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A number of Psion users agree with you and have created an online petition to have the Symbian/EPOC (not Sybian you perverts!) OS as an option (as used in Psion's previous NetBook, 5/5Mx and Revo/Mako).

A NetBook Pro forum has been set up at PDAStreet/Psionplace to discuss this - with plenty of posters bemoaning the lack of EPOC.

Please sign this online petition if you'd like to see the netBook Pro running EPOC/Symbian OS. I doubt it'll have any immediate effect, but by indicating people's interest in the platform, it may yet do some longer-term good.

I mourn the loss of Psion as was... while Symbian may have kept the core OS alive and in demand, that's no good to us if it's not being employed (or even promoted) in a form factor which can demonstrate its strengths. :(

It's a credit to Psion that, for all its screen problems, the 5mx is still an amazing bit of kit - still my machine of choice, to which nothing else comes close. I just wish that they'd recognise that achievement and cultivate it. If only they'd not chickened out of the market; a little marketing and promotion would have done wonders. [fx: sigh]

Now there's a compromise!

If Star Wars Kid can't get a character/cameo in episode 3, then maybe Lucas can get him a Jedi on SWG!

Do you care about the future of Java? Are you interested in seeing Java continue to be the premier platform for computing in the next several decades?

Then please take the time to sign this new Spin Java petition, which asks Sun Microsytems and Scott McNealy to spin off Java into a separate sister company.

Spin Java Petition

For more info click here. Thank you.

To: The United States Government

We, the undersigned, are voters involved in the IT industry who believe that software patents will stifle innovation in the software industry and restrict computer users unfairly.

We have seen that many software patents covering well-known algorithms and techniques hinder the software industry in the United States of America and around the world. The Patent Office has shown that it does not understand software and cannot follow developments in the field, and frequently issues patents on well-known techniques and on simple ideas that programmers consider obvious. The causes of this are inherent in the nature of the software field and cannot be corrected.

Due to the incremental nature of software development, where developers add to the work of those that went before, patents covering software techniques are an obstacle to progress in software. Programmers, in the course of doing their job, search for solutions to the problem at hand and are only impeded by software patents which threaten them or their employers with litigation. The ultimate impact of software patents is to slow innovation, rather than to promote it and therefore contradicts the stated purpose of the patent laws.

Never before has an industry where copyright was widely established had patents imposed on it. Software patents increase the cost of doing business in the software industry, which will make it difficult for smaller companies and individual developers to operate.

Patents in most fields in practice usually affect only factories, patents that apply to software tie the hands of every computer user. Only a tremendous public benefit could justify this imposition, but the actual effect of software patents is harmful.

For the good of the software industry and computer users both, we call for a Federal law to exclude software implementations running on general purpose computer hardware from the coverage of any patent.

Please see the following links for more information:
http://www2.linuxjournal.com/article s/currents/003 .html
http://users.erols.com/gcasamen/software-pa tents
http://antipatents.8m.com/software-patents. html
http://www.researchoninnovation.org/patent.p df

NOTE: This petition is limited to the US voters in order to have the maximum effect in the United States. If software patents are a problem in your country you are free to use the text of this petition to start a petition for your country.

Sincerely,

The Undersigned

If you are against flouridation in water, here is a petition to the WHO.

Stop Flouridation Now!

User's in other country's will be confused by this, granted the internet is an english langauge creation for the most part thus far, but when it come's to not understanding something, a error message is easier to understand than an english verisign page. If anyone doesn't agree with this, i suggest you, like i did, sign the petition!

Move on - helps busy people be effective citizens.

Make them Accountable - Make Media and Politicians Accountable.

Fallout Shelter - News and Views from the shelter.

Citizens for Legitimate Government - Undo the Coup - opinion and discussion.

Petition to Senate to investigate "Oddities" of 9/11 - by Lori R. Price.

Education for Peace in Iraq Center - Speakers & projects.

War Resisters' League - promoting peace.

American Friends Service Committee - Quakers for peace.

Black Radical Congress - Election reform and voting rights.

Z-Net - Activist Community.

Currently 98,988 has signed the "Put The Star Wars Kid in Episode III"-petition.

http://www.petitiononline.com/Ghyslain/petition.ht ml

Speaking of that online petition, does anybody else see only 178 signatures reported from the "View Current Signatures" page? I'm sure it was past 1600 a couple of days ago, but now seems stuck on just 178. Or is some cache out there just giving me an out-of-date copy of it?

online petition

you can file a complaint about Verisign to ICANN by using their:

Registrar Problem Report Form

Don't forget the petition!!! Go sign it.

http://www.petitiononline.com/icanndns/

For those of you who don't know, there's a petition to bring HL2 to the Mac here.

Please sign: http://www.petitiononline.com/icanndns/petition.ht ml

Don't forget to sign the petition on Verisign's abuse of the DNS system.

Here is a much better petition entitled: "Stop Verisign DNS Abuse"

This is a more agressive petition than the one mentioned in another comment attached to this article: http://www.petitiononline.com/badnsi/petition.html "

Is Stratton D. Sclavos doing a good job as CEO of Verisign? Vote yes or no in this Forbes.com poll.

Also, here's a petition that may also be of interest.

ICANN might be able to force VeriSign to get this off the net
http://www.petitiononline.com/icanndns/

http://www.petitiononline.com/verisign

Go sign

Valve better gets its act together with Steam.

Vaguely on-topic. This is the first petition I've ever signed...

Protest of Half-Life 2's requirement of an internet connection for Single Player and Lan Party games.

I'm waaay out of the loop with the Half-Life scene nowadays so I hope I'm not spreading FUD by posting this link. But if Valve do seriously intend to require an Internet connection for single-player and LAN games (apparently NOT just one-time product activation) then I think it would be a very bad thing.

Thanks to Blue's News for the link.

Broadcom has been asked. They have been asked many times. There's a petition with 3400 names and counting. Broadcom doesn't care about the Linux market. They've made that very clear. Right now, the best chance for Broadcom Linux drivers looks to be the reverse engineering project, which doesn't seem to be going very well at this point.

I bought a Linksys card with the Broadcom chipset a couple weeks ago, not knowing about the driver issue. I've since returned it and bought the (cheaper) D-Link card. Unless Broadcom changes their attitude, I'm never going to buy another product from them again, even if third party drivers are available.

Screw s!

Petition here

If you wish to sign, too, do it here.

If you agree that BitTorrent and open source video codecs (such as XviD) should be used, please take a moment to sign the following petition:

http://www.petitiononline.com/bt4bbc/petition.html

Thank You.

Like most users of Linux, we are at the point where we are not going to stand still while SCO trashes the entire Free Software movement. I have already authorized a payment of $10,000 to the FSF, and a payment of $5,000 to the Red Hat Open Source Now fund. If you want to do all you can during this waiting period before the trial, I would urge you to sign this petition that signifies the unity of the Free and Open source communities against SCO's outlandish claims.

Linksys 802.11g cards (and the new version of their 802.11b PCI card) don't work in linux. The chipset manufaturer, Broadcom, is holding back specifications on the card. If you want 802.11g in linux, the best solution is the D-Link card, or the Netgear one. Both use the Intersil Prism GT chipset. Intersil is very open about their design, and supports the development of open source drivers for Linux and other operating systems. Even if Broadcom were to open up, Intersil is more likely the company you would be wanting to give money to.

Still, drivers for the Broadcom chipset would be nice, so take a minute to sign the petition.

I should also add that it will be *really* great if more people sign the petition to ask Sun to release the LighHouse Design applications ! the petition is here : http://www.petitiononline.com/laafs/petition.html Sun doesn't use thoses software at all, yet some are really great (for example, Quantrix, a multidimensionnal spreadshit, or VarioBuilder, a tool to create small database-based applications like MSAccess).

If Sun choose to release some of theses apps, it would be possible to port them on GNUstep and MacOSX !

So please, sign the petition !

that holds so much weight in the software development community, the "recommendation" by Bradley Kuhn was rather terse. Moreover, his argument was not well-supported. His relase read more as if he was simply bashing Apple's license. The first half of Bradley's statement reads as if he is supporting the new version of the AFSL. Statements such as "The APSL 2.0, like the Affero GPL, seeks to defend the freedom...". Two thirds of the way through his statement we are hit with three bullet points stating why the AFSL is "bad". Prefacing these bullet points is an unlinked reference comparing the AFSL to the NPL. After the bullet points Bradley then goes on to state "For this reason, we recommend you do not release new software using this license". Bradley probably knows a great deal more about the AFSL issue, but such a terse and unelaborated statement against adopting it is irresponsible. Especially coming from a representative of the organization that supposedly worked with Apple's lawyers to draft the new version of the License.

Furthermore - a company such as apple is in the business of making money. In many ways operating a software business "is incompatible with the GPL." [kuhn]. It's nice to see - for a change - an organization that is at least making an effort to give back some of their innovations to the development community. The only other method of protecting their IP is through patent law, and we know how GNU feels about that (link on GNU's home page)

Instead of taking such a cynical and negative stance on an effort to change the way the software industry works - why don't we support it?

The next step is Microsoft buying SCO. What an interesting turn that would be! I wouldn't doubt that that has been the plan all along, but who knows...

Sign the petition to end this nonsense here.

- Slew -

Sprint was set to release the t608 bluetooth enabled phone (a dream come true for powerbook owners), but something happened. They are not releasing it... Voice your support at the following web petition if you, like me, would like a bluetooth sprint pcs phone: http://www.petitiononline.com/sellt608/petition.ht ml

How difficult would it be to amend this law to allow short range (<10m?) FM Transmiters or transmition on a specific frequency? Scanning through the FM radio spectrum most of it seems to be just plain static.

Does this law also apply to short range AM transmitters?

Lets start a petition...

I recommend that people *don't* file a complaint using the form. A large number of similar complaints, based on the same small set of facts, and mostly with misstatements of fact and little reflection or care taken in composition, are *not* going to impress the people at the SEC who have to process these forms. A much better idea is to put our heads together, compose a decent letter, and then put it to one of the online petition sites (eg. PetitionOnline).

The Tobacco settlement with the states ($246 billion over 25 years) went to the states, which are pissing it away on everything except cancer research. What the petition advocates is for the Tobacco Industry to fund *its own* carefully focused effort to find a cure for cancer, i.e., eliminate the government middlemen. I bet that if the Tobacco Industry spent 10 billion/year over 5 years, it would find a cure for cancer in 5 years. They could do this by starting a Celera like corporation.

Sign here.

... and don't forget to end it with "I will have to seriously reconsider my support for you if you support this bill".

Most elected officials know that very few people actually vote, no matter how hot and bothered they get about something. Sure, i can read up on the latest here at slashdot, click on over to Lessig's blog and from there, sign the petition to reclaim the public domain, or head off to the EFF's web site and send a pre-formatted email or fax... it's too easy. Let your congressfolk know that you get out of bed bright and early on election day if you want their attention.

The NRA has 4.3 million members which isn't really that many in the internet age (i'm guessing slashdot probably has about one third to half as many readers, if we count unregistered people), and they seem to get heard pretty loud and clear. /t

Now if only they could release the source for the nvnet Ethernet drivers...

Or at least release enough docs so that open source drivers could be implemented; I'm running 2.5.x, and had to use an additional network card because the (crappy)binary drivers from nvidia only support ancient kernels, not to mention there is no support for *BSD or other OSes.

Better audio support would be nice too... ALSA handles it, but in a very dumbed down mode, with many features not supported because nvidia doesn't want to release the docs, and AFAIK there is not even binary drivers for that...

But the network drivers are the biggest pain, in my company we have >20 Linux desktops, and is a PIA to have to install manually the drivers in each box, and pray that the kernel you are using is supported.

Keep in mind that even if the nvidia binary graphics drivers are quite good, the nforce drivers are _crap_ and haven't been updated since November last year, there are various bugs that nvidia said would be fixed in the next release, but so far the users are stuck.

Oh, well, I guess that I(and my company) will buy VIA based boards from now on... *sigh*

Best wishes

\\Uriel

P.S.: Don't forget to sign the petition, maybe nvidia gets a clue when they realize how many of their customers they are pissing off:
http://petitiononline.com/nforce2/petition.html

Now if only they could release the source for the nvnet Ethernet drivers...

Or at least release enough docs so that open source drivers could be implemented; I'm running 2.5.x, and had to use an additional network card because the (crappy)binary drivers from nvidia only support ancient kernels, not to mention there is no support for *BSD or other OSes.

Better audio support would be nice too... ALSA handles it, but in a very dumbed down mode, with many features not supported because nvidia doesn't want to release the docs, and AFAIK there is not even binary drivers for that...

But the network drivers are the biggest pain, in my company we have >20 Linux desktops, and is a PIA to have to install manually the drivers in each box, and pray that the kernel you are using is supported.

Keep in mind that even if the nvidia binary graphics drivers are quite good, the nforce drivers are _crap_ and haven't been updated since November last year, there are various bugs that nvidia said would be fixed in the next release, but so far the users are stuck.

Oh, well, I guess that I(and my company) will buy VIA based boards from now on... *sigh*

Best wishes

\\Uriel

P.S.: Don't forget to sign the petition, maybe nvidia gets a clue when they realize how many of their customers they are pissing off:
http://petitiononline.com/nforce2/petition.html

The proper way for U.S. citizens and lawful permanent residents to screw the Bono estate is to sign a petition to pass a law to take a bite out of the Bono Act.

...the SCOsueme petition? (-:

yeah, yeah, don't feed the copyright monster

Have you signed the Eldred Act petition?

but wives and kids do their own thing

I don't give Disney more money than an occasional rental. Why don't you introduce them to Don Bluth movies, DreamWorks movies, and the like?

They took almost all of their storys from the public domain.

And some from other cartoons that were still under copyright. Atlantis == Nadia, and The Lion King == Kimba the White Lion or whatever it was called.

And now Disney's gone beyond stealing stories to stealing names. Before late May 2003, "Nemo" was a character from Little Nemo in Slumberland, an old comic strip by Winsor McCay. Now, "Nemo" is a clown fish. And right now, "Brother Bear" is one of the Berenstain Bears. But pretty soon...

This sounds like the basis of a suit aginst them

Tried that.

It failed at the district court level.

It failed at the appeals level.

It failed at the Supreme Court level.

The court of last resort is the Congress itself. If you haven't already, and you live in the States, please sign the Eldred Act petition.

What, you mean like a petition to Instead, round up as many people as you can to petition Microsoft to get them to support the PNG format as well as Mozilla does.

What, you mean a petition like Aaron Adam's petition for Proper PNG Support in Internet Explorer for Windows, as endorsed by the likes of Zeldman (designer extraordinaire), A List Apart (who have an article describing various workarounds, which are simple but ultimately impractical), Eric Meyer (CSS guru - excellent books BTW), Owen Briggs (the Noodle Incident), and the like? I'd highly recommend that you take the time to sign it, it'll only take a few seconds...

I'd also encourage you to give Microsoft some product feedback (no registration or e-mail required) on IE/win's crappy PNG support ;)

As for resources describing each browser's level of support, check out this excellent listing of each web browsers' PNG support over at Gregg Roelofses LibPNG site.

Cheers,

ManxStef

To:Â the Microsoft Internet Explorer for Windows Development Team

The PNG image format was designed to be a replacement for the GIF format, due to both copyright and design problems with GIF. However, the latest version of Microsoft Internet Explorer (MSIE) still does not have full and proper support for the image format, despite the fact that the whitepaper for MSIE 4, which can be read here, promised full support:

"While other browser manufactures include PNG support as a 3rd party option , Internet Explorer 4.0 provides native support for PNG."

Full native support for PNG still has not been implemented in the Windows version of MSIE, despite the fact that MSIE for Mac and others browsers have full support, and it was promised to the users of MSIE for Windows over four years ago.

We, the undersigned, request that the developers of MSIE for Windows please implement full support for PNG images, for the following reasons:

The PNG format is superior to the GIF format: When the same image is saved in both PNG and GIF formats, in an editor with full and proper support for both formats, the PNG image is typically a smaller file size, is free from royalties, patents, and copyright restrictions that hinder the GIF format, and can use more than 256 colours - up to 48-bit colour.

The PNG format is a World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) recommendation: Microsoft has repeatedly stated their renewed commitment to web standards, so implementing full PNG support would be the next logical step in fulfilling this promise, especially since it was supposed to be implemented over four years ago.

The PNG format supports alpha transparency: Anybody who has designed images for use online knows the woes of trying to make that image appear smooth on any background. Some designers create different images to be used on different background colours, other designers simply leave the edges jagged, and still others just give their images a solid background. It's a bad way to go, but it's the only choice right now. Using PNG images with alpha transparency would eliminate all of these problems, and make the work of web designers a lot easier.

After ignoring requests on this issue for four years, we hope that you, the developers of Microsoft Internet Explorer for Windows, will take a step in the right direction, and show that you truly are committed to web standards.

Sincerely,

The Undersigned

Even I don't think SCO is that stupid.

They may well be that desperate. Desperate can be roughly equivalent to mindless.

all SCO could do is sue Linux companies and users to cease further infringement, not monetary damages. They couldn't even recoup legal costs for the cases.

I think I'll start encouraging other people to invite SCO to sue them - oops, too late.

Before SCO even do that, they have to serve notice on those people and give them a reasonable time to cease. Which to me sounds like a fine reason to update, no complaints there.

This is stating the obvious, but "cease further infringement" is precisely what the vast majority of Linux kernel developers are aching to do, if and when they are shown some genuine infringing code.

For those of you who think that the Reclaim the PUblic Domain petition isn't strong enough, there's another one that Larry lists on his blog: Reclaim Copyright Law.

SO all of you bitching that the Eldred Act isn't strong enough -- I defy you to sign this other one!

For those of you who think that the Reclaim the PUblic Domain petition isn't strong enough, there's another one that Larry lists on his blog: Reclaim Copyright Law.

SO all of you bitching that the Eldred Act isn't strong enough -- I defy you to sign this other one!

i've seen some pretty dumb petitions, I can't believe this one made slashdot. Of course, when you have michael posting the story, you can't rule anything out.

If you want to sign petitions, this site has them all.

Maybe some of you could take the time to sign a petition to help get (proper) PNG support in MSIE?