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Slashback: IP Protection, ReligiousDocument, LiPS Savings
Sony leading a price-fixing cartel? Sheridan writes "Hot on the heels of the SonyBMG XCP rootkit fiasco The Times is reporting that Sony may have been charging online retailers up to 15% more for its products than high street outlets in an attempt to block online bargains from forcing prices down. Perhaps they're trying to recoup some of their losses on the rootkitted CDs, although somebody ought to let them know that most of their loss was to their reputation, which this certainly won't help."
Deconstructing the IP protection act. Brent writes "Ars Technica takes a more in-depth look at the Intellectual Property Protection Act of 2005 and shows that some of the original fears of the Act were overstated. The article states that the act is primarily concerned with criminal acts of infringement, namely infringement done for commercial gain or competitive advantage, and not with criminalizing the mere attempt at commonplace infringement. In short, the act is aimed at commercial piracy. The article also ends with an reasonable challenge to the US government, including the call for a referendum on consumer rights and the penalization of the use of any digital rights technology that impedes fair use."
Even the clergy are jumping into the OpenDocument fray. da6d writes "The LXer has an article about clergy joining the fray surrounding Microsoft's refusal to support OpenDocument. From the article: '[they] see Microsoft's stance as intentionally withholding support so that it can turn a technical business decision into a political fight. By refusing to support OpenDocument, Microsoft is ignoring the cross-platform document sharing needs of visually impaired users, not only in Massachusetts, but also in the other 49 states, not to mention the rest of the world. The economically disadvantaged will also suffer from the lack of Opendocument support in Microsoft Office.'"
UK spammer gets his due. delete writes "Notorious UK internet spammer Peter Francis-Macrae, who referred to himself as "weaselboy", has been convicted of fraud. The 23-year-old earned more than £1.5 million through his activities, primarily through spam mails offering the registration of unavailable domain names. Up to £425,000 of his earnings remain unrecovered."
Linux to make smartphones and high end communication devices cheaper. nitinah writes "In an interview with Phonemag, the founders of LiPS comment that mainstream adoption of Linux would make smartphone and high end communication devices more affordable than ever before. Founding members John Ostrem, lead scientist of PalmSource and Michel Gien, EVP of Jaluna also commented that Linux would also extend the economics to not just phones but applications and services."
The economically disadvantaged will also suffer from the lack of Opendocument support in Microsoft Office.
How would the economically disadvantaged suffer? They'll just use OpenOffice instead. 100% OD support, and zero cost.
Unless they're already pirating MS Office and hopelessly locked in.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
Can we seriously STOP calling non-materialized projected profits "LOSSES"? Sony hasn't lost a single dollar on their "rootkit fiasco." At the worst, they could be making less than they expected, but they're not losing any money that was already in their pockets. Their "lost profits" are based on their predictions of how their products would sell given certain predicted factors.
Yes, this "LOSSES" arguement easily fits into the piracy problem and how the MPAA has "LOST" so much money.
Stop! Just stop falling for their vocabulary changes.
Microsoft Office doesn't really support the needs of blind users. It is the screen reader companies that have spend lots of time writting custom code so Office works with their software. Who would have thought they would spend most time trying to get the monopoly office suite working?
If there were better (and I'm not a windows user/developer so I'm going on trust about such assertations) API hooks for accessibility (see the Peter Korn article) then they would be able to support _all_ suites adequately rather than having to spend all their time making MS Office work.
You seem to be misinformed about exactly what this policy entails and when it is to take place. MS office will not be banned, but it cannot be used to generate new documents after January 2007 - That's more than a year from now. There are several projects already tackling the accessability issues for ODF. There are also several programs that will allow you to convert ODF to a MS compatible format should that be necessary. For more information, try reading these articles on groklaw for starters (the first one should address your issues quite adequately):
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http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20051029
http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20051114
http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20051015
As a concerned citizen of Massachusetts myself, I find the position of locking all Mass citizens into the use of MS office to be quite unfair.