The court ruled that SCO *converted* money that was actually Novell's in the licensing racket, so SCO never had actual ownership of that cash. That is way different from normal debt, and can't be discharged under bankruptcy. The only reason this liability isn't "on the books" yet is that the original court hasn't figured out how much it is, but it's safe to assume that it will be "a lot".
As a bonus, the court that will be deciding how much it is will be the same one that SCO told no trust fund was required because bankruptcy wasn't imminent just a few weeks before they filed for bankruptcy. They are almost certainly well and truly fucked here, and "spin" isn't going to change that. Their whole strategy seems to be to provoke the judge to anger so they have an issue for appeal, but Kimball is a pretty cool customer who will make sure that his ruling is air-tight.
The Utah court's summary judgment held that SCO does *not* own the copyrights to the code they are licensing. SCO built their entire case around a theory of "but... we paid a lot of money for this business, and of course it transferred the copyrights to us! Never mind what the actual contracts said." Too bad for them that the court rejected that argument totally.
And, this article presumes that the BK court will approve the deal, and do so over the objections of the major creditors. The judge may well not approve the deal as written, as there is no real guarantee of the additional $95M being actually available, and further since the $95M is a line of credit at a 17% interest rate it could magically evaporate at any time.
The deal really doesn't provide any security for the creditors at all, nor does it put the post-bankruptcy SCO in a financial position where it is unlikely to be back in bankruptcy in the near future. Indeed, it puts the company squarely in debt for even more than it faces to begin with due to the interest. The creditors names change, but the debt remains and really grows exponentially.
The only way I can see the court approving this is if the entire $100M were a straight-up equity purchase which was a cash infusion sufficient to pay off and retire all the debt. Just moving the chairs around on the deck isn't going to pass muster here.
As for the appelate courts, SCO's behavior prior to summary judgement will be a huge factor. They dragged the case out, refused to comply with discovery orders, and changed their arguments constantly.
When I was in High School, I finally figured out that the homework was a total and complete waste of time, and never bothered with it. Then I'd go in and ace every test. It pissed teachers off to no end that I just didn't care that the final grade would be a B or C when my test scores were some of the best in the class.
I never did waste my time with college, and spent four years in the military instead. I learned more there than many college students, and came out easily $100k ahead, since that way resulted in being paid as opposed to paying out via loans and tuition.
If degrees are so worthwhile, then how do we explain Bill Gates? He dropped out and basically took over the entire software world. Motivation and natural talent count for a lot more than education.
I've known several self-made millionaires, and none of them had degrees, whereas the people I've met with Masters degrees tend to end up in a middle-tier corporate job and never really get ahead.
Maybe doing and learning on one's own removes barriers to thinking and allows success to actually happen.
No patent shall be granted covering the behavior or actions of any person, nor of processes that merely mimic the behavior of any person. ("Person" covers corporate entities too!)
And really, really, really hammer the point of the KSR case that combining known devices and techniques and getting the expected and predictable result is not protectable on obviousness and novelty grounds.
I've noticed that AMD tends to leapfrog Intel in a really big way every few years, then Intel slowly catches up and maybe passes them for a while with evolutionary changes. Then AMD hits another "breakthrough" that blows Intel totally out of the water again for a couple of years.
AMD tends to be smaller, more agile, but slower at the evolutionary tweaks than Intel. Intel's sheer size gives them an edge on the drudgery of small performance and cost optimizations, but they are so big that the "outside the box" thinking needed to really innovate is lost in committee before AMD releases the product.
Right now, Intel has the upper position. Give it a year or two...
1. Is the media that they wrote the logs to a read/write type such as a hard drive, or is it a write-once medium such as CD-R, WORM, or any other of a litany of one-shot write technologies. Read/write media leave open a gaping credibility hole, as the files can be easily modified at any time to say anything.
2. Can they produce the original media AND prove that it has not been modified since the records were created?
3. What verification of the date/time stamps are they using? Is it just a text or number date/time, or something more robust such as a time-based GUID? And is there a secure checksum of the entered record (such as an MD5 hash) that can be checked to show authenticity?
4. What measures are they using to ensure that their date/time stamps are reasonably accurate?
5. What physical security measures have they taken to ensure that physical and/or remote access to the media and systems used is restricted only to authorized personnel?
In America, the general idea is that rights are granted by virtue of being born ("from God" or "natural law"). Governments in the American ideal merely recognize and protect pre-existing rights, they don't "give" them.
In Europe, the mindset is much more that the government grants the rights, and individuals have no "natural rights".
"they had to make them work with the current domains that are administrated using Active Directory, use exchange servers for mail etc. I think they would have heart attacks."
THAT right there is the reason why the EU took their action against MS. What the original order said is that MS was ordered to release full and complete interfacing specifications and protocols. They dragged their heels on this for three years, and then tried issuing the specs under a super-restrictive license along with a huge fee.
EU called "shenanigans" on that one, and smacked them with a fine of 2M Euros per day.
They were warned, tried to play lawyer-ball, and lost. Big.
With specs and protocols, Active Directory and Exchange support would probably already be in the Linux machines, and would at most take a small amount of configuration for site-specifics like domain name, etc.
Instead, you are locked-in to ONLY purchasing MS clients right now. And it is BECAUSE of this that the EU took action.
Basically, the EU rule is now "inside the box: MS owns that and can keep secret. Outside the box: customer owns that and it must be publicly documented."
And exactly how do we reconcile the term "prohibited communication" with "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press..."
Seems a pretty straightforward violation of the First Amendment, and finding ways around the Fourth as well.
approach to fighting online porn. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)
( ) Pornographers can easily use it to harvest email addresses (*) It will filter out too much legitimate non-porn content ( ) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money (*) It is defenseless against brute force attacks ( ) It will stop porn for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it (*) Users of the web will not put up with it (*) Google and other legitimate web operators will not put up with it ( ) Microsoft will not put up with it ( ) The police will not put up with it ( ) Requires too much cooperation from pornographers (*) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once (*) Many web operators cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential viewers ( ) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business
Specifically, your plan fails to account for
( ) Laws expressly prohibiting it (*) Lack of centrally controlling authority for the web ( ) Open relays in foreign countries ( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses (*) Asshats ( ) Jurisdictional problems ( ) Unpopularity of weird new taxes ( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money (*) Huge existing software investment in the net protocols ( ) Susceptibility of protocols other than HTTP to attack ( ) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email (*) Willingness and ability of users to install software necessary to make it work (*) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes (*) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches (*) Extreme profitability of porn ( ) Joe jobs and/or identity theft (*) Technically illiterate politicians (*) Dishonesty on the part of pornographers themselves ( ) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering (*) Internet Explorer
and the following philosophical objections may also apply:
(*) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever been shown practical ( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable (*) Website content should not be the subject of legislation (*) Blacklists suck (*) Whitelists suck (*) We should be able to talk about sex without being censored ( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud ( ) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks (*) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually (*) Why should we have to trust you and your servers? ( ) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses (*) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem ( ) I don't want the government reading my email ( ) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough (*) It's the parent's job to watch what their kid is doing
Furthermore, this is what I think about you:
( ) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work. (*) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it. ( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your house down!
The only way to make a "kid friendly web" is to disconnect it from the public Internet entirely and build a parallel system that is manually built site-by-site and page-by-page. It could use all the same tech, but can have no connection whatsoever to the public net.
It's impossible to have a free-speech net along with "child friendly" in the same setup. It has to be parallel and completely separate, or it won't ever work well enough.
I'm a real hardliner on the belief that interfaces should not only be unprotectable, but should be required to be released in any and all cases, period, no exceptions.
Then again, every once in a while, someone hits on a previously unknown fundamental breakthrough that turns the rules as we know them on their head. Think Gallileo, Newton, Einsten, et al. It DOES happen.
That said, it's highly unlikely that the inventor of the "free energy" stuff is actually on to anything. I take his claims with a truckload of salt, but am willing to see what is really going on there.
It is possible that he hit on something, but pretty highly unlikely.
"YOU CAN'T GET ENERGY OUT OF NOTHING"
Very true. But if someone DOES hit on a way to tap into something we've been heretofore unaware of, that doesn't make it energy from nothing, just energy from something we didn't know about before -- the same as fusion, fission, and antimatter anniahlation would have been unthinkable in 1670.
"You don't have to leave yet do ya? You didn't stick a chainsaw up my ass yet! My head's still on my torso! I'm glad you fuckers can handle your high!"
All caps scream reccomended, but/. lameness filter prohibits posting that way.
Or even better, liberate them from oil money by developing our own engergy sources. Then these third-world deserts can become what third-world deserts always have been...
Why waste three weeks when we can use subs to deliver Domino's nukes -- thirty minutes or less or they are free? One sub carries enough warheads to do the job, and two can basically make the whole country's popluated areas into the world's biggest parking lot.
Or better yet... rather than dropping meteors or nukes on anyone, how about just cutting their 'net cables?
Slashdot Mirror
The court ruled that SCO *converted* money that was actually Novell's in the licensing racket, so SCO never had actual ownership of that cash. That is way different from normal debt, and can't be discharged under bankruptcy. The only reason this liability isn't "on the books" yet is that the original court hasn't figured out how much it is, but it's safe to assume that it will be "a lot".
As a bonus, the court that will be deciding how much it is will be the same one that SCO told no trust fund was required because bankruptcy wasn't imminent just a few weeks before they filed for bankruptcy. They are almost certainly well and truly fucked here, and "spin" isn't going to change that. Their whole strategy seems to be to provoke the judge to anger so they have an issue for appeal, but Kimball is a pretty cool customer who will make sure that his ruling is air-tight.
The Utah court's summary judgment held that SCO does *not* own the copyrights to the code they are licensing. SCO built their entire case around a theory of "but... we paid a lot of money for this business, and of course it transferred the copyrights to us! Never mind what the actual contracts said." Too bad for them that the court rejected that argument totally.
And, this article presumes that the BK court will approve the deal, and do so over the objections of the major creditors. The judge may well not approve the deal as written, as there is no real guarantee of the additional $95M being actually available, and further since the $95M is a line of credit at a 17% interest rate it could magically evaporate at any time.
The deal really doesn't provide any security for the creditors at all, nor does it put the post-bankruptcy SCO in a financial position where it is unlikely to be back in bankruptcy in the near future. Indeed, it puts the company squarely in debt for even more than it faces to begin with due to the interest. The creditors names change, but the debt remains and really grows exponentially.
The only way I can see the court approving this is if the entire $100M were a straight-up equity purchase which was a cash infusion sufficient to pay off and retire all the debt. Just moving the chairs around on the deck isn't going to pass muster here.
As for the appelate courts, SCO's behavior prior to summary judgement will be a huge factor. They dragged the case out, refused to comply with discovery orders, and changed their arguments constantly.
What? I guess the site devs never heard of the obscure concept known in some circles as "cookies"?
When I was in High School, I finally figured out that the homework was a total and complete waste of time, and never bothered with it. Then I'd go in and ace every test. It pissed teachers off to no end that I just didn't care that the final grade would be a B or C when my test scores were some of the best in the class.
I never did waste my time with college, and spent four years in the military instead. I learned more there than many college students, and came out easily $100k ahead, since that way resulted in being paid as opposed to paying out via loans and tuition.
If degrees are so worthwhile, then how do we explain Bill Gates? He dropped out and basically took over the entire software world. Motivation and natural talent count for a lot more than education.
I've known several self-made millionaires, and none of them had degrees, whereas the people I've met with Masters degrees tend to end up in a middle-tier corporate job and never really get ahead.
Maybe doing and learning on one's own removes barriers to thinking and allows success to actually happen.
How about this to start...
No patent shall be granted covering the behavior or actions of any person, nor of processes that merely mimic the behavior of any person. ("Person" covers corporate entities too!)
And really, really, really hammer the point of the KSR case that combining known devices and techniques and getting the expected and predictable result is not protectable on obviousness and novelty grounds.
I've noticed that AMD tends to leapfrog Intel in a really big way every few years, then Intel slowly catches up and maybe passes them for a while with evolutionary changes. Then AMD hits another "breakthrough" that blows Intel totally out of the water again for a couple of years.
AMD tends to be smaller, more agile, but slower at the evolutionary tweaks than Intel. Intel's sheer size gives them an edge on the drudgery of small performance and cost optimizations, but they are so big that the "outside the box" thinking needed to really innovate is lost in committee before AMD releases the product.
Right now, Intel has the upper position. Give it a year or two...
1. Is the media that they wrote the logs to a read/write type such as a hard drive, or is it a write-once medium such as CD-R, WORM, or any other of a litany of one-shot write technologies. Read/write media leave open a gaping credibility hole, as the files can be easily modified at any time to say anything.
2. Can they produce the original media AND prove that it has not been modified since the records were created?
3. What verification of the date/time stamps are they using? Is it just a text or number date/time, or something more robust such as a time-based GUID? And is there a secure checksum of the entered record (such as an MD5 hash) that can be checked to show authenticity?
4. What measures are they using to ensure that their date/time stamps are reasonably accurate?
5. What physical security measures have they taken to ensure that physical and/or remote access to the media and systems used is restricted only to authorized personnel?
Run Linux or BSD on the thing, and it will not require a reboot.
Method of Shovel Fucking has been patented by someone, and the royalty is too high. As is Method and Device for Gagging With a Spoon.
Virtual A-10's?
Wouldn't it just be cheaper to provide free beer and lawn chairs to some rednecks to sit at the border with their .30/30's?
Oh, come on. If you use The Form, you have to fill it out completely.
In America, the general idea is that rights are granted by virtue of being born ("from God" or "natural law"). Governments in the American ideal merely recognize and protect pre-existing rights, they don't "give" them.
In Europe, the mindset is much more that the government grants the rights, and individuals have no "natural rights".
"they had to make them work with the current domains that are administrated using Active Directory, use exchange servers for mail etc. I think they would have heart attacks."
THAT right there is the reason why the EU took their action against MS. What the original order said is that MS was ordered to release full and complete interfacing specifications and protocols. They dragged their heels on this for three years, and then tried issuing the specs under a super-restrictive license along with a huge fee.
EU called "shenanigans" on that one, and smacked them with a fine of 2M Euros per day.
They were warned, tried to play lawyer-ball, and lost. Big.
With specs and protocols, Active Directory and Exchange support would probably already be in the Linux machines, and would at most take a small amount of configuration for site-specifics like domain name, etc.
Instead, you are locked-in to ONLY purchasing MS clients right now. And it is BECAUSE of this that the EU took action.
Basically, the EU rule is now "inside the box: MS owns that and can keep secret. Outside the box: customer owns that and it must be publicly documented."
And exactly how do we reconcile the term "prohibited communication" with "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press..."
Seems a pretty straightforward violation of the First Amendment, and finding ways around the Fourth as well.
Forgot to use the form....
The Utah proposal advocates a
(*) technical (*) legislative (*) market-based ( ) vigilante
approach to fighting online porn. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)
( ) Pornographers can easily use it to harvest email addresses
(*) It will filter out too much legitimate non-porn content
( ) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money
(*) It is defenseless against brute force attacks
( ) It will stop porn for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it
(*) Users of the web will not put up with it
(*) Google and other legitimate web operators will not put up with it
( ) Microsoft will not put up with it
( ) The police will not put up with it
( ) Requires too much cooperation from pornographers
(*) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
(*) Many web operators cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential viewers
( ) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business
Specifically, your plan fails to account for
( ) Laws expressly prohibiting it
(*) Lack of centrally controlling authority for the web
( ) Open relays in foreign countries
( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses
(*) Asshats
( ) Jurisdictional problems
( ) Unpopularity of weird new taxes
( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money
(*) Huge existing software investment in the net protocols
( ) Susceptibility of protocols other than HTTP to attack
( ) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email
(*) Willingness and ability of users to install software necessary to make it work
(*) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes
(*) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches
(*) Extreme profitability of porn
( ) Joe jobs and/or identity theft
(*) Technically illiterate politicians
(*) Dishonesty on the part of pornographers themselves
( ) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering
(*) Internet Explorer
and the following philosophical objections may also apply:
(*) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever been shown practical
( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable
(*) Website content should not be the subject of legislation
(*) Blacklists suck
(*) Whitelists suck
(*) We should be able to talk about sex without being censored
( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud
( ) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks
(*) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually
(*) Why should we have to trust you and your servers?
( ) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses
(*) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem
( ) I don't want the government reading my email
( ) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough
(*) It's the parent's job to watch what their kid is doing
Furthermore, this is what I think about you:
( ) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work.
(*) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it.
( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your house down!
The only way to make a "kid friendly web" is to disconnect it from the public Internet entirely and build a parallel system that is manually built site-by-site and page-by-page. It could use all the same tech, but can have no connection whatsoever to the public net.
It's impossible to have a free-speech net along with "child friendly" in the same setup. It has to be parallel and completely separate, or it won't ever work well enough.
I'm a real hardliner on the belief that interfaces should not only be unprotectable, but should be required to be released in any and all cases, period, no exceptions.
Then again, every once in a while, someone hits on a previously unknown fundamental breakthrough that turns the rules as we know them on their head. Think Gallileo, Newton, Einsten, et al. It DOES happen.
That said, it's highly unlikely that the inventor of the "free energy" stuff is actually on to anything. I take his claims with a truckload of salt, but am willing to see what is really going on there.
It is possible that he hit on something, but pretty highly unlikely.
"YOU CAN'T GET ENERGY OUT OF NOTHING"
Very true. But if someone DOES hit on a way to tap into something we've been heretofore unaware of, that doesn't make it energy from nothing, just energy from something we didn't know about before -- the same as fusion, fission, and antimatter anniahlation would have been unthinkable in 1670.
"You don't have to leave yet do ya? You didn't stick a chainsaw up my ass yet! My head's still on my torso! I'm glad you fuckers can handle your high!"
All caps scream reccomended, but
I'd say for the first offense, a day in stocks would be appropriate. For the second, hanging, drawing, and quartering.
You'd see frivolous cases go away in a big hurry.
Or even better, liberate them from oil money by developing our own engergy sources. Then these third-world deserts can become what third-world deserts always have been...
Irrelevant.
Why waste three weeks when we can use subs to deliver Domino's nukes -- thirty minutes or less or they are free? One sub carries enough warheads to do the job, and two can basically make the whole country's popluated areas into the world's biggest parking lot.
Or better yet... rather than dropping meteors or nukes on anyone, how about just cutting their 'net cables?
Every time.
Hope they don't just setup a botnet.
No... but some ARE married. Which makes sense... because after marriage sex becomes like a good steak: very rare.