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Fatwallet should send a letter to each US Senator, and each US Representative, detailing the issue, and requesting their response regarding their view of this abuse of consumer rights, and basic rights, and of the DMCA act which should be struck down entirely.

In the letter, Fatwallet should indicate that the Senators' and Reps' responses or positions, as well as their voting record concerning the original DMCA, broadcast flags, digital restrictions management and related topics will be listed. Their lack of response will also be listed if that is their tactic.

Then Fatwallet should put up a page on their website, and break it down by State, listing each Senator and Representative, and how they voted on these Jack Valenti/MPAA/Hollywood Berman schemes, and what their response was to Fatwallet's run-in with the DMCA.

While Fatwallet is not about the DMCA, they have now experienced the hammer of the DMCA. Sending out a form letter to 435 US elected representatives will hardly put a dent in their budget, and will go a long way to exposing who supports the public, and who is in the pockets of Hollywood at the expense of the public and freedom of information. It will also put the reps on notice that more people are watching, and paying attention to how they vote.

The Fatwallet website doesn't allow anon posting, so I posted here. Somehow, those that still insist on forced registration will never understand why they don't have a bigger audience.

For more on the DMCA, see these sites:

NYLXS

and for our direct actions in Washington and NY regarding the dmca, drm (is theft), broadcast flag, and more, see:

NY Fair Use

then get involved.

btw, the deadline for posting comments on the broadcast flag, another Jack Valenti/MPAA/Hollywood Reps theft attempt, is fast approaching. See:

Declan McCullough asks "Why have you not written to the FCC?" and Slashdot
responds

There was a /. article on the subject not too long ago (which I couldn't find), but I did find a couple of links that should prove interesting.

Here is one that pegs the white box PC market at 30% market share. Dell had the largest market share (as estimated by the same group during the same period) at 17.1%.

Hope this is helpful.

A: We have a constant problem with people who are trying to break our system for no other purpose than they have nothing better to do--like their bosses haven't assigned them enough to do at work today, or that their mom hasn't made them mow the lawn, in most cases!

A: We have a constant problem with people who are trying to break our system for no other purpose than they have nothing better to do--like their bosses haven't assigned them enough to do at work today, or that their mom hasn't made them mow the lawn, in most cases!

r0xah,
I dig getting paid, too. And I'll be the first to admit I've written wreams of code on MS platforms.
Agreed, much of what you hear here is the sound of a full diaper.
The other extreme is an ostrich-like attitude about fascist business practices. "What's good for MS is good for the US" is not much of an answer. I personally worry that the US stands to be at an economic disadvantage to the rest of the world because we've optimized ourselves to bow to Redmond at the expense of knowing how to get anything done, rendering US business less competitive.
Particularly offensive is crap like this. Government stuff is supposed to be all about the lowest bidder. Who bids lower than the GPL? TCO arguments do have merit, so make them. Show me that forking over a pile of cash to Redmond gets us a better memo.

Forever suck?

Mac OS has not *always* been inferior.

Until Windows 95, you really had no choice except a Mac to do desktop graphics and printing.

Macs had high color
Macs had multiple monitors
Macs had TrueType and PostScript
Macs had color management

So it took until 1995 for a PC to catch up for that (you use Photoshop in Classic Mode, so there's your history for you). So if it was the year 1994 and you had to do graphics, there was no alternative except a Mac... Oh, sure, you could use Windows NT 3.51, actually, but... people didn't.

So until 1995, realistically, Adobe had to survive on Macs and Windows NT. You couldn't have your Photoshop on your Windows 2000 computer without Adobe thriving on the Mac. So say thank you to all the Mac users who kept Adobe alive long enough for Windows to catch up enough for a Windows port to be possible.

What else... Mac OS released without any truly innovative ideas? At the time a mouse, a windowing system, and a desktop metaphor was pretty innovative. Photoshop, released in 1990, couldn't have existed on the PC since Windows 3.0 wasn't available until 1990! The first graphical Mac was unleashed in 1984... of course Windows 1.0 was available the very next year in 1985...

So what else does that show us? Word 1.0 for DOS was available 1983, Word 1.0 for Mac was available in 1985, and it wasn't until 1993 that Word 6.0 (for Windows) was released. Word for DOS had or Word for Mac had only been available up to that point.

Then there's Quicktime...

Okay, so all that is OLD hat. Microsoft (eventually) will catch up, history is showing us.

So what did Apple do new with OS X that is innovative, you ask?

How about security? Of course security is a nasty beast to define, because it is only visible through the lack of exploits. No exploits, no news. Do I think OS X is more secure than Windows XP? Yes. Why? Partially because the core OS is open source, partially because the core OS is heavily related to BSD, and partially because the core OS has been in use since 1989 with the release of the first NeXT workstations. Windows, while similarly old, is not similarly aged, with IE exploits, IIS exploits, ActiveX exploits, and other exploits. OS X gets around IE exploits by not integrating IE, though there is an HTML library available. It gets around IIS exploits by relying on tried and true OSS servers such as Apache, BSD-telnetd, BSD-sshd, and BSD-ftpd. It gets around ActiveX exploits by relying on a scripting technology, AppleScript, that has been used successfully since 1993 to automate prepress, print, publishing, and graphics businesses. Oh, and they don't integrate AppleScript into the html rendering engine, though there is a third party AppleScript plugin available. Yes, there have been AppleScript viruses, just like there are VisualBasic viruses...

But Apple doesn't suffer nearly as badly because Mail doesn't auto execute AppleScript viruses which aren't embedded into the HTML that s rendered by the preview pane.

Alright, so this is sorta cheap, innovation by not being as *bad* as Microsoft.

There's legitimate innovation as well.

OS X 10.0 had it's compositing engine. Vector based, PDF based, output independent. It's certainly not perfect, but it's a continuation of NeXT's PostScript based DisplayPS. Windows already has something called GDI+ and WMF, but I do not believe they are currently used.

OS X 10.0 introduced iDVD, to match the earlier release of iTunes and iMovie, allowing the sufficiently well of Mac owner the capabillity to make DVDs within 20 minutes, though burning them probably took an hour or so.

OS X 10.2 upped the stakes with *hardware* accelerated display technology. Big deal, you say? It's 3d hardware accelerated. Microsoft is hoping to catch up next year with Longhorn.

OS X 10.2 also added new networking technology that doesn't yet exist on Windows, though UPnP is close. Rendevous, otherwise known as ZeroConf, is a peer to peer network discovery protocol.

OS X 10.2 added bluetooth support, which Windows XP adds later this year.

OS X 10.2 added full tablet and handwriting recognition, which doesn't appear until . Also, you will probably need a new PC, where OS X only requires a tablet, such as a Wacom tablet, instead of a new computer.

Anyway, it's really only your loss, not mine, if Apple OS X doesn't somehow suit your needs, and likewise your gain if Windows XP can suit yours (but not mine)

There have been several cases brought in civil court. Anyone with standing can bring a civil case, while the gov't alone brings the criminal charges. Criminal penalties for this sort of thing -- basically copyright infringement -- are extraordinary, until the DMCA came along. Likely they have been looking for a good test case to make their precedent. It looks like they will win.

The EFF I believe has some of the other litigation described. This article has some interesting discussion and identifies several examples of litigation or intimidation.

There is one surefire way to invalidate the DMCA -- get Congress to repeal it. I know, tedious and democratic, but maybe the public will get mad enough at some point.

I'm wrong, actually.

Apple killed it's eWorld online service years before Apple nee iGreen went into business, so I guess Apple *was* there first.

Actually, eWorld was an earlier effort than what I was thinking of. (More.) It appears the focus was on setting up a portal but not trying to compete on access. Their early alliance with Earthlink (what happened to that?) might have been a gesture towards some sort of synergy. Anyway, the distinction between access and portal probably goes right by most consumers, taking us back to the trademark problem. (I went through enough agony in my old job trying to explain to my boss the difference between RAM and hard drives, and why we needed to buy both.)

I remember that there is www.appleisp.net What up with that? There's not even the usual "in no was associated with" disclaimer.

Around Windows 2000, if i'm not mistaken?

You're not

Who thinks the IBM trial was a disaster?

"Generally" everyone. It's not that the investigation accomplished nothing but that it cost millions of dollars, seriously damaged a leading US company, and dragged on so long that it made itself irrelevant. The Microsoft case was much faster and better focused. I believe strongly in antitrust and happen to be a lawyer, but do not endorse perpetual aimless government meddling and avoidable attorney fees over the free market. I don't believe the case was pointless at the outset, but it became so, partly because it was radically different from Standard Oil.

Ironically the PC gave us MS-DOS and the birth of the MS dynasty. I don't buy that the PC rose to fame because it was a superior open standard; it had the prestigious IBM label on it, and then IBM lost control of it.

Here is an article on the contrast that I chanced upon. There are many many others, and the usual stack of books, criticizing the IBM investigation. This the dominant view, not FUD (by whom?). Microsoft was the see-what-we-have-learned sequel.

Here is an earlier Slashdot article. It mentions that the current database (as of Nov 10) has 200 titles

Of course there are. Myself, I use SimpleDNS.

Odd that you would pick Morgan Stanley for your example -- they're working with Redhat to switch to linux for some of their operations.
My point wasn't that you shouldn't learn windows if you're in a windows shop -- my point was that Linux/Unix administrators get paid better, and that Linux/Unix have a much greater market share than you obviously think -- even in corporate environments. If you're looking for a job, that's a better place to look. Plus, you don't have to steal win2k, or lie on your resume...

If any of you slash-posters had read the article, you'd see that the real story is that Apple is using DMCA: http://news.com.com/2100-1023-955805.html

But we've been over that before...

Wow, you're in complete denial, aren't you? I doubt posting any kind of 'facts' or 'figures' would ever deter you from your vapid M$ fetish, but in response to your previous accusation that these people are uninformed...

http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1107-958762.html

http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,3973,9619,00 .asp

http://www.cnn.com/2002/WORLD/europe/06/17/eu.cook ies/

Yesterday I submitted A Plan For A Wireless Park in Portland. Portland is re-designing its Waterfront Park.

They liked it! I got an immediate response from the people in charge who said they'd CC the wireless ideas to everyone in the department and include it in their newsletter.

I like the idea of interactive, engaging and site-specific applications. The Dialtone Symphony (.ram) is wholly produced through the choreographed ringing of people's own cell phones. Here are some other ideas:

• Talking maniquins
• Interactive Sculpture
• Triggered light/sound sequencers
• City Clouds
• 360 Live Video at public events
• Wi-Fi in Stadiums
• Traffic Maps
• Visitor Information and Narrated Neighborhood Tours
• Videoconference to linked Kiosks around the state or in nearby hotels.
• Real-time Location Information for event managers with devices like Vocera's communicator badge
• Jogging kiosks with comparitive times, personal history and bio monitor
• E-mail/picture kiosks
• RF-ID wrist bands for kids ($2.99) or "find friends" (free)
• Weather, news and park info
• Recreation Bulletin Board
• Live bird cams
• Events triggered by cell calls
• Jam sessions
• Card tournaments
• Yahoo games

The Public Review Draft of Portland's Waterfront Park Master Plan is available on-line.

The Morrison Bridge, in the center of Waterfront Park, has phone line access. An Orinoco 2500 ($1000) could drive Wi-Fi repeaters on the north end (near Saturday Market) and the south end, (near the Alexis Hotel), providing blanket coverage. The repeaters could be camouflaged as animals or Oregon historic figures. Waterfront Park also has a direct shot to the Council Crest tower where Winfield Wireless has a wireless ISP.

Rent out Segway Scooters with built-in Pocket PCs. Your GPS position would trigger Oregon Historical Society's Narrated Neighborhood Tours, Portland Visitor's Association's Self-Guided Tours, Portland Metro Maps or Lewis and Clark Maps. Wireless cameras could be helpful for the police, too.

Jacksonville Florida's free wireless hot spots provide tourist information as well as internet access. Multi-lingual kiosks, incorporating webtablets with language translation are available now. Text to speech can be output in a variety of languages. And it sounds good. Human voice samples are now incorporated into text to speech. Choose a language, respond by voice.

Don't give up! Put some wireless ideas together and send it to your Parks Department.

Dreams DO come true!

Interactive, engaging and site-specific applications are a click away. The Dialtone Symphony (.ram) is wholly produced through the choreographed ringing of people's own cell phones. Here are some other ideas:

• Talking maniquins
• Interactive Sculpture
• Triggered light/sound sequencers
• City Clouds
• 360 Live Video at public events
• Wi-Fi in Stadiums
• Traffic Maps
• Visitor Information and Narrated Neighborhood Tours
• Videoconference to linked Kiosks around the state or in nearby hotels.
• Real-time Location Information for event managers with devices like Vocera's communicator badge
• Jogging kiosks with comparitive times, personal history and bio monitor
• E-mail/picture kiosks
• RF-ID wrist bands for kids ($2.99) or "find friends" (free)
• Weather, news and park info
• Recreation Bulletin Board
• Live bird cams
• Events triggered by cell calls
• Jam sessions
• Card tournaments
• Yahoo games

The Public Review Draft of Portland's Waterfront Park Master Plan is available on-line.

The Morrison Bridge, in the center of Waterfront Park, has phone line access. An Orinoco 2500 ($1000) could drive Wi-Fi repeaters on the north end (near Saturday Market) and the south end, (near the Alexis Hotel), providing blanket coverage. The repeaters could be camouflaged as animals or Oregon historic figures. Waterfront Park also has a direct shot to the Council Crest tower where Winfield Wireless has a wireless ISP.

Rent out Segway Scooters with built-in Pocket PCs. Your GPS position would trigger Oregon Historical Society's Narrated Neighborhood Tours, Portland Visitor's Association's Self-Guided Tours, Portland Metro Maps or Lewis and Clark Maps. Wireless cameras could be helpful for the police, too.

Jacksonville Florida's free wireless hot spots provide tourist information as well as internet access. Multi-lingual kiosks, incorporating webtablets with language translation are available now. Text to speech can be output in a variety of languages. And it sounds good. Human voice samples are now incorporated into text to speech. Choose a language, respond by voice.

Parks have not caught up with the wireless society. Let's make it happen!

A: We have a constant problem with people who are trying to break our system for no other purpose than they have nothing better to do--like their bosses haven't assigned them enough to do at work today, or that their mom hasn't made them mow the lawn, in most cases!

A: We have a constant problem with people who are trying to break our system for no other purpose than they have nothing better to do--like their bosses haven't assigned them enough to do at work today, or that their mom hasn't made them mow the lawn, in most cases!

Transmeta uses a VLIW (Very Long Instruction Word) technology. How long I did not see in a brief glance, but according to this article they have used 128 and 256. They do this as a way of encoding parallelism. Graphics processing also tends to have a lot of implicit parallelism which long instruction words help with. Both dedicated game consoles (eg the playstation) and graphics cards migrate to longer words much faster than general purpose computers. Years ago the 64 in Nintendo-64 was because it was a 64-bit computer. These days 128 and 256 bits are commonplace, and at least one 512-bit GPU exists.

Or alternatively, you could download Acrobat Reader for Linux.
Try this link to get it from download.com.
http://download.com.com/3120-20-0.html?qt=acrobat+ reader&tg=dl-2002&search=+Go%21+

Ahh. The good old days. When you could spend hours trying to figure out how to get the Zork parser to let you perform a simple action! I miss them. :)

Haven't seen this mentioned yet, but last I heard Roxio is buying Napster's intellectual property. Not sure what they intend to do with it though :)

-nwp

Yeah, for bigger projects we have blackmail bisiness model (when the company releases the project for free including the source code, waits for it to become popular, and demands money for security fixes - yes, I am talking about bind).

• Microsoft buys Colusa Software (March 12, 1996)
• White paper on Colusa Omniware (PostScript format)

The price for XP in a competitive market would be around $20.

What you call an honest living, a federal judge and a federal appeals court called criminal activity.

Yes, but copying your own music, or even sharing it without profit, is LEGAL -- it's "fair use." The copyproofing scheme makes sense to the degree it bars illegal activity, and not so to the degree it interferes with the sorts of legal uses people have grown accustomed to.

Presumably the labels could create a license barring even "fair use" -- it's an exception to basic copyright law, not a constituional right. But they haven't chosen to do so, yet; they're just interfering with it indirectly, and perhaps this is their intent.

I am sure Gates will be real upset about this one.

I understand that because this is Slashdot, we all feel a need to assume the worst about Bill. However, this program has been out for over six months, and not a single word has come from Microsoft.

For an article about an earlier release of XBMP, check here.

... for his $$$ if they can manage to expand the breadth of their wifi networks (meaning national coverage, not just boston) according to this article... would be interesting if it were to happen though.

some more [in german] links for the lazy ones.

High court weighs copyright law

The point is that bad policy isn't always unconstitutional, and the court may take that as reason to disagree without acting.

In general, this article is very light on the legal specifics behind this case and this law, but there are good resources out there, including specifically:

Opposing Copyright Protection

For the average home user disabling this service may be a bit difficult, especially on a 9X derivitive. Personally I feel the better method is to install a software firewall of one sort or another. Personally, I run Zone Alarm. Its a nice, simple, easy to install firewall. It may not be the best protection in the world, but its a start. On top of that, I use a router with a builtin firewall, and lock down every port that I don't need open. But at the very least, a software firewall will stop most of the simple hacks and its easy enough for the average end user.
Also, one question I had running around the back of my head about this whole Messenger Service hack: On a Win2k machine, when someone NET SEND's you there is usually an entry in the Event Log, which, I believe, usually includes the sender. Does this hold true to messages over the internet, and if so, can this information be used to track down the sender's IP address?

That's exactly the oposite from what Stephen Wolfram is saying: that everything in nature has an underlying ALGORITHM, not a mathematical formula. Check out this light news.com article, or just read his wonderful book: A new kind of science.

It was passport.com and someone else didn't buy it. He renewed it for them

Microsoft XML Architect and W3C XML Standard Co-creator Jeal Paoli announce XML integration with "Office 11" on November 14th...

Open Source community (in no doubt lead/prodded/cajoled/wrangled by Sun's Scott McNealy) tries to upstage W3C's work on XML by producing their own standard on November 20th.

Can you say "wanna-be"?

Also, I think the "editors" of /. should be lynched for turning an honest response from Microsoft into a "we-don't-play-that-no-mo" response. Microsost NEVER said that they weren't going to work within that working-group or not. CowboyNeal et. al. are just a bunch of freakin' gits who love to "sucker-punch" anyone they can.

I think /. should change their background color to "yellow" - because this STINKS of "Yellow Journalism"

ScottKin - looking for CowboyNeal so I can PUMMEL him into consciousness.

The company is adopting Extensible Markup Language (XML) as a second file format in all Office applications, to enable better data exchange between the productivity suite and back-end software, such as databases. This "opening up" of Office could end Microsoft's lock on document file formats that have boosted Office sales in years past and made the software the de facto standard for desktop productivity.

news story about public comment period for dmca

I think that we all know when that happened.

I would speculate whether or not this is because of the cost or the freedom.

I know they have better things to spend money on than client licenses for MS stuff. I do think its a great push for linux worldwide BUT I would just happen to think the free as in speech part is just a plus for not having to pay (as much w/ TCO).

Either way, I wish our own government would use linux. As it would be a great push away from the monopoly that they "punished".

In related news... The U.S. government flunked a computer-security review for the third consecutive year

Might this fire have something to do with this, one cannot escape wondering?

By rewriting wiretap laws, CSEA would allow limited surveillance without a court order when there is an "ongoing attack" on an Internet-connected computer or "an immediate threat to a national security interest." That kind of surveillance would, however, be limited to obtaining a suspect's telephone number, IP address, URLs or e-mail header information--not the contents of online communications or telephone calls.

They already did and lost so far, what more as a result the name Windows as a trademark for MS' OS might not be protected. Lindows might be doing us all a favor.

Wow!

NumaFLEX... And to think... All that AMD could come up with was Athlon 64.

You'da thunk that they'd at least stuck a period or an 'e' on there somewhere...

eAthlon.64?

Yes it is a true story ... but there is more than one story. Apple has been rabidly aggressive about not letting iDVD work without their branded SuperDrive. I'm not sure why this is because, to my knowledge, they don't sell software to burn to generic DVD drives, and don't want anyone else to either. It's not like iMovie and Final Cut Pro, there I understand they don't want people using iMovie without a new Mac.

Here are a few articles about this topic to chew on:

Legal restrictions stop the sale of SuperDrive eMac

Apple: Burn DVDs--and we'll burn you

Hope this helps the original doubter of this fact.

Spatch

You don't think it's significant to mention that the world's newest supercomputer will be running Linux OS? Check it out on IBM's pages or check it out here . I can't believe this information was not mentioned on the front page. This is _very_ significant VICTORY for the open source world!

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Go ahead, shoot Messenger. It's had its fair share of bugs too...

Whoopsie
Daisy

A cross platform OS (like Linux) would probably be too difficult to get to perform the way they need it to.

Too difficult? Oh really? Have you heard the NEWS? IBM's Blue Gene/L WILL run Linux!

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Yeah! Read this! . It's a story from news.com. Frankly, quite amazing! The world's fastest computer will run Linux! I see it as a praise for open source developers! LINUX DOMINATED THE WORLD!

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Give me an example when "vote with your money" has ever worked

Umm ... how about Divx? (the DRM scheme, not the CODEC)

can you port it to linux

Actually, BLUE GENE/L (the faster one) will run Linux!

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