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Danny Weitzner is Director of the World Wide Web Consortium's Technology and Society activities, which means he's in charge of handling reactions to a W3C proposal that would allow "Reasonable and Non-Discriminatory" (hence "RAND") license fees to be charged for use of W3C-endorsed standards that are covered by patents or other trade restrictions. Many prominent Free Software and Open Source people are firmly against RAND; RMS has even emailed me personally several times, asking me to post a link to this anti-RAND story (in which he is quoted). Slashdot has mentioned this controversy before, because we, too, feel it's important.. But Danny is the person at W3C who is dealing directly with all of this, so he's the person we should question. So ask away, one question per post as usual, and we'll post Danny's answers to 10 of the highest-moderated questions as soon as he gets them back to us.

fsck writes "Australian actor Yahoo Serious is fighting Internet portal Yahoo! for the trademark to the word Yahoo, registered with the Australian Trade Marks Office in August. Yahoo! was founded in 1994, whereas Yahoo Serious changed his name by deed poll in 1980. It sounds as though Mr Serious is, among other things, tired of receiving any more misdirected Yahoo! snail mail." The levels of comedy to this are astounding.

gwernol writes "Over at Screen Daily they are claiming that an Australian company has demonstrated a high quality, full-screen video-on-demand service that is delivered over a 28.8k modem. They claim this will 'eliminate the need for broadband.' If this is true, then they'll change the world. Of course, the basic technology has been around for a while, see this article from 1998 or this one from earlier this year. I remain extremely sceptical. If this is real, why won't they allow proper independent testing? But it is interesting that they're getting funding. Could this be the last great Internet scam?"

Several readers also pointed out this brief report at imdb.com as well. We've mentioned this before, but the news here is the reportedly successful demo. It would be a lot easier to swallow if he'd let people test it independently, but video-over-28.8 sure is tantalizing.

highpingbastard writes: "Staff at Australian telecommunications carrier Telstra are going to hold a decomissioning ceremony for a 25-year-old voice and data cable spanning between Australia and New Zealand that died yesterday. Telstra was still using the 2Mbps cable as a backup circuit up until the time it was cut, probably by a ship's anchor. In general, undersea cables have a 25-year life span. A chance for all involved in the cable's long life to get closure. Australia's fastest looped network to the U.S., the (flash animation warning) Southern Cross Network Cable, also went down for 15 hours after it was snagged at the same time. It is supposed to have a 99.999 per cent network availability, or downtime amounting to 50 minutes over 10 years. Doh! That's 300 years' worth in one hit by my calculation ..."

RoweM writes "The Australian Capital Terrority will use a Debian-based, GPL'd electronic voting system in elections this October. See this article, and the vendor's press release. Note, this is not Internet voting, but an electronic vote registration and counting system--you still have to go to the polling booth :)."

spam-it-to-me-baby writes: "Interesting court case going on down under at the moment involving a prominent Australian businessman who claims he was defamed by a Dow Jones article published on a web server in the United States. Prosecution is digging up an obscure 1848 judgement over what constitutes an act of publication to ensure the case is heard here rather than in the U.S. Dow's claiming the story was for a U.S. readership. The case continues ..." And since laws on what you can legally say aloud or in print vary greatly from country to country, please make sure your words are only available in pre-screened jurisdictions.

Bomber007 writes "As taken from here: "As part of the Morphing Project, scientists are developing smart wing materials that can bend on command, closely imitating a bird's wings during flight, and piezoelectric sensors that allow an aircraft to "feel" the motion of its wings, just like birds do, so it can adjust to different conditions. Further research might see personal aircraft with self-healing materials, NASA says. And air cars that hover, fly backwards and upside down, just like bugs can. NASA being NASA, many of the other potential applications are military: there's a vision for fighter bombers that could instantly morph into agile, high speed jets and also talk of fleets of attack aircraft without pilots." More information can also be found at the NASA site here." Voltron. That's my comment.

spam-it-to-me-baby writes: "Adam Hinkley started out as a bright 17-year-old Australian software hack with a good idea. Now he's 22, broke, and has lost all his intellectual property after being crushed by the multinational software company that first took him into its folds and then dragged him through the courts in an at-times bitter and protracted battle. He has a few words of warning for any other young mind thinking of starting off down the same path." Sobering, but it looks like Adam has been able to shrug off the ruling with admirable ease. Learn from what he says.