The United States is dying to lose it's share of the world economy. All this innovation by litagation only hampers real technology growth and invention. You'll see other nations like China rise more quickly than they would have since the USA is busy trying to run itself into the ground while making quatertly profits go up 1%. It's a lot easier to hit a nonmoving target. All China has to do is play catch up in that case.
It is even simpler than that.
Lawsuits, even the most just and justifiable kind, are ultimately negative-sum games for those who play. Wealth is lost to both parties, regardless of the outcome, as it is absorbed in legal costs and attorney's fees (rather than paid out as dividends... which yields higher stock value, or reinvested, which yields future growth).
Litigation of this nature is particularly heinous, as it is extremenly negative sum... millions are impoverished (their tools are taken away), thousands are told it has become illegal for them to share their hard work with one another, and the pockets of a few oligarchs, monopolists, and their attorney's are lined with the blood, sweat, and tears of their victims (exchanged for US dollars at a great exchange rate... for the monopolists).
America has been playing this sort of negative-sum game with itself for quite some time. It destroyed the aviation industry to the point where the manufacturers of small aircraft stopped building small airplanes for a time... until congress passed a 19-year cap on airplane manufacturer liability, at which point airplanes began to be built again (albeit sold at three or four times what their market price would be otherwise, simply to underwrite 19 years of liability!). Now add so-called 'intellectual property' to the mix, in the form of copyrights and, more harmfully by far, patents, and you have the ultimate negative-sum game: make the hard work of others illegal, eliminate all competition, and benefit yourself. B. Gates has played this game for years, holding the technology and the industry back a good fifteen years or longer and wiping out vastly better products in the process. He, and his company Microsoft, have cut a swath of destruction across the industry, from Silocon Valley to Tokyo. Not through fair or just competition, not by offering a superior product (as anyone who has ever used Windows and compared it with another product, be it GNU/Linux, Mac OS X, FreeBSD, or what have you will attest), but through misinformation, deceit, copyright violations (and even real-world, physical theft of competitor's software, for which they have been convicted in more than one country), an abuse of their monopoly position (for which they have been convicted, but remain unpunished, in America), and now, finally, through the most appalling abuse of the already broken American legal system we have seen for quite some time, they are for the first time going to start using their patent portfolio to destroy that which they could not otherwise conquer.
This isn't the end of Linux, of free software, or of open source. It is the end of American preeminence in the software industry, and frankly, this country has earned exactly this sort of ignoble end to its dominance in the field, both through the appalling policies of washington that have done everything to destroy and dismantal the digital progress of the last decade, and the apathy of its people, including you and I, to allow such a disgustingly corrupt and wicked government to move forward with its agenda unchecked, unquestioned, and uncriticized.
Enough!
Either we get off our butts and get involed politically, or we shut up and accept our places back on the couch, our creativity outlawed and our voices silenced, once again absorbing the opinions and attitudes so graciously provided by our betters via the traditional media in mindless, drooling silence.
Magnetic stripe readers are now quite common and could be installed on public terminals at minimal expense. Probably the most significant barrier to their widespread adoption is the lack of standard protocols and software packages.
USB is even more ubiquitous. Almost all (if not in fact all) new hardware comes with USB, and all modern operating systems support it. It is cross platform, accessible to GNU/Linux, OS X, and even that other obscure operating system from Redmond, WA.
Banks have to provide their customers with credit cards anyway. Why not a small memory chip, insertable into any USB card reader? Indeed, if they use an already widespread standard, the only cost will be installing the actual USB readers... something a number of PCs, USB printers, etc. already provide, and something public terminals could add at minimal expense.
No need to rewrite any software, other than the authentication routines at the server end.
The BSD's legal trouble in the 1990's helped Linux gain popularity at BSD's expense. Now it may be time for the enterprise to remember BSD can do everything Linux can do -- sometimes better!
The BSD zealots need to get a grip. There is absolutely nothing prevento SCO (or anyone else) from accusing BSD of having incorporated their code into the codebase and making precisely the same baseless accusations and FUD against *BSD that they are currently making against Linux.
Nothing.
The earlier court case you cite dealt with AT&T code at that time, which was subsequently removed from the BSD codebase. BSD got off on those minor infractions because AT&T had appropriated huge amounts of BSD code and was guilty of copyright violation in turn.
The cross-licensing that resulted from this legal battle applied to AT&T UNIX at that time, not the subsequent releases of System V which SCO is falsely claiming Linux has infringed upon.
There is therefor nothing at all preventing SCO from making exactly these same sort of accusations against *BSD, and indeed Darl et. al. have already made preliminary noises in that direction.
So those of you zealously screaming "BSD is immune" are not only spewing nonsense, you'd better hope and pray to whatever deieties you believe in (if any) that Linux does not loose on this one, because your favorite platform is almost certainly next on the list.
In any case, i've met a lot of geeks that will believe any old bullshit (atkins has really taken hold in the geek community for some reason, for example)
OK, now it is my turn to call bullshit.
As much as I have always despised 'diets de jour', Atkins was preaching his take on this for 30 odd years, much to his own personal and professional derision. However, in recent years scientific studies have finally been conducted to validate or refute his findings, and in every case have validated his approach.
Now there is plenty of innuendo suggesting 'long term health effects' that are bad, but no solid studies have been performed, and the claim that the atkins diet does in fact lead to dramatic weight loss has been demonstrated and is no longer disputed even by its detractors.
OTOH we do have emperical evidence of the ill health effects of the low fat, high carb diets that dieticians have been foisting upon us over the last two decades: America has never been as obese, or as unhealthy, as it is today. Specific causes are uncertain (correlation does not prove causation, it really can only suggest it, and even then not always), but it is clear that as the American diet has embraced and increased its consumption of low-fat, high-carb products the populace has grown vastly more obese and unhealthy.
So we have only three ways of losing weight in a reaonably healthy manner: burn more calories, consume less calories, or go into ketosis by dropping your carb intake dramatically. 'Low Fat' doesn't do shit for anyone except peddlers of 'low fat' foods and diets... who are arguably quacks of the highest order.
In any event, calling atkins "any old bullshit" flies in the face of numerous studies and, most importantly, the very real and reproducable effect it has on people's weight.
I actually did the Atkins thing, not out of any personal interest (as I said, I've always despised 'diets de jour'), but to be supportive of my girlfriend who was doing it.
I did not expect it to work and had zero faith in the approach.
After losing 45 pounds and having my waiste size shring by 6 inches I had to eat a little crow and admit that, emperically, the damn thing worked, and worked dramatically. Having my blood pressure go from marginally high to marginally low, and my cholesterol go from Very High to Medium-Low in four short months made me a believer...whatever 'long term health effects' there might be (and who knows, even pseudo-scientific innuendo can be right on occasion), the immediate health effects were dramatic and extremely positive.
However, unlike religion, I buy into the Atkins approach (though I'm no longer on the diet) because of verifiable, reproducable results.
As I said, it is possible there may be health issues with eating low-carb diets over the long term, but that certainly isn't proven, and no real long term studies have yet been done (though plenty of allegations have been made, by the same people who were pushing the low-fat, high carb disaster upon us the last several decades).
Indeed, Given that we evolved for most of our 3 million years as primates eating exactly that kind of diet, it is quite possible, perhaps even likely, that there are no such health risks... certainly the theories that there are have yet to be rigorously tested. High-carb foods didn't become common until after the advent of modern agriculture, some 8-10 thousand years ago, so it really isn't unreasonable to find that our metabolisms aren't terribly well adapted to processing it. 10,000 years is nothing compared to 3,000,000, so we propbably have a while yet before our bodies evolve into more effecient processors of high-carb diets than low-carb diets.
In a way it is a pity Atkins has become popular (among geeks as well as anyone else), as I absolutely hate doing anything that smacks of 'trendy,' but the simple fact is that, unlike low-fat, high-carb diets that are supposed to make you healthy and don'
...I must say your argument is utter hogwash. It is merely the "if you have nothing to hide, why do you care about privacy" strawman dressed up in different clothes.
How is it privacy infringement? You're doing something illegal (copyright infringement), you are then caught, and you are then identified. Is their a reasonable expectation of privacy when transmitting your IP address to millions of other users when using Kaazaa? Hardly.
How is it privacy infringement? You're doing something illegal (conducting illegal business on the telephone), you are then caught, and you are then identified. Is their [sic] a reasonable expectation of privacy when you are talking on the telephone on a switchboard of millions of other citizens while talking? Hardly.
One reasonably expects one's communications to be private, whether it is by mail, telephone, or internet. Even large private meetings (private business teleconferences, etc.) have a reasonable expectation of privacy. The internet is really no different, and were lawmakers and the law at all sane ISPs would have the same common carrier status afforded the Bells.
You want to arrest someone for doing something illegal on the internet? Fine. Get your subpeana, go through the standard wiretapping process (complete with court order, etc.) and then invade someone's privacy as part of an official investigation by law enforcement who are held accountable to the public.
Do not allow private corporations and their lawyers to simply invade one's electronic home and communications at will, bypassing the entire intent and letter of the reasonable search and seizure clause of the constitution, and accountable only to their own shareholders. Or, if you do advocate such obscenely undemocratic violations of people's basic civil rights to due process and privacy, do not expect any legitimacy or sympathy from the rest of us, regardless of how despicable the actions were of those you are trampling over the constitution to get.
Next you'll be arguing the police should put cameras in our homes or listen in on every phone call, simply because somewhere out there there is a dirty old man molesting a child or someone contracting a murder for hire.
"Do it for the children! Stop Crime!"
What you suggest is the digital equivelent of a camera in every home and a wiretap on every phone, and it has no place whatsoever in a free society irrespective of what crimes a few idiots (or a billion idiots) may be committing.
Constitutional safeguards and legal procedure is there for a very important reason: to afford all of us protections regardless of our guilt or innocence. A damn good thing, too, as with the current laws on the books every single one of us is guilty of breaking some law, somewhere, nearly each and every day we get out of bed. Want private thugs in pin stripe suits enforcing all those laws against you, and breaking down your door to do so?
No?
Then stop advocating unconstitutional and draconian behavior, merely because the target of your particular ire threatens your outdated business models, or offends your notions of right and wrong. Because I guarantee you, somewhere, sometimes, you are offending someone else's notion of right and wrong, and once you open up that door you too will be on the wrong end of someone else's personal or business "enforcement action," and civil government accountable to the people will have been replaced by corporate, plutocratic fascism accountable to only a few CEOs and shareholders as they trample over the rest of us.
I accidentally posted this twice (not sure what Mozilla did to allow that, given that this was a revision and the other should never have been posted).
I see you were modded Troll. If only moderation were like on K5, we wouldn't fall prey to stupid moderators who don't recognise sarcasm even when tagged as so.
Indeed.
As for the legal system, there is no wonder it breaks when you have no faith in it. Faith is required to get something to work, so obviously something more than just the system is broken. Blaiming the system is childish and naive.
Nonsense.
There are plenty of systems that require no faith whatsoever to function, and the justice system is one such. As a point if fact, it is functioning despite widespread lack of faith in it...it just isn't functioning for the people it was ostensibly built to serve, but rather for the lawyers that populate and run it. So lack of faith isn't really interfering it its functioning at all, per se, it is merely a reflection of who the current legal system is serving, and who it is not.
One could argue that democracy requires faith to function, but that presupposes that one must have faith before one casts his or her vote. While that may be true for many, it certainly is not for me.
I haven't had faith in our democracy since Reagan's War on Drugs in the 1980s and the requirement that I urinate for my employer or lose my summer job (I passed all the screenings, but I'll never forget that invasion of my privacy for as long as I live), with Edwin Meese and his fascist cronies cheering from the White House. Nevertheless, despite this complete lack of faith in our democratic institutions, which I strongly suspect are corrupt beyond all hope of reform, I stubbornly continue to cast my vote and watch my candidate lose election after election.
Why?
Because it is my civil duty to do so, just as it is my civil duty to serve jury duty every so often (which I have done twice now). If our democracy is truly failing and beyond all hope of repair, it isn't going to be so because of my lack of participation. So, while I have no faith in the system, I participate anyway.
Unfortunately, statistics on voter turnout suggest I am a tiny minority, and that most of the silent majority that has lost faith in the process don't bother to vote and all, and thereby have become a large part of the problem which is making the system so ineffectual... which, once again, supports the notion that democracy does in fact require faith in the system to function.
Be that as it may, the misnamed justice system (which has devolved into merely a legal system and a forum for litigious sophism) doesn't require any faith whatsoever to function, merely the presence of a well armed police force prepared to back up their decisions with force of arms.
So, much as you may like to call me childish and suggest that my lack of faith is somehow responsible for the widespread corruption and disconnect between the legal system's mechanations and the notions of what constitutes justice that most people commonly hold, the fact of the matter is that the devolution of our legal system and the corruption that infests it and our other branches of government has absolutely nothing to do with my lack of faith, or the lack of faith of millions of others, and everything to do with the behavior and ethical failings of those who make up that system, the vast, vast majority of whom are lawyers working to serve other lawyers first and foremost, the clients of those lawyers second, and the American people last.
I used to be 50 pounds heavier, and can attest than switching from pop to water (or at least to sugar free pop) will get you 2 or 3 pounds.
Cut potato chips out of your diet and you'll drop another 5-10 pounds.
Go on the Atkins diet, and you'll dump a huge amount of weight in a short time (I dropped 40 pounds with absolutely no effort whatsoever). Be advised that once you go off the diet you will spike back up... however, if you keep your carb count under control (without being fascist about it) and eat like you're 40 pounds lighter (i.e. decrease the quantity you consume modestly) you will only spike a few pounds (~5 lbs or so) and then stabilize.
All of this works with no other lifestyle changes, no workout regimes, no uncomfortable sweating at the gym or smashing your joints jogging along the smog-congested streats of your city.
Which of course means you don't lose any time available for hacking out new code, surfing pr0n, doing machinima or blender applications, writing, or what have you.
(Of course, that means you have just as much time to work, as well).
I detest sports and am not overly fond of any form of uncomfortable work out. Luckily working out isn't a requirement for good health or fitness... if you walk a few miles a day (I do: to and from work) and eat right you can be reasonably fit with no discomfort and no submission to the Jock Ueber Alles (tm) mentality of western culture in the form of glorified, pay-to-torment-yourself 'fitness' clubs.
Unless of course spandex is your fetish, in which case the multi-hundred dollar membership to your local fitness club or spa may be worth it to you.
I used to be 50 pounds heavier, and can attest than switching from pop to water (or at least to sugar free pop) will get you 2 or 3 pounds.
Cut potato chips out of your diet and you'll drop another 5-10 pounds.
Go on the atkins diet, and you'll dump a huge amount of weight in a short time (I dropped 40 pounds with absolutely no effort whatsoever). Be advised that once you go off the diet you will spike back up... however, if you keep your carb count under control (without being fascist about it) and eat like you're 40 pounds lighter (i.e. decrease the quantity you consume modestly) you will only spike a few pounds (~5 lbs or so) and then stabilize.
All of this works with no other lifestyle changes, no workout regimes, no uncomfortable sweating at the gym or smashing your joints jogging along the smog-congested streats of your city.
Which of course means you don't lose any time available for hacking out new code, surfing pr0n, doing machinima or blender applications, writing, or what have you.
(Of course, that means you have just as much time to work, as well).
I detest sports and am not overly fond of any form of work out that does not involve intimate physical relations. Luckily working out isn't a requirement for good health or fitness... if you walk a few miles a day (I do: to and from work) and eat right you can be reasonably fit with no discomfort and no submission to the Jock Ueber Alles (tm) mentality of western culture in the form of glorified, pay-to-torment-yourself 'fitness' clubs.
Unless of course spandex is your fetish, in which case the multi-hundred dollar membership to your local fitness club or spa may be worth it to you.
I just have not been able to bring my question in a clearer light.
For one, the user had no idea that this was the case and therefore in all fairness should have another alternative.
Indeed they do. For SCO to collect any damages whatsoever they MUST show the offendor what code is in violation, so that the offendor has an opportunity to cease and desist in the infringement.
Failure to do so, as SCO has done, constitutes "dirty hands" and means they are entitled to absolutely zero damages under the law.
Can the end user then avoid litigation by simply foregoing the SCO code? As far as I know, SCO have been mum about this, but they have mentioned somewhere to the effect that if someone were to go and try to remove tainted portions, you would get kernel 2.2. I think the statment refers to the fact that the code in question is now integrated with the kernel and eliminating it will be difficult. They do not mean it to be an alternative to litigation or buying a license.
They don't have a choice, by law. At some point they either put up or shut up. However, since all of the allegations have been public PR, and none of them present in any court filings, the point is moot. They can scream and threaten, but until they show the world what the offending code is and provide an opportunity for one to cease infringement, they have absolutely no claim and no right to any damages, from anyone.
Once they make the allegation official, and provide evidence of the allegation, it is a simple matter to remove the offending code (or refute the allegation, if, as would likely be the case in such a scenerio, the Linux code were written first and added to SCO later, i.e. SCO is the pirate, not Linux, or the code came from IBM and was contributed to AIX and Linux, which might be a violation of IBM's license with SCO (but again, probably not) but is certainly not a violatino of copyright, given that IBM owns the copyright to the code they have written).
Obviously this assumes there is infringing code lurking in the kernel, which is extraordinarilly unlikely.
I have always been a bit patriotic. Honorably discharged from the US Air Force and all. It pains me to see how patheticly inept the US legal system really is.
The system works.
It is the best in the world.
We are a shining beacon of justice to humanity.
As we recall, when we demonstrated to the world how perfectly the American legal system works, showing the rest of humanity once again How to Live Properly(tm, Bush & Co.) with the historical supreme court ruled that a Florida recount really wasn't necessary through the most convulated and strained logic quite possibly ever set to paper and handed the presidency to a man most of the world correctly recognizes as not having been elected by the American People (but "it was a victory for democracy" quoth the spinmeisters).
America has the best system in the world. I know. I saw it on TV. [/sarcasm]
The legal system in America is so broken, and in such disrepute among the common man, that even my republican voting mother has absolutely no faith in it. As a liberal voter on the other end of the spectrum I share her lack of confidence in that system fully, as does everyone I know or have spoken with, a couple of attorneys and one retired judge excepted.
So how can we be sure about this? I would like to know more. Are you predicting a legal path given that the extraordinary circumstances are true? Do you have an example of a case settled in this manner?
I think you misunderstand.
Virtually every (if not in fact every) copyright case has been settled in this manner: the copyright holder has the right to require anyone copying their work to adhere to their license, which can be quite restrictive (in contrast to the GPL) and anyone so copying the product is required to adhere to that license or forego copying the product. Since copying is required to use software (i.e. it must be downloaded, copied to disk, copied to memory, etc.), any use of GPLed software requires adherence to the GPL. Ditto for any SCO software and associationed SCO license.
When I say the 'GPL wins', I mean that:
1) a user cannot mix the two incompatible licenses (and code) together: they must by law forego one or othe other (or use them independently of one another, not as one combined product). 2) Foregoing SCO code is a lot easier than forgoing Linux code if one is running a GNU/Linux system. Whatever code Caldera contributed and may now be trying to rescind, or whatever system V (non-BSD) code is in the linux kernel (almost certainly NONE, but for argument's sake lets pretend it is >0 lines), is going to by a tiny fraction of the overall kernel. To have a working kernel an end user will find it far easier to remove the offending SCO code (if any, again, probably there is none) than to start with the few hypothetical code fragments SCO might lay claim to and build a working kernel from that.
Ergo, any sane end user sticking with Linux will chose to forego the SCO code and license in favor of the GPLed code and license. I.e. 'the GPL wins.'
I did not mean that the SCO license would be eradicated by the GPL necessarilly, although given SCO's behavior in distributing the Linux kernel up through this moment (and continuing to do so in knowing and willful violation of the GPL if it does in fact contain SCO code they are unwilling to license under the GPL) that could very well happen (assuming there is any SCO code in the kernel).
Most likely there is no SCO code in the Linux kernel, and SCO is not violating the GPL by distributing it. If they do distribute binaries only they will be in violation, but technically shaking people down for unnecessary licensing fees is, while certainly fraudulant and perhaps illegal, quite possibly not a GPL violation if in fact they distribute the code with any binaries.
It is a fine line they are walking, and one that will almost certainly destroy them in the end. But, as this is clearly a stock scam and not a long term business strategy, I doubt they really care.
You are wrong on so many counts one is forced to wonder if you aren't an astroturfer for SCO, or one of their underwriters such as Sun Microsystems or Microsoft, or just woefully uninformed.
First, the fact that SCO still has a Linux dist. on their FTP server is not evidence of anything.
Wrong. It is evidence of the 'smoking gun' variety that they are doing one of the following
1) Legally distributing GPLed code
a) any Caldera contributed code is likewise GPLed and legal
b) Either there is no misappropriated code present or they have implicitly chosen to GPL it. 2) SCO is willfully and knowingly violating copyright, as violating the GPL (or disregarding it) means that regular copyright law applies, and they have no right to distribute any code but that which they wrote (which excludes virtually everything except that contributed by Caldera, if anything).
Either way, it is certainly evidence of 'something.'
The end users are in no way bound by the GPL, they are just in violation of SCO's copyright.
The end users most certainly are bound by copyright law, and are thus not permitted by default to download (ie. 'copy'), much less use the software in question unless they adhere to the GPL. Therefor, end users are REQUIRED by law to adhere to the GPL if they make any use of the software (including the Linux kernel itself). This includes SCO and anyone else.
Understanding that point, SCO is free to license their SysV code to linux users. Linux users are free to use it.
Yes, but in the extraordinarilly unlikely event that there is SCO code in Linux, users are NOT permitted to violate the GPL OR SCO's license. The two are incompatible, so the user in question must chose to adhere to one or the other (guess which one wins? Yup, the GPL, as SCO's contribution, if any, won't a working kernel make).
IBM is potentially in bad shape, legally and in damages. Of course, this is all assuming that their is merit to SCO's claim that their code was placed in Linux.
The world is in dire straights, assuming the claims of Osama bin Laden and your local suicide cult have merit. The fact of the matter is that SCO consistently provides absolutely no evidence of any of their claims, and has continued to do so for months, while the Linux development process has been in contrast very transparent and well documented. You have more chance of being right by joining the local suicide cult than you do by suggesting these fraudulant attorneys have any shred of legitimacy in their arguments. Indeed, the court filing papers underscore just how lacking their case really is, and how empty their bellecose assertions vis-a-vis Linux copyright really are.
That really isn't important. Even if SCO were 100% correct, they themselves would be willfully guilty of copyright violation, and while everyone might have to switch to FreeBSD from Linux (unlikely in the extreme), SCO would be buried under copyright suits of their own, and will not stay in business regardless. Their day is over, they have become little more than stooges for Sun Microsystems and Microsoft, and their passing is loud, noise, and annoying, but ultimately of little lasting interest. They do not own the copyright on Linux, they have no legal basis to license code they do not own, and once this stock bubble collapses there is a very real liklihood that most of their leadership will be in court, quite possibly followed by prison.
Litigation is inherently a negative sum game. The players litigate, one takes a portion of money from the other (or not), and a percentage (usually 30% or more) is pocketed by the attorney.
Even in the most just and reasonable situations, in which one person is truly injured by another and deserves compensation, the litigation involved decreases the overall pie available to the two principles (remember, that ambulance chaser is getting a third of the money).
When it comes to vastly more insidious things like patent and copyright law, wealth is destroyed for millions simply to line the pockets of a few, with the overall pie shrunk by orders of magnitude just so a few can reap a little more money than the free market would entitle them to.
This is simply the logical extention: get a patent on a business method and eradicate all competition by enforcing the patent. Increase your own wealth modestly (or immodestly) by destroying vastly greater sums of wealth that others might, through their innovation, enjoy.
Patents (and to some degree copyright) are antithetical to free markets and the competition required for capitalism to function in any real sense, and business / software patents are certainly the most offensive of the lot.
Make no mistake about it. The United States, through its litigiousness, is playing a negative sum game with itself, and the only end result of this nonsense is that the entire American pie shrinks and shrinks and shrinks, until there is little or nothing left and the entire nation, intellectual property attorneys excepted, is impoverished. And once the entire economic system collapses, as it surely will if competition is eradicated in such a manner, even they will be joining the rest of the starving masses in the street.
It is an ugly future, one which our attorney dominated policy makers and judiciary have created for us, and one which almost all of us are certain to live to see reach its logical conclusion.
You are right. It is going to get very, very nasty. Indeed, if patents aren't severely curtailed or banned outright (business model and software patents in particular), and copyright rolled back and restrained to its historical role, American capitalism is likely to experience much the same catastrophic failure that communism did, growing ever more ineffecient as ever more monopolies take over ever more once-competative markets. Opportunity is already decreasing, and the curve will accelerate, until there is little left for any but a few priveleged.
We have lawyers, litigiousness, but most of all, patent law made by, of, and for patent attorneys to thank for this appalling mess. Don't expect it to get any better anytime soon, if ever.
Or you can watch the BBC news at a more reasonable hour on BBC America, which is offered, frequently in the low or moderate priced packages most people with premium TV service have, by just about every cable/sat provider out there.
I do not have statistics to confirm or refute your assertion that BBCA is offered by those cable companies offering service to "most people", but I can tell you that RCN cable, which serves much of downtown Chicago (where I live) does not offer BBCA, nor have I ever seen it offered in any of the other, smaller communities in which I've lived over the years by the monopolies that service those communities.
Perhaps it is available widely in New York, LA, portions of Chicago, and various other markets, but clearly a large segment of the country, including a large portion of its 3rd largest city, do not have a cable company that offers it.
Which IMHO is a crying shame, as there is precious little quality television and the BBC habitually excells at bringing quality stuff to the airwaves.
Ask a Star Wars fan about how Han Solo made a voyage in however many parsecs and prepare to boggle at the convoluted thought process behind the explanation.
I am not a Star Wars fan at all (though I used to be a casual enjoyer of the movies, before episodes I and II), but this point isn't as convulated or silly as you may think.
Remember Einstein's equation: e=m (more commonly known as e=mc^2)? You can drop the c^2 if you chose your units to be such that c=1, meaning that the speed of light is little more than a constant that converts between two sets of units that essentially measure the same thing. Indeed, physcicists have proposed that we adopt more natural units that clarify this relationship.
Distance and time are likewise the same thing (as becomes apparent when dealing with general relativity).
You could measure time in units that describe how far light travels in a given period of time. While saying "just give me 300,000 kilometers, I'll be right with you" is a little more verbose the "just give me a second," the two are, in terms of physics, identical. Alternatively, you could say something is about a nanosecond distant, i.e. that object is one light-nanosecond away from your current position.
The fact that we didn't understand the relationships between space and time, nor that between energy and mass, is why we've ended up with two essentially incompatible units for each (meters vs. seconds, grams vs. Joules) which make the e=m relationship, and the distance vs. time relationship, appear more complex than they actually are.
So, saying one made a trip in x parsecs (which is silly sounding and undoubtably resulted from George Lucas not knowing a thing about physics or the units he was tossing about) isn't really as silly as one would think.
What is silly is that we still have different units for distance vs. time, and mass vs. energy, when in each case they are one and the same.
There, now you've read a 'convuluted' explaination by someone who hates what Star Wars has become and was never a very ardent fan... an explaination that happens to be true.
Every time when I read articles such as these I wonder: why oh why do Democrats in the USA have such a hard time selling the truth to the public? I mean: the current Bush administration has piled misleading and disputable decision on decision, and the American public seems to feel it is all right. How come? Why aren't the Democrats using these obvious limitations on the freedoms of the American citizens to rally the public so they'll support the Democrats and elect a better government in place which will overturn such decisions like a concentration of media companies?
Because we don't get the news here.
Seriously.
Or, to be more precise, the main networks and popular media outlets have filtered the foreign and domestic news beyond all recognition.
Why? Not because they harbor some pro-Bush bias (although clearly some, such as Fox news, do), but because they all compete in a market for viewership, and several factors coincide to make the media self censoring and self-slanting, including the desire to cozy up to the administration in order to get and maintain access to the white house (which the Bush administration exploits and enforces shamelessly and aggressively...witness seasoned reporters who have been in the whitehouse for 20 years or more being relegated to back seats behind neophytes for posing difficult questions in White House press conferences and subsequently being ignored by the press secretary/president/etc.) and the desire to maintain popularity with a public they perceive as supporting the president.
The latter is an assumption that is quite possibly mistaken, if the conservatives I work with are any indication (most of whome are saying rather loudly that Bush has gone to far and things are spirallying out of control... these being the same people who relish the opportunity to bash Hilary and slam President Clinton. In other words, Bush seems to be losing a fair chunk of moderate-to-conservative, but non-religious right, republicans).
Back on topic, the news we get in the United States is NOTHING like the news you get overseas. Our information is so sanitized and slanted that you would probably not recognize the same events if you saw them reported here. This was driven home rather forcefully the other night when I was at my girlfriend's watching the BBC news on PBS at 10:00pm, and for the first time saw footage of injured soldiers and Iraqis, and heard first hand just what an appalling quagmire this administration's precipitious invasion has put us into. Contrasting that with Fox or CNN (modulo the editorializing there is little difference of late) is like night and day.
So, while we aren't forbidden from getting foreign news sources per se (the Internet is available, after all, and the BBC is available once/day at 10:00PM), we are discouraged in that the BBC is shown at a time when it must compete against most of the local news broadcasts, on a station few bother to watch (more's the pity), and that virtually every mainstream press to which people have subscribed for the bulk of their lives is heavilly censored and sanitized... and most people never realize it!
It is incredibly discouraging to be an American at a time like this, when our country appears to be spiralling full steam into a state of plutocratic fascism, the FCC has gutted and destroyed our telecom industry, crippled our internet industry, and is hell bent on consolidating our remaining media into a few easilly-influenced mega-companies, perhaps even into a single monopoly. The freedom I grew up with has dissappeared bit by bit ever since the Reagan era in the 1980s, and while more people are becoming aware of it today, still there are too few of us, and too many who simply toe the party line or bury their head in the sand in a frenzy of misplaced national pride, and things continue to spiral downward and get worse.
Perhaps this years record deficit of 450+ Billion dollars, beneath a Republican President and
Given Microsoft's record of continual failure with regards to security, I've always thought putting MS in charge of security (as with Palladium) was like asking the wolf to guard the sheep.
Given that 'homeland security' is really a euphemism for something between 'Big Brother' ("total informational awareness" etc.) and 'Political Police', I for one am relieved they are sufficiently incompetent to select Microsoft as their platform. This may, and I stress may, slow down our slide into a complete surveillance society submerged beneath ubiquitous governance.
Or not, as it may be just the prelude needed for even more draconian legislation and public hysteria when Microsoft's chronic security issues begin to affect our perceived safety, leading to the unpleasant irony of having the technical ability to monitor and ubiquitously govern every man, woman, child, dog, cat, and garden slug in the country diminished while providing the political excuse for accelerating legislation through congress that makes the former pre-Gorbochov soviet parliament look positively liberal by comparison.
What we do know for certain is that it puts a lot of money in the pockets of a convicted monopolist, which isn't helpful to anyone (other than said monopolist).
I checked the site, and I couldn't find any mention of handwriting recognition.
There are handwriting recognition programs available for Linux, including several under the GPL, but you are correct that the Lycoris website, which does have a "keyboard free" section, only seems to mention a software keyboard (xvkdb perhaps?) and not handwriting recognition as such. I too would be interested in a clarification of this, although I suspect the virtual software keyboard is the only form on 'keyboard free' input available at the moment (it is what we use on our GNU/Linux tablets as well).
A more important question for me, as an administrator who works for a firm that deploys several dozen GNU/Linux tablets (Fujitsu Stylistic 3400s and LPT-600s at present) is, do they have a list of supported tablets and are the latest Fujitsus on that list? Such a list would be invaluable when it comes to evaluating new hardware, and if their distro is as good and seemless as they make it sound, we would certainly buy a copy for consideration.
Alas, their website seems to be very lacking in that information as well. Hopefully someone from Lycoris is reading this thread and can comment and/or update the information on their web page.
Um while I agree with your statemnts (for the most part) I must point out that mp3.com is now owned by a record label and not the independant music site of it's hayday...
Very true, which was why I said "...non-traditional channels such as mp3.com once was..."
A lot of times, the label is putting a fair chunk of change into promoting the tour, booking the appropriate venues, and getting things done in general. I could see a decent tour costing the same as producing a CD, if not more when they go multinational.
Um, no.
The record label is putting a great deal of the Band's future earnings into promoting the band, mostly in promoting their CD sales, of which the band will receive $0.25-$0.50 per copy. Any promotion of the band, be it their CDs (the bulk of the promotion) or their tour is all charged to the band. In the end the recording companies, while taking the Lion's share of the CD profits (and now, soon, the touring profits as well), pays absolutely squat for promotion.
Hopefully this new development will encourage more bands to avoid the clutches of the recording industry and market direct, or use non-traditional channels such as mp3.com once was to reach their audiences. With luck this final act of hubris will be enough to kill those parisites dead, something that would be very good for artists and fans alike.
Why are they running Windows? In all seriousness, why not Linux or something else? If they run Windows, then the must pay MS money for every console they make.
GNU/Linux wouldn't work, as a key component of their business plan (and probably a key component of their spectacular failure) is crippling their hardware through DRM encryption. Assuming a kernel driver is needed to access the hardware, and that they don't want to force users to compile the kernel upon purchasing tha machine (i.e. assuming a binary distribution of the kernel), they would have to provide sources to their driver, thereby revealing the 'secret' of their DRM technology. As much of the DRM technology involves 'security through obscurity' snakeoil, they aren't about to do this. (Remember, a binary-only driver taints the kernel, and IIRC you cannot ship a precompiled, tainted kernel).
OTOH they could use FreeBSD and release as many internally hacked, proprietary versions as they like. So while I'm an avid user of Linux (of the Gentoo flavor, personally), Linux would probably be the last choice for a closed, crippled system like this that relies at least in part on secrecy to function. Even if they were to develop their own, in-house, proprietary DRM encryption scheme, they will likely prefer to leverage Microsoft's existing, extensive efforts in crippling their customer's future hardware through DRM rather than have to adopt FreeBSD to the task and do all the work themself.
It is a foolish tradeoff, as FreeBSD offers no competing product, while Microsoft's X-Box is clearly a competitor, making them beholden to a competitor for a key component of their own product. Another reason, in addition to the poor bang/$, crippling DRM, and subscription approach issues, that the product is almost certain to be DOA. Any one of those issues alone would be enough to kill the product, but taken together they make it's liklihood of survival approximately 0%.
People who disseminate the dangerous myth that 120 volts (or even.012 volts, if the amperage is high enough) can't kill should be held at least in part liable for anyone they mislead into performing an uncautious act that gets them hurt or killed.
Like my loser ex-stepfather, who couldn't be bothered to get a switch fixed that he knew to be dangerous.
When I was a kid, we had an intermittent short in the switch to our garbage disposal. If one had their hand on the metal faucet (e.g. turning on the water) and threw the switch at the same time, one could get one hell of a shock. Indeed, I was unconscious from the time I threw the switch to the time I slammed against the wall on the far side of the kitchen. That was how I as a ten year old kid learned that we had a dangerous switch installed.
While 120 volts and tens of amps do not always kill (just as lighting does not always kill), it certainly can, and the question of whether I was unconscious for a second or two, or actually dead but lucky enough that my ten-year-old heart could restart itself (perhaps from the counter shock of having my back slam against a wall) is an interesting question, but either way it was certainly lights-out for a brief period of time.
OTOH I've had tens of thousands of volts pass through my body in one of those low amperage static electricity demonstrations, and other than having my hair stand up on end and a very slight tingle in my fingers all was perfectly well. So you are certainly correct, ohm's law applies and it is amerage (as well as frequency...60 Hz was a really lousy choice from a safety perspective, and 50 Hz is almost as bad), not voltage that defines the lethalness of an electrical jolt.
I'm sure Microsoft wanted them to use their software, but Linux is more likely to win when the competition is another *nix. Microsoft probably couldn't meet the requirements of 'runs old payroll software' or something, no matter how low they could price their software to compete.
It is unlikely the GNU/Linux is going to be running their old software either (hence they are "developing a new system" for deployment by Q2 2004), although they may be able to reuse some code. However, coming from a mainframe environment to a Linux environment doesn't really imply that they will be able to reuse much more code than they would have had they chosen Windows instead.
However, given Microsoft's incessant moving targets, incompatible windows releases, forced upgrade paths, forced obsolescence, licensing limitations and costs, and labor intensive administrative and maintenance requirements, stealth DRM and backdoor technologies, and woeful security record, it is unsurprising that governments are chosing Linux over Windows.
Microsoft themselves have said they are focusing the bulk of their efforts on combating the adoption of Linux in government ($CO is but a sideshow of this effort... the real movers and shakers are flying to Munich, or having the president of Peru come crawling to them in Redmond, and paying bribes...excuse me, campaign contributions... to keep Linux deployment at bay).
It is quite telling that despite all of these efforts on the part of Redmond the stream of countries dumping Windows as well as older mainframe and *NIX platforms in favor of Linux and other free software efforts (FreeBSD, etc.) is quickly becoming a torrent and shows every sign of escaliting into a flood.
Don't kid yourself. Wins like this are big for Linux adoption, and they are a huge blow to the monopolists of Redmond.
Slashdot Mirror
The United States is dying to lose it's share of the world economy. All this innovation by litagation only hampers real technology growth and invention. You'll see other nations like China rise more quickly than they would have since the USA is busy trying to run itself into the ground while making quatertly profits go up 1%. It's a lot easier to hit a nonmoving target. All China has to do is play catch up in that case.
... which yields higher stock value, or reinvested, which yields future growth).
... millions are impoverished (their tools are taken away), thousands are told it has become illegal for them to share their hard work with one another, and the pockets of a few oligarchs, monopolists, and their attorney's are lined with the blood, sweat, and tears of their victims (exchanged for US dollars at a great exchange rate ... for the monopolists).
... until congress passed a 19-year cap on airplane manufacturer liability, at which point airplanes began to be built again (albeit sold at three or four times what their market price would be otherwise, simply to underwrite 19 years of liability!). Now add so-called 'intellectual property' to the mix, in the form of copyrights and, more harmfully by far, patents, and you have the ultimate negative-sum game: make the hard work of others illegal, eliminate all competition, and benefit yourself. B. Gates has played this game for years, holding the technology and the industry back a good fifteen years or longer and wiping out vastly better products in the process. He, and his company Microsoft, have cut a swath of destruction across the industry, from Silocon Valley to Tokyo. Not through fair or just competition, not by offering a superior product (as anyone who has ever used Windows and compared it with another product, be it GNU/Linux, Mac OS X, FreeBSD, or what have you will attest), but through misinformation, deceit, copyright violations (and even real-world, physical theft of competitor's software, for which they have been convicted in more than one country), an abuse of their monopoly position (for which they have been convicted, but remain unpunished, in America), and now, finally, through the most appalling abuse of the already broken American legal system we have seen for quite some time, they are for the first time going to start using their patent portfolio to destroy that which they could not otherwise conquer.
It is even simpler than that.
Lawsuits, even the most just and justifiable kind, are ultimately negative-sum games for those who play. Wealth is lost to both parties, regardless of the outcome, as it is absorbed in legal costs and attorney's fees (rather than paid out as dividends
Litigation of this nature is particularly heinous, as it is extremenly negative sum
America has been playing this sort of negative-sum game with itself for quite some time. It destroyed the aviation industry to the point where the manufacturers of small aircraft stopped building small airplanes for a time
This isn't the end of Linux, of free software, or of open source. It is the end of American preeminence in the software industry, and frankly, this country has earned exactly this sort of ignoble end to its dominance in the field, both through the appalling policies of washington that have done everything to destroy and dismantal the digital progress of the last decade, and the apathy of its people, including you and I, to allow such a disgustingly corrupt and wicked government to move forward with its agenda unchecked, unquestioned, and uncriticized.
Enough!
Either we get off our butts and get involed politically, or we shut up and accept our places back on the couch, our creativity outlawed and our voices silenced, once again absorbing the opinions and attitudes so graciously provided by our betters via the traditional media in mindless, drooling silence.
Magnetic stripe readers are now quite common and could be installed on public terminals at minimal expense. Probably the most significant barrier to their widespread adoption is the lack of standard protocols and software packages.
... something a number of PCs, USB printers, etc. already provide, and something public terminals could add at minimal expense.
USB is even more ubiquitous. Almost all (if not in fact all) new hardware comes with USB, and all modern operating systems support it. It is cross platform, accessible to GNU/Linux, OS X, and even that other obscure operating system from Redmond, WA.
Banks have to provide their customers with credit cards anyway. Why not a small memory chip, insertable into any USB card reader? Indeed, if they use an already widespread standard, the only cost will be installing the actual USB readers
No need to rewrite any software, other than the authentication routines at the server end.
The BSD's legal trouble in the 1990's helped Linux gain popularity at BSD's expense. Now it may be time for the enterprise to remember BSD can do everything Linux can do -- sometimes better!
The BSD zealots need to get a grip. There is absolutely nothing prevento SCO (or anyone else) from accusing BSD of having incorporated their code into the codebase and making precisely the same baseless accusations and FUD against *BSD that they are currently making against Linux.
Nothing.
The earlier court case you cite dealt with AT&T code at that time, which was subsequently removed from the BSD codebase. BSD got off on those minor infractions because AT&T had appropriated huge amounts of BSD code and was guilty of copyright violation in turn.
The cross-licensing that resulted from this legal battle applied to AT&T UNIX at that time, not the subsequent releases of System V which SCO is falsely claiming Linux has infringed upon.
There is therefor nothing at all preventing SCO from making exactly these same sort of accusations against *BSD, and indeed Darl et. al. have already made preliminary noises in that direction.
So those of you zealously screaming "BSD is immune" are not only spewing nonsense, you'd better hope and pray to whatever deieties you believe in (if any) that Linux does not loose on this one, because your favorite platform is almost certainly next on the list.
In any case, i've met a lot of geeks that will believe any old bullshit (atkins has really taken hold in the geek community for some reason, for example)
... who are arguably quacks of the highest order.
... certainly the theories that there are have yet to be rigorously tested. High-carb foods didn't become common until after the advent of modern agriculture, some 8-10 thousand years ago, so it really isn't unreasonable to find that our metabolisms aren't terribly well adapted to processing it. 10,000 years is nothing compared to 3,000,000, so we propbably have a while yet before our bodies evolve into more effecient processors of high-carb diets than low-carb diets.
OK, now it is my turn to call bullshit.
As much as I have always despised 'diets de jour', Atkins was preaching his take on this for 30 odd years, much to his own personal and professional derision. However, in recent years scientific studies have finally been conducted to validate or refute his findings, and in every case have validated his approach.
Now there is plenty of innuendo suggesting 'long term health effects' that are bad, but no solid studies have been performed, and the claim that the atkins diet does in fact lead to dramatic weight loss has been demonstrated and is no longer disputed even by its detractors.
OTOH we do have emperical evidence of the ill health effects of the low fat, high carb diets that dieticians have been foisting upon us over the last two decades: America has never been as obese, or as unhealthy, as it is today. Specific causes are uncertain (correlation does not prove causation, it really can only suggest it, and even then not always), but it is clear that as the American diet has embraced and increased its consumption of low-fat, high-carb products the populace has grown vastly more obese and unhealthy.
So we have only three ways of losing weight in a reaonably healthy manner: burn more calories, consume less calories, or go into ketosis by dropping your carb intake dramatically. 'Low Fat' doesn't do shit for anyone except peddlers of 'low fat' foods and diets
In any event, calling atkins "any old bullshit" flies in the face of numerous studies and, most importantly, the very real and reproducable effect it has on people's weight.
I actually did the Atkins thing, not out of any personal interest (as I said, I've always despised 'diets de jour'), but to be supportive of my girlfriend who was doing it.
I did not expect it to work and had zero faith in the approach.
After losing 45 pounds and having my waiste size shring by 6 inches I had to eat a little crow and admit that, emperically, the damn thing worked, and worked dramatically. Having my blood pressure go from marginally high to marginally low, and my cholesterol go from Very High to Medium-Low in four short months made me a believer...whatever 'long term health effects' there might be (and who knows, even pseudo-scientific innuendo can be right on occasion), the immediate health effects were dramatic and extremely positive.
However, unlike religion, I buy into the Atkins approach (though I'm no longer on the diet) because of verifiable, reproducable results.
As I said, it is possible there may be health issues with eating low-carb diets over the long term, but that certainly isn't proven, and no real long term studies have yet been done (though plenty of allegations have been made, by the same people who were pushing the low-fat, high carb disaster upon us the last several decades).
Indeed, Given that we evolved for most of our 3 million years as primates eating exactly that kind of diet, it is quite possible, perhaps even likely, that there are no such health risks
In a way it is a pity Atkins has become popular (among geeks as well as anyone else), as I absolutely hate doing anything that smacks of 'trendy,' but the simple fact is that, unlike low-fat, high-carb diets that are supposed to make you healthy and don'
...I must say your argument is utter hogwash. It is merely the "if you have nothing to hide, why do you care about privacy" strawman dressed up in different clothes.
How is it privacy infringement? You're doing something illegal (copyright infringement), you are then caught, and you are then identified. Is their a reasonable expectation of privacy when transmitting your IP address to millions of other users when using Kaazaa? Hardly.
How is it privacy infringement? You're doing something illegal (conducting illegal business on the telephone), you are then caught, and you are then identified. Is their [sic] a reasonable expectation of privacy when you are talking on the telephone on a switchboard of millions of other citizens while talking? Hardly.
One reasonably expects one's communications to be private, whether it is by mail, telephone, or internet. Even large private meetings (private business teleconferences, etc.) have a reasonable expectation of privacy. The internet is really no different, and were lawmakers and the law at all sane ISPs would have the same common carrier status afforded the Bells.
You want to arrest someone for doing something illegal on the internet? Fine. Get your subpeana, go through the standard wiretapping process (complete with court order, etc.) and then invade someone's privacy as part of an official investigation by law enforcement who are held accountable to the public.
Do not allow private corporations and their lawyers to simply invade one's electronic home and communications at will, bypassing the entire intent and letter of the reasonable search and seizure clause of the constitution, and accountable only to their own shareholders. Or, if you do advocate such obscenely undemocratic violations of people's basic civil rights to due process and privacy, do not expect any legitimacy or sympathy from the rest of us, regardless of how despicable the actions were of those you are trampling over the constitution to get.
Next you'll be arguing the police should put cameras in our homes or listen in on every phone call, simply because somewhere out there there is a dirty old man molesting a child or someone contracting a murder for hire.
"Do it for the children! Stop Crime!"
What you suggest is the digital equivelent of a camera in every home and a wiretap on every phone, and it has no place whatsoever in a free society irrespective of what crimes a few idiots (or a billion idiots) may be committing.
Constitutional safeguards and legal procedure is there for a very important reason: to afford all of us protections regardless of our guilt or innocence. A damn good thing, too, as with the current laws on the books every single one of us is guilty of breaking some law, somewhere, nearly each and every day we get out of bed. Want private thugs in pin stripe suits enforcing all those laws against you, and breaking down your door to do so?
No?
Then stop advocating unconstitutional and draconian behavior, merely because the target of your particular ire threatens your outdated business models, or offends your notions of right and wrong. Because I guarantee you, somewhere, sometimes, you are offending someone else's notion of right and wrong, and once you open up that door you too will be on the wrong end of someone else's personal or business "enforcement action," and civil government accountable to the people will have been replaced by corporate, plutocratic fascism accountable to only a few CEOs and shareholders as they trample over the rest of us.
ARGH!!
Aplogies.
I accidentally posted this twice (not sure what Mozilla did to allow that, given that this was a revision and the other should never have been posted).
I see you were modded Troll. If only moderation were like on K5, we wouldn't fall prey to stupid moderators who don't recognise sarcasm even when tagged as so.
... which, once again, supports the notion that democracy does in fact require faith in the system to function.
Indeed.
As for the legal system, there is no wonder it breaks when you have no faith in it. Faith is required to get something to work, so obviously something more than just the system is broken. Blaiming the system is childish and naive.
Nonsense.
There are plenty of systems that require no faith whatsoever to function, and the justice system is one such. As a point if fact, it is functioning despite widespread lack of faith in it...it just isn't functioning for the people it was ostensibly built to serve, but rather for the lawyers that populate and run it. So lack of faith isn't really interfering it its functioning at all, per se, it is merely a reflection of who the current legal system is serving, and who it is not.
One could argue that democracy requires faith to function, but that presupposes that one must have faith before one casts his or her vote. While that may be true for many, it certainly is not for me.
I haven't had faith in our democracy since Reagan's War on Drugs in the 1980s and the requirement that I urinate for my employer or lose my summer job (I passed all the screenings, but I'll never forget that invasion of my privacy for as long as I live), with Edwin Meese and his fascist cronies cheering from the White House. Nevertheless, despite this complete lack of faith in our democratic institutions, which I strongly suspect are corrupt beyond all hope of reform, I stubbornly continue to cast my vote and watch my candidate lose election after election.
Why?
Because it is my civil duty to do so, just as it is my civil duty to serve jury duty every so often (which I have done twice now). If our democracy is truly failing and beyond all hope of repair, it isn't going to be so because of my lack of participation. So, while I have no faith in the system, I participate anyway.
Unfortunately, statistics on voter turnout suggest I am a tiny minority, and that most of the silent majority that has lost faith in the process don't bother to vote and all, and thereby have become a large part of the problem which is making the system so ineffectual
Be that as it may, the misnamed justice system (which has devolved into merely a legal system and a forum for litigious sophism) doesn't require any faith whatsoever to function, merely the presence of a well armed police force prepared to back up their decisions with force of arms.
So, much as you may like to call me childish and suggest that my lack of faith is somehow responsible for the widespread corruption and disconnect between the legal system's mechanations and the notions of what constitutes justice that most people commonly hold, the fact of the matter is that the devolution of our legal system and the corruption that infests it and our other branches of government has absolutely nothing to do with my lack of faith, or the lack of faith of millions of others, and everything to do with the behavior and ethical failings of those who make up that system, the vast, vast majority of whom are lawyers working to serve other lawyers first and foremost, the clients of those lawyers second, and the American people last.
I used to be 50 pounds heavier, and can attest than switching from pop to water (or at least to sugar free pop) will get you 2 or 3 pounds.
... however, if you keep your carb count under control (without being fascist about it) and eat like you're 40 pounds lighter (i.e. decrease the quantity you consume modestly) you will only spike a few pounds (~5 lbs or so) and then stabilize.
... if you walk a few miles a day (I do: to and from work) and eat right you can be reasonably fit with no discomfort and no submission to the Jock Ueber Alles (tm) mentality of western culture in the form of glorified, pay-to-torment-yourself 'fitness' clubs.
Cut potato chips out of your diet and you'll drop another 5-10 pounds.
Go on the Atkins diet, and you'll dump a huge amount of weight in a short time (I dropped 40 pounds with absolutely no effort whatsoever). Be advised that once you go off the diet you will spike back up
All of this works with no other lifestyle changes, no workout regimes, no uncomfortable sweating at the gym or smashing your joints jogging along the smog-congested streats of your city.
Which of course means you don't lose any time available for hacking out new code, surfing pr0n, doing machinima or blender applications, writing, or what have you.
(Of course, that means you have just as much time to work, as well).
I detest sports and am not overly fond of any form of uncomfortable work out. Luckily working out isn't a requirement for good health or fitness
Unless of course spandex is your fetish, in which case the multi-hundred dollar membership to your local fitness club or spa may be worth it to you.
I used to be 50 pounds heavier, and can attest than switching from pop to water (or at least to sugar free pop) will get you 2 or 3 pounds.
... however, if you keep your carb count under control (without being fascist about it) and eat like you're 40 pounds lighter (i.e. decrease the quantity you consume modestly) you will only spike a few pounds (~5 lbs or so) and then stabilize.
... if you walk a few miles a day (I do: to and from work) and eat right you can be reasonably fit with no discomfort and no submission to the Jock Ueber Alles (tm) mentality of western culture in the form of glorified, pay-to-torment-yourself 'fitness' clubs.
Cut potato chips out of your diet and you'll drop another 5-10 pounds.
Go on the atkins diet, and you'll dump a huge amount of weight in a short time (I dropped 40 pounds with absolutely no effort whatsoever). Be advised that once you go off the diet you will spike back up
All of this works with no other lifestyle changes, no workout regimes, no uncomfortable sweating at the gym or smashing your joints jogging along the smog-congested streats of your city.
Which of course means you don't lose any time available for hacking out new code, surfing pr0n, doing machinima or blender applications, writing, or what have you.
(Of course, that means you have just as much time to work, as well).
I detest sports and am not overly fond of any form of work out that does not involve intimate physical relations. Luckily working out isn't a requirement for good health or fitness
Unless of course spandex is your fetish, in which case the multi-hundred dollar membership to your local fitness club or spa may be worth it to you.
I just have not been able to bring my question in a clearer light.
For one, the user had no idea that this was the case and therefore in all fairness should have another alternative.
Indeed they do. For SCO to collect any damages whatsoever they MUST show the offendor what code is in violation, so that the offendor has an opportunity to cease and desist in the infringement.
Failure to do so, as SCO has done, constitutes "dirty hands" and means they are entitled to absolutely zero damages under the law.
Can the end user then avoid litigation by simply foregoing the SCO code? As far as I know, SCO have been mum about this, but they have mentioned somewhere to the effect that if someone were to go and try to remove tainted portions, you would get kernel 2.2. I think the statment refers to the fact that the code in question is now integrated with the kernel and eliminating it will be difficult. They do not mean it to be an alternative to litigation or buying a license.
They don't have a choice, by law. At some point they either put up or shut up. However, since all of the allegations have been public PR, and none of them present in any court filings, the point is moot. They can scream and threaten, but until they show the world what the offending code is and provide an opportunity for one to cease infringement, they have absolutely no claim and no right to any damages, from anyone.
Once they make the allegation official, and provide evidence of the allegation, it is a simple matter to remove the offending code (or refute the allegation, if, as would likely be the case in such a scenerio, the Linux code were written first and added to SCO later, i.e. SCO is the pirate, not Linux, or the code came from IBM and was contributed to AIX and Linux, which might be a violation of IBM's license with SCO (but again, probably not) but is certainly not a violatino of copyright, given that IBM owns the copyright to the code they have written).
Obviously this assumes there is infringing code lurking in the kernel, which is extraordinarilly unlikely.
I have always been a bit patriotic. Honorably discharged from the US Air Force and all. It pains me to see how patheticly inept the US legal system really is.
The system works.
It is the best in the world.
We are a shining beacon of justice to humanity.
As we recall, when we demonstrated to the world how perfectly the American legal system works, showing the rest of humanity once again How to Live Properly(tm, Bush & Co.) with the historical supreme court ruled that a Florida recount really wasn't necessary through the most convulated and strained logic quite possibly ever set to paper and handed the presidency to a man most of the world correctly recognizes as not having been elected by the American People (but "it was a victory for democracy" quoth the spinmeisters).
America has the best system in the world. I know. I saw it on TV.
[/sarcasm]
The legal system in America is so broken, and in such disrepute among the common man, that even my republican voting mother has absolutely no faith in it. As a liberal voter on the other end of the spectrum I share her lack of confidence in that system fully, as does everyone I know or have spoken with, a couple of attorneys and one retired judge excepted.
So how can we be sure about this? I would like to know more. Are you predicting a legal path given that the extraordinary circumstances are true? Do you have an example of a case settled in this manner?
I think you misunderstand.
Virtually every (if not in fact every) copyright case has been settled in this manner: the copyright holder has the right to require anyone copying their work to adhere to their license, which can be quite restrictive (in contrast to the GPL) and anyone so copying the product is required to adhere to that license or forego copying the product. Since copying is required to use software (i.e. it must be downloaded, copied to disk, copied to memory, etc.), any use of GPLed software requires adherence to the GPL. Ditto for any SCO software and associationed SCO license.
When I say the 'GPL wins', I mean that:
1) a user cannot mix the two incompatible licenses (and code) together: they must by law forego one or othe other (or use them independently of one another, not as one combined product).
2) Foregoing SCO code is a lot easier than forgoing Linux code if one is running a GNU/Linux system. Whatever code Caldera contributed and may now be trying to rescind, or whatever system V (non-BSD) code is in the linux kernel (almost certainly NONE, but for argument's sake lets pretend it is >0 lines), is going to by a tiny fraction of the overall kernel. To have a working kernel an end user will find it far easier to remove the offending SCO code (if any, again, probably there is none) than to start with the few hypothetical code fragments SCO might lay claim to and build a working kernel from that.
Ergo, any sane end user sticking with Linux will chose to forego the SCO code and license in favor of the GPLed code and license. I.e. 'the GPL wins.'
I did not mean that the SCO license would be eradicated by the GPL necessarilly, although given SCO's behavior in distributing the Linux kernel up through this moment (and continuing to do so in knowing and willful violation of the GPL if it does in fact contain SCO code they are unwilling to license under the GPL) that could very well happen (assuming there is any SCO code in the kernel).
Most likely there is no SCO code in the Linux kernel, and SCO is not violating the GPL by distributing it. If they do distribute binaries only they will be in violation, but technically shaking people down for unnecessary licensing fees is, while certainly fraudulant and perhaps illegal, quite possibly not a GPL violation if in fact they distribute the code with any binaries.
It is a fine line they are walking, and one that will almost certainly destroy them in the end. But, as this is clearly a stock scam and not a long term business strategy, I doubt they really care.
You are wrong on so many counts one is forced to wonder if you aren't an astroturfer for SCO, or one of their underwriters such as Sun Microsystems or Microsoft, or just woefully uninformed.
First, the fact that SCO still has a Linux dist. on their FTP server is not evidence of anything.
Wrong. It is evidence of the 'smoking gun' variety that they are doing one of the following
1) Legally distributing GPLed code
a) any Caldera contributed code is likewise GPLed and legal
b) Either there is no misappropriated code present or they have implicitly chosen to GPL it.
2) SCO is willfully and knowingly violating copyright, as violating the GPL (or disregarding it) means that regular copyright law applies, and they have no right to distribute any code but that which they wrote (which excludes virtually everything except that contributed by Caldera, if anything).
Either way, it is certainly evidence of 'something.'
The end users are in no way bound by the GPL, they are just in violation of SCO's copyright.
The end users most certainly are bound by copyright law, and are thus not permitted by default to download (ie. 'copy'), much less use the software in question unless they adhere to the GPL. Therefor, end users are REQUIRED by law to adhere to the GPL if they make any use of the software (including the Linux kernel itself). This includes SCO and anyone else.
Understanding that point, SCO is free to license their SysV code to linux users. Linux users are free to use it.
Yes, but in the extraordinarilly unlikely event that there is SCO code in Linux, users are NOT permitted to violate the GPL OR SCO's license. The two are incompatible, so the user in question must chose to adhere to one or the other (guess which one wins? Yup, the GPL, as SCO's contribution, if any, won't a working kernel make).
IBM is potentially in bad shape, legally and in damages. Of course, this is all assuming that their is merit to SCO's claim that their code was placed in Linux.
The world is in dire straights, assuming the claims of Osama bin Laden and your local suicide cult have merit. The fact of the matter is that SCO consistently provides absolutely no evidence of any of their claims, and has continued to do so for months, while the Linux development process has been in contrast very transparent and well documented. You have more chance of being right by joining the local suicide cult than you do by suggesting these fraudulant attorneys have any shred of legitimacy in their arguments. Indeed, the court filing papers underscore just how lacking their case really is, and how empty their bellecose assertions vis-a-vis Linux copyright really are.
That really isn't important. Even if SCO were 100% correct, they themselves would be willfully guilty of copyright violation, and while everyone might have to switch to FreeBSD from Linux (unlikely in the extreme), SCO would be buried under copyright suits of their own, and will not stay in business regardless. Their day is over, they have become little more than stooges for Sun Microsystems and Microsoft, and their passing is loud, noise, and annoying, but ultimately of little lasting interest. They do not own the copyright on Linux, they have no legal basis to license code they do not own, and once this stock bubble collapses there is a very real liklihood that most of their leadership will be in court, quite possibly followed by prison.
Litigation is inherently a negative sum game. The players litigate, one takes a portion of money from the other (or not), and a percentage (usually 30% or more) is pocketed by the attorney.
Even in the most just and reasonable situations, in which one person is truly injured by another and deserves compensation, the litigation involved decreases the overall pie available to the two principles (remember, that ambulance chaser is getting a third of the money).
When it comes to vastly more insidious things like patent and copyright law, wealth is destroyed for millions simply to line the pockets of a few, with the overall pie shrunk by orders of magnitude just so a few can reap a little more money than the free market would entitle them to.
This is simply the logical extention: get a patent on a business method and eradicate all competition by enforcing the patent. Increase your own wealth modestly (or immodestly) by destroying vastly greater sums of wealth that others might, through their innovation, enjoy.
Patents (and to some degree copyright) are antithetical to free markets and the competition required for capitalism to function in any real sense, and business / software patents are certainly the most offensive of the lot.
Make no mistake about it. The United States, through its litigiousness, is playing a negative sum game with itself, and the only end result of this nonsense is that the entire American pie shrinks and shrinks and shrinks, until there is little or nothing left and the entire nation, intellectual property attorneys excepted, is impoverished. And once the entire economic system collapses, as it surely will if competition is eradicated in such a manner, even they will be joining the rest of the starving masses in the street.
It is an ugly future, one which our attorney dominated policy makers and judiciary have created for us, and one which almost all of us are certain to live to see reach its logical conclusion.
You are right. It is going to get very, very nasty. Indeed, if patents aren't severely curtailed or banned outright (business model and software patents in particular), and copyright rolled back and restrained to its historical role, American capitalism is likely to experience much the same catastrophic failure that communism did, growing ever more ineffecient as ever more monopolies take over ever more once-competative markets. Opportunity is already decreasing, and the curve will accelerate, until there is little left for any but a few priveleged.
We have lawyers, litigiousness, but most of all, patent law made by, of, and for patent attorneys to thank for this appalling mess. Don't expect it to get any better anytime soon, if ever.
Or you can watch the BBC news at a more reasonable hour on BBC America, which is offered, frequently in the low or moderate priced packages most people with premium TV service have, by just about every cable/sat provider out there.
I do not have statistics to confirm or refute your assertion that BBCA is offered by those cable companies offering service to "most people", but I can tell you that RCN cable, which serves much of downtown Chicago (where I live) does not offer BBCA, nor have I ever seen it offered in any of the other, smaller communities in which I've lived over the years by the monopolies that service those communities.
Perhaps it is available widely in New York, LA, portions of Chicago, and various other markets, but clearly a large segment of the country, including a large portion of its 3rd largest city, do not have a cable company that offers it.
Which IMHO is a crying shame, as there is precious little quality television and the BBC habitually excells at bringing quality stuff to the airwaves.
Ask a Star Wars fan about how Han Solo made a voyage in however many parsecs and prepare to boggle at the convoluted thought process behind the explanation.
... an explaination that happens to be true.
I am not a Star Wars fan at all (though I used to be a casual enjoyer of the movies, before episodes I and II), but this point isn't as convulated or silly as you may think.
Remember Einstein's equation: e=m (more commonly known as e=mc^2)? You can drop the c^2 if you chose your units to be such that c=1, meaning that the speed of light is little more than a constant that converts between two sets of units that essentially measure the same thing. Indeed, physcicists have proposed that we adopt more natural units that clarify this relationship.
Distance and time are likewise the same thing (as becomes apparent when dealing with general relativity).
You could measure time in units that describe how far light travels in a given period of time. While saying "just give me 300,000 kilometers, I'll be right with you" is a little more verbose the "just give me a second," the two are, in terms of physics, identical. Alternatively, you could say something is about a nanosecond distant, i.e. that object is one light-nanosecond away from your current position.
The fact that we didn't understand the relationships between space and time, nor that between energy and mass, is why we've ended up with two essentially incompatible units for each (meters vs. seconds, grams vs. Joules) which make the e=m relationship, and the distance vs. time relationship, appear more complex than they actually are.
So, saying one made a trip in x parsecs (which is silly sounding and undoubtably resulted from George Lucas not knowing a thing about physics or the units he was tossing about) isn't really as silly as one would think.
What is silly is that we still have different units for distance vs. time, and mass vs. energy, when in each case they are one and the same.
There, now you've read a 'convuluted' explaination by someone who hates what Star Wars has become and was never a very ardent fan
Every time when I read articles such as these I wonder: why oh why do Democrats in the USA have such a hard time selling the truth to the public? I mean: the current Bush administration has piled misleading and disputable decision on decision, and the American public seems to feel it is all right. How come? Why aren't the Democrats using these obvious limitations on the freedoms of the American citizens to rally the public so they'll support the Democrats and elect a better government in place which will overturn such decisions like a concentration of media companies?
... these being the same people who relish the opportunity to bash Hilary and slam President Clinton. In other words, Bush seems to be losing a fair chunk of moderate-to-conservative, but non-religious right, republicans).
... and most people never realize it!
Because we don't get the news here.
Seriously.
Or, to be more precise, the main networks and popular media outlets have filtered the foreign and domestic news beyond all recognition.
Why? Not because they harbor some pro-Bush bias (although clearly some, such as Fox news, do), but because they all compete in a market for viewership, and several factors coincide to make the media self censoring and self-slanting, including the desire to cozy up to the administration in order to get and maintain access to the white house (which the Bush administration exploits and enforces shamelessly and aggressively...witness seasoned reporters who have been in the whitehouse for 20 years or more being relegated to back seats behind neophytes for posing difficult questions in White House press conferences and subsequently being ignored by the press secretary/president/etc.) and the desire to maintain popularity with a public they perceive as supporting the president.
The latter is an assumption that is quite possibly mistaken, if the conservatives I work with are any indication (most of whome are saying rather loudly that Bush has gone to far and things are spirallying out of control
Back on topic, the news we get in the United States is NOTHING like the news you get overseas. Our information is so sanitized and slanted that you would probably not recognize the same events if you saw them reported here. This was driven home rather forcefully the other night when I was at my girlfriend's watching the BBC news on PBS at 10:00pm, and for the first time saw footage of injured soldiers and Iraqis, and heard first hand just what an appalling quagmire this administration's precipitious invasion has put us into. Contrasting that with Fox or CNN (modulo the editorializing there is little difference of late) is like night and day.
So, while we aren't forbidden from getting foreign news sources per se (the Internet is available, after all, and the BBC is available once/day at 10:00PM), we are discouraged in that the BBC is shown at a time when it must compete against most of the local news broadcasts, on a station few bother to watch (more's the pity), and that virtually every mainstream press to which people have subscribed for the bulk of their lives is heavilly censored and sanitized
It is incredibly discouraging to be an American at a time like this, when our country appears to be spiralling full steam into a state of plutocratic fascism, the FCC has gutted and destroyed our telecom industry, crippled our internet industry, and is hell bent on consolidating our remaining media into a few easilly-influenced mega-companies, perhaps even into a single monopoly. The freedom I grew up with has dissappeared bit by bit ever since the Reagan era in the 1980s, and while more people are becoming aware of it today, still there are too few of us, and too many who simply toe the party line or bury their head in the sand in a frenzy of misplaced national pride, and things continue to spiral downward and get worse.
Perhaps this years record deficit of 450+ Billion dollars, beneath a Republican President and
Given Microsoft's record of continual failure with regards to security, I've always thought putting MS in charge of security (as with Palladium) was like asking the wolf to guard the sheep.
Given that 'homeland security' is really a euphemism for something between 'Big Brother' ("total informational awareness" etc.) and 'Political Police', I for one am relieved they are sufficiently incompetent to select Microsoft as their platform. This may, and I stress may, slow down our slide into a complete surveillance society submerged beneath ubiquitous governance.
Or not, as it may be just the prelude needed for even more draconian legislation and public hysteria when Microsoft's chronic security issues begin to affect our perceived safety, leading to the unpleasant irony of having the technical ability to monitor and ubiquitously govern every man, woman, child, dog, cat, and garden slug in the country diminished while providing the political excuse for accelerating legislation through congress that makes the former pre-Gorbochov soviet parliament look positively liberal by comparison.
What we do know for certain is that it puts a lot of money in the pockets of a convicted monopolist, which isn't helpful to anyone (other than said monopolist).
I checked the site, and I couldn't find any mention of handwriting recognition.
There are handwriting recognition programs available for Linux, including several under the GPL, but you are correct that the Lycoris website, which does have a "keyboard free" section, only seems to mention a software keyboard (xvkdb perhaps?) and not handwriting recognition as such. I too would be interested in a clarification of this, although I suspect the virtual software keyboard is the only form on 'keyboard free' input available at the moment (it is what we use on our GNU/Linux tablets as well).
A more important question for me, as an administrator who works for a firm that deploys several dozen GNU/Linux tablets (Fujitsu Stylistic 3400s and LPT-600s at present) is, do they have a list of supported tablets and are the latest Fujitsus on that list? Such a list would be invaluable when it comes to evaluating new hardware, and if their distro is as good and seemless as they make it sound, we would certainly buy a copy for consideration.
Alas, their website seems to be very lacking in that information as well. Hopefully someone from Lycoris is reading this thread and can comment and/or update the information on their web page.
Um while I agree with your statemnts (for the most part) I must point out that mp3.com is now owned by a record label and not the independant music site of it's hayday...
Very true, which was why I said "...non-traditional channels such as mp3.com once was..."
A lot of times, the label is putting a fair chunk of change into promoting the tour, booking the appropriate venues, and getting things done in general. I could see a decent tour costing the same as producing a CD, if not more when they go multinational.
Um, no.
The record label is putting a great deal of the Band's future earnings into promoting the band, mostly in promoting their CD sales, of which the band will receive $0.25-$0.50 per copy. Any promotion of the band, be it their CDs (the bulk of the promotion) or their tour is all charged to the band. In the end the recording companies, while taking the Lion's share of the CD profits (and now, soon, the touring profits as well), pays absolutely squat for promotion.
Hopefully this new development will encourage more bands to avoid the clutches of the recording industry and market direct, or use non-traditional channels such as mp3.com once was to reach their audiences. With luck this final act of hubris will be enough to kill those parisites dead, something that would be very good for artists and fans alike.
Why are they running Windows? In all seriousness, why not Linux or something else? If they run Windows, then the must pay MS money for every console they make.
GNU/Linux wouldn't work, as a key component of their business plan (and probably a key component of their spectacular failure) is crippling their hardware through DRM encryption. Assuming a kernel driver is needed to access the hardware, and that they don't want to force users to compile the kernel upon purchasing tha machine (i.e. assuming a binary distribution of the kernel), they would have to provide sources to their driver, thereby revealing the 'secret' of their DRM technology. As much of the DRM technology involves 'security through obscurity' snakeoil, they aren't about to do this. (Remember, a binary-only driver taints the kernel, and IIRC you cannot ship a precompiled, tainted kernel).
OTOH they could use FreeBSD and release as many internally hacked, proprietary versions as they like. So while I'm an avid user of Linux (of the Gentoo flavor, personally), Linux would probably be the last choice for a closed, crippled system like this that relies at least in part on secrecy to function. Even if they were to develop their own, in-house, proprietary DRM encryption scheme, they will likely prefer to leverage Microsoft's existing, extensive efforts in crippling their customer's future hardware through DRM rather than have to adopt FreeBSD to the task and do all the work themself.
It is a foolish tradeoff, as FreeBSD offers no competing product, while Microsoft's X-Box is clearly a competitor, making them beholden to a competitor for a key component of their own product. Another reason, in addition to the poor bang/$, crippling DRM, and subscription approach issues, that the product is almost certain to be DOA. Any one of those issues alone would be enough to kill the product, but taken together they make it's liklihood of survival approximately 0%.
Absolutely right!
.012 volts, if the amperage is high enough) can't kill should be held at least in part liable for anyone they mislead into performing an uncautious act that gets them hurt or killed.
People who disseminate the dangerous myth that 120 volts (or even
Like my loser ex-stepfather, who couldn't be bothered to get a switch fixed that he knew to be dangerous.
When I was a kid, we had an intermittent short in the switch to our garbage disposal. If one had their hand on the metal faucet (e.g. turning on the water) and threw the switch at the same time, one could get one hell of a shock. Indeed, I was unconscious from the time I threw the switch to the time I slammed against the wall on the far side of the kitchen. That was how I as a ten year old kid learned that we had a dangerous switch installed.
While 120 volts and tens of amps do not always kill (just as lighting does not always kill), it certainly can, and the question of whether I was unconscious for a second or two, or actually dead but lucky enough that my ten-year-old heart could restart itself (perhaps from the counter shock of having my back slam against a wall) is an interesting question, but either way it was certainly lights-out for a brief period of time.
OTOH I've had tens of thousands of volts pass through my body in one of those low amperage static electricity demonstrations, and other than having my hair stand up on end and a very slight tingle in my fingers all was perfectly well. So you are certainly correct, ohm's law applies and it is amerage (as well as frequency...60 Hz was a really lousy choice from a safety perspective, and 50 Hz is almost as bad), not voltage that defines the lethalness of an electrical jolt.
I'm sure Microsoft wanted them to use their software, but Linux is more likely to win when the competition is another *nix. Microsoft probably couldn't meet the requirements of 'runs old payroll software' or something, no matter how low they could price their software to compete.
... the real movers and shakers are flying to Munich, or having the president of Peru come crawling to them in Redmond, and paying bribes...excuse me, campaign contributions... to keep Linux deployment at bay).
It is unlikely the GNU/Linux is going to be running their old software either (hence they are "developing a new system" for deployment by Q2 2004), although they may be able to reuse some code. However, coming from a mainframe environment to a Linux environment doesn't really imply that they will be able to reuse much more code than they would have had they chosen Windows instead.
However, given Microsoft's incessant moving targets, incompatible windows releases, forced upgrade paths, forced obsolescence, licensing limitations and costs, and labor intensive administrative and maintenance requirements, stealth DRM and backdoor technologies, and woeful security record, it is unsurprising that governments are chosing Linux over Windows.
Microsoft themselves have said they are focusing the bulk of their efforts on combating the adoption of Linux in government ($CO is but a sideshow of this effort
It is quite telling that despite all of these efforts on the part of Redmond the stream of countries dumping Windows as well as older mainframe and *NIX platforms in favor of Linux and other free software efforts (FreeBSD, etc.) is quickly becoming a torrent and shows every sign of escaliting into a flood.
Don't kid yourself. Wins like this are big for Linux adoption, and they are a huge blow to the monopolists of Redmond.
Businesses are supposed to provide products and services, not shove them down our throats. It is our choice what we buy anyway, isn't it?
In Bushland (Amerika), what you buy CHOOSES YOU.