The numbers I used are from CNET: http://reviews.cnet.com/laptops/dell-xps-m1730/4507-3121_7-32687269.html?tag=mncol;psum .

I would never buy any 17-inch laptop, Apple or otherwise. I have a 13" MacBook, and have previously owned tablet PCs, linux laptops, and Windows laptops from Toshiba, Gateway, and Dell.

My point was not that that particular MacBook makes sense to any given consumer. My point was that you cannot compare two computers on the basis of selected clock speeds alone, at the expense of realizing that there are many other factors.

You're comparing apples to oranges here. The laptop he referred to was the 17" MBP, which as a claimed 8 hour battery. The Dell he referred to was quoted at the specs I quoted here: http://reviews.cnet.com/laptops/dell-xps-m1730/4507-3121_7-32687269.html?tag=mncol;psum

You are actually comparing the wrong Mac to the wrong Dell. I don't see how that's an honest critique of my post.

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2009/03/31/scitech/pcanswer/main4905580.shtml:

Crazy as it seems, some prosecutors have gone after kids for taking and sending pictures of themselves. There was a case in Florida a couple of years ago where a teenage boy and girl photographed themselves nude and engaged in "unspecified sexual behavior." One kid sent the picture to the other and somehow the police got involved. They were tried and convicted for production and distribution of child porn and the teen who received the image had the additional charge of possession. An appeals court upheld the convictions.

http://news.cnet.com/Police-blotter-Teens-prosecuted-for-racy-photos/2100-1030_3-6157857.html:

By a 2-1 vote, the appeals court didn't buy it. Judge James Wolf, a former prosecutor, wrote the majority opinion.

Wolf speculated that Amber and Jeremy could have ended up selling the photos to child pornographers ("one motive for revealing the photos is profit") or showing the images to their friends. He claimed that Amber had neither the "foresight or maturity" to make a reasonable estimation of the risks on her own. And he said that transferring the images from a digital camera to a PC created innumerable problems: "The two computers (can) be hacked."

In most cased, to prove it are fairly trivial for experts. You car is supposed to be fitted with a authorized alarm type ( the type is specified in the contract as well ) So, in normal circumstance, if the car is found back the expert will look for evidence of alarm circumvention, broken windows, ... it gets worse if they also find the thief.

So, if the thief cracks the keyless fob leaving no physical trace of circumvention you are boned.

And if they catch the thief they are going to take his word over yours even though he has every incentive to lie and say you left it unlocked with the keys in driver's seat that way they won't know he's got an expensive laptop with an expensive fob cracker to confiscate from him.

That's fucked up.

Question is: If it takes a 40 foot high wing to move a 1 ton car, how big of a wing would you need to move a 50,000 ton container ship?

I think a better question is: Why do you need to move a ship that big on sail power alone? While it would be cool to do so, using wind power in conjunction with conventional engines improves efficiency reducing fuel consumption between 10 and 35 percent, which is a good start.

This is all fairly silly... Apple does not keep the 30%:

Updated 4:00 p.m. - An Apple representative said the company's policy concerning refunds and developers is that when a refund is granted on a purchase made through the App Store, Apple returns the customer's money and debits the developer's account by 70 percent of the application price, or the revenue the developer had gained on the sale. The company does not charge the developer an additional 30 percent during the refund process, the representative said.

cnet already looked into this and debunked it two days ago: http://news.cnet.com/8301-13579_3-10205293-37.html?tag=mncol;title

See this CNet article for details.

They really fumbled the ball on organizing this, expecting Microsoft to acquiesce with one week's notice.

See Reuven's post. Certainly the CCIF leadership was involved, but to my knowledge, It was led by IBM, who doesn't want to be named so they don't make it look like an "IBM initiative". See this CNet article for more information on how IBM approached Microsoft.

IBM completely fumbled the ball here, they were disorganized and got their PR organization to call people up 1 week ago to sign the document, a fait accompli. You might be able to do that to smaller cloud companies, but you don't fucking do that to Microsoft and expect acquiescence.

You're right. It is definitely possible that they have been able to move a lot of iPhone inventory since they started giving the phone away for free.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13579_3-10172786-37.html

The only wisdom I have to share at this point is : if you find out your ISP is in league with the RIAA, change ISP's, and let them know why you left.

Well, start the list with AT&T, Comcast and Cox cable.

FLAC is already supported on a number of platforms—and why not, considering it's *FREE* (licensing-wise) for them to do so. If my miniscule SanDisk Clip can play FLACs, surely all the other manufacturers should be able to figure it out.

mp3HD is a poster-child for stillborn technology. Hey Thomson, nice try staying relevant!

I wouldn't bet on it. But it should be better than ordinary MP3s, in theory. OTOH do you really expect people won't just keep using the format that takes up the least space?

Find some case studies on the web where someone has been caught (Ernie Ball Inc. http://news.cnet.com/2008-1082_3-5065859.html ) and the price he had to pay £90,000) and the solution he then applied (ripped out all MS software).
Show that to your boss and mention that the previous guy might want a pay day at some point by whistleblowing to the BSA.
Make sure you email it to the boss, document it as a "Cover your Ass" scenario.
If the boss doesn;t wake up, leave and whistleblow yourself and show your documented attempts to get compliant. Bear in mind you may sink the company if its really bad, so check your conscience first.

All depends on EULA compliance and your jurisdiction.

*If* the EULA is found binding, you will be on the hook for the audit at your expense. Those expenses would include the court costs. Read the Microsoft EULA, ok?

Basically, it isn't worth (typically) trying. Say "Uncle" and get on with it. Or do what Ball did, and say "fuck you" -- but note that even Ball paid! THEN went to F/OSS.

http://news.cnet.com/2008-1082_3-5065859.html

Ball settled for 65,000, and 35,000 in legal fees. Most companies just settle.

He's been crazy for years. My first exposure to his loony ideas was in that old story of his, "The Right To Read". He wrote that when I'd just entered college and just started using this "GNU" stuff, and I remember being being stunned by his paranoia.

Sure, there's basically no way that kind of absurdity would be tolerated sufficiently for it to get that far.

Grade schools wasting time preaching about intellectual property?

That's just the more general issue of special interests intruding and making a mess of things. Don't they do similar things with cosmology and historical biology and sex ed? That's also what I understand gender studies (is it still called that) and the like are, which I think have also reached grade school now.

Software being outlawed for being able to edit RAM that someone else's program allocated?

No. I think it's called something like "substantial noninfringing uses".

People who didn't have the root passwords for their own computers?

That's not what that is. There are some theoretical bad uses, but somehow those don't seem to have materialized... probably because people aren't stupid.

And then there's the central point of the story, that eventually people would be stuck with books they couldn't lend or resell!

Funny thing is, things are actually going in the opposite direction. iTunes has non-DRM tracks now, there are other online music stores popping up that sell ordinary MP3 files, there are various Open Textbook projects, research seems to be moving to open access publishing instead of / in addition to the old closed journals, etc.

That Stallman guy was clearly a nutjob.

Yep. Visions of dystopia can make the slope look very slippery and very scary, but time tends to show that things don't actually end up going that way. And it isn't even copyleft that prevents it, it's people saying "wtf this makes no sense" and going elsewhere.

He's been crazy for years. My first exposure to his loony ideas was in that old story of his, "The Right To Read". He wrote that when I'd just entered college and just started using this "GNU" stuff, and I remember being being stunned by his paranoia. Grade schools wasting time preaching about intellectual property? Software being outlawed for being able to edit RAM that someone else's program allocated? People who didn't have the root passwords for their own computers? And then there's the central point of the story, that eventually people would be stuck with books they couldn't lend or resell! That Stallman guy was clearly a nutjob.

now I want a new machine and the 20" Dell is still perfect, but I can't reuse the iMac.

First off, because they are not so easy to reuse or re purpose I don't like these all-in-one computers, whether iMacs, Dell XPS One, or other all-in-one computers. To me they are a waste of resources. However you can still use the iMac. See this. It describes how you can use it with another Mac. For instance using a Firewire cable you can use it as a Firewire drive. MacOSX explains how you can use some iMacs as a second monitor. Check Can MacBook Pro laptop use IMAC monitor (easily)? as well.

Hope this helps.

Falcon

In the past 10 years, the most notable patent lawsuits were:

SCO vs. Linux - After hundreds of millions of dollars were blown away in lawyers legal fees, the judge rules that Linux didn't infringe on SCO's intellectual property. Best site for news here is Groklaw

3Dfx vs. Nvidia - 3dfx lost and merged into Nvidia

Rambus vs. Hynix vs Micron Technology vs. Infineon Technologies vs. Siemens AG. vs. Samsung

Rambus seemed to be suing just about everyone, and everyone else was countersuing Rambus and each other. Legal letters seem to be flying around like chairs in a Saturday night bar fight.

Hynix to pay Rambus $379 million in patent dispute

A complete list of legal updates provided by Rambus

Micron vs. Rambus

Although it does seem better to settle all patent disputes with cross-licensing as soon as possible, rather than slogging it out into bankruptcy

Rambus and Infineon settle patent dispute