Slashback: Epson, AbiWord, Justification
It was the least they could do. Last week, AbiWord's PayPal account for donations was lightened to the tune of several hundred dollars. Now, an anonymous reader writes "According to this posting, PayPal has succumbed to the pressure. They have agreed to reimburse the AbiWord team for the money that was stolen from their account last week. I still want to know how the AbiWord account was broken into..."
Because licenses matter. specht writes "I am a bit surprised that nobody has reported this yet. EPSON KOWA made their scanner and printer software available for downloading again after they had to pull it because of a GPL violation (see the previous Slashdot story). More information about this (and why it had to be removed in the first place) are here . Kudos to EPSON KOWA and EPSON for working with the FSF to resolve these issues."
No, that's "Gorilla marketing." akiaki007 writes "As many might have noticed, Friday most of Manhattan was covered with butterflies. This article on CNN that states that NYC fined MS $50.00 and the cost of cleaning up the static-cling plastic ads. On a side note, most other companies probably would have been fined per ad, though somehow MS got off, pretty much scot-free."
Priceless -- which is nice when you're paying. Digital Soldier writes "HERE is an article from Government Executive Magazine justifying, from a security perspective, the use of open source software in government. In short, the article makes the point that open source software allows security administrators to be pro-active rather than purely reactive in their work. I guess they don't like waiting for service packs."
Lovely spam, lovely spam ah ah ah ah ... ghostrider_one writes "Australian IT is reporting that notorious Australian spammers T3 direct have appealed the recent dismisssal of their lawsuit against the person they blame for being blacklisted in SPEWS."
Average middle class person with $100,000 positive net worth (being generous to avergae of course) = $0.01 / $100,000 = 0.0000001
Microsoft with $40 billion in cash = $50 / $40 bil = 0.00000000125
Of course the marketers knew what they were doing with the ads. Did they not realize they were breaking the law? Of course they knew. They were counting on it, and by making waves, they were counting on getting on CNN and maybe others (/.). If they didn't make a fuss and apologize and such, then I, who am not a New Yorker, would never have known or seen the photo of the campaign. It worked. That's why they did it, and took the risk. So what if they have to pay a few dollars, even per butterfly. Its cheaper than running an add, most likely!
Here's my question: did Pay Pal give AbiWord the information about the transaction so they can track down the thieves who did this?
If not, why not? Maybe there's NOT a security problem... and the thieves work at PayPal?
OK, it's ridiculous... but so is the idea that Pay Pal wouldn't help AbiWord with such info...
Libertarianism is rich wolves and poor sheep playing gambler's ruin for dinner.
One, I hate it when /. refuses a post just to use it from someone else later. Besides, my copy was much better than this.
Two: This is pure bullshit. IBM does something similar in San Fran with the "peace love Linux" logos and gets hurt for over $100,000 in fines. They did it in Chicago and they got assesed an $18,000 fine to the person who actually laid chalk on concrete and community service.
Why the hell did they only hit them up with a $50 fine? For a multibillion dollar corporation, headed by the world's richest man, this is lunacy. Per ad would have been better; a whopping huge fine would've been best.
Maybe Mayor Rich^H^H^H^HBloomberg didn't want to rock the boat and piss off a potential contributor.... then again, IIRC he _did_ run in '01 out of his pocket....
I used to be someone else. Now I'm someone better.
Real life is underrated.