Um, dude? Release candidate. Testing code, not the final product you have to pay for. I don't think it's unreasonable for Microsoft to put an end date on their RC code, and it's probably a good thing to give people plenty of warning that their testing copy's going to stop working (especially when it's going to be a year before that date hits and people'll have lots of time to forget they aren't running the actual released version).
Oh, I'm sure they will. But as I said, this is an area of law with 2 centuries of case law behind it to define exactly where the boundaries are. There's not a lot of wiggle room for the RIAA's lawyers.
And as I keep noting, "when you are served" is not the relevant legal standard. The standard is "when you know, or have reasonable grounds to believe, you will be sued". Being served is just a cut-off point: once you're served it's practically impossible to argue that you didn't know you were being sued. Once you've gotten a letter from their attorneys demanding a settlement it's a good bet the duty's started. Note that whether you're guilty or not is irrelevant, even if you're pure as the driven snow you're obliged to preserve evidence if you think they're going to sue anyway. Yes, even if you know they're going to lose the suit. It's whether you will be sued, not whether they'll win. The duty may begin even earlier, for instance if news of a John Doe suit you'd reasonably fall under hits the papers. In that situation it'll depend on how you acted. If you suddenly did a clean reinstall, wiping out everything, just 3 days after that news broke, a judge will probably look askance at the "coincidence". OTOH, if you can document a power outage affecting your home just before the reinstall and claim that when power came back the drive was corrupted and wouldn't boot and you had to reinstall, the judge may believe you. If you've got additional back-up documentation, eg. an invoice from a local computer-repair place that did the reinstall for you confirming your drive was corrupted plus receipts for the usual range of small software bits you had to re-buy 'cause you didn't have backup copies of them (downloaded stuff like StyleXP, for instance, where it's easier to buy a new copy than recover the keys needed to reinstall the old one) you'll be in an even stronger position. Once you've been contacted directly those excuses don't fly nearly as well. You'll need to show that it wasn't under your control, wasn't reasonably expected and was something that it'd be unreasonable to be taking precautions against. While you may get away with reinstalling over a corrupted drive caused by a power failure before direct contact, for instance, after direct contact the court would expect you to preserve the corrupted drive as evidence it really was corrupted and use a brand-new drive to rebuild your system.
Hence my advice to not create evidence in the first place. Make it policy long before any hint of a lawsuit to wipe your browser history, clear the cache, clear cookies, delete all temporary files etc. at the end of every browsing session. Make it a policy to work only in a VMware virtual machine and to revert the guest image to a standard copy every day. And document a reason for doing this (eg. to eliminate any malware that does get through the anti-virus software and firewall) that doesn't involve legal action of any type. Or better yet, don't do anything that'd leave any evidence you'd need to destroy. The best defense is to not have any trace of illegality on your system in the first place. If you've got a system where the only downloaded content is provably legal (eg. videos and music obtained directly from the creators and paid for if they're asking payment), that's the best defense. And when the RIAA asks for your drives, don't refuse to hand them over completely. Refuse to hand over the originals, certainly, but the counter-offer should be to have 2 forensic images made under the joint supervision of the RIAA's and your expert, one copy going to the RIAA and one to you. The RIAA wins a lot of the hard-drive examination cases because the defendant tries to keep them from getting the drive at all which just annoys the judge. If you go "We're fully willing to produce it for you, but we're not letting you have sole, unsupervised control of the original while it's the only extant copy.", the judge is more likely to agree with you.
In short, treat the judge like the GM in a tabletop role-playing game. If you try to game things to get away with something the rules pretty clearly intend you shouldn't be able to do, expect him to Do Something About It that you'll like even less than not having gotten away with it.
Still won't fly. You're ignoring the 2 centuries of law defining all this. It's not specific to these cases, here we're talking about law applicable to all lawsuits of all types. And the judge doesn't have discretion in how to make the call, courts higher than him (whose rulings he has to follow) have laid down the rules. One of them, for instance, is that the lawsuit begins when the papers are served on the defendant. Not neccesarily when the defendant receives them, but not just when the plaintiff's attorney tries to send them either. And normally service by mail (where there might be a difference) is only allowed once the plaintiff has exhausted all other means of service directly to the defendant or his attorney.
You can get screwed up if your attorney tries to get fancy, but if he treats it as a bog-standard question of service, discovery and duty to preserve evidence with no reference to copyright or Constitutional rights or anything he'll be able to force a predictable outcome simply because this question's been addressed so thoroughly elsewhere.
Note: that outcome will not be one where you get to destroy evidence after any reasonable person would know they've been sued or are about to be sued. The courts have been there, done that, pounded the game-player into the ground up to his ankles the long way. I'll say this: if you're worrying about how to dispose of evidence because you're going to be sued, you've obviously screwed up your planning. The only safe way to destroy evidence is to not create it in the first place, or failing that to destroy it long before there's any hint of a lawsuit in the air and in accordance with a policy that doesn't mention lawsuits or legal action even in passing.
So, this is simply a user account system. You upload items to your user account on the server. How they're stored is determined by the server, see any system (eg. SourceForge) that allows users to upload things but doesn't expose the physical internal storage architecture via the UI. Access to items is determined by authorization data associated with the user account, controlled by the server and the server administrators. If the administrators revoke your account's access to an item, the server won't let you access it.
None of this is new, we've been doing it for decades. Even in the Windows world this goes back as far as NT 3.1. And once you've got this, the rest of their stuff is horribly obvious.
Except that the law, IIRC, says the duty to preserve evidence begins when you know or reasonably believe you will be sued, not when you're served with papers. So if you destroy evidence in the expectation of being served with a lawsuit, you've just breached that duty to preserve and the judge will hammer you for it. And yes, it's written that way exactly to allow the judge to nail people who know they're going to be sued and try to get rid of the evidence before the papers actually arrive.
Technically I believe it's when you know or have good reason to believe you're about to be sued. Once you've been served you definitely fall into the "know" category. Before that... it depends a lot on the circumstances. If you get a letter from their attorney, on office letterhead where it's clear they are an attorney, you'll probably need a really strong argument to convince a judge you didn't have good reason to believe you were going to be sued. Even if you responded with what they wanted and were clearly in the right, a judge would expect you to excercise some prudence and not go trashing evidence until you'd gotten a confirmation from the attorney that they were satisfied or until some reasonable time had gone by without any further communication. If the letter's from some non-attorney yobbo you've never heard of before in your life, and you can show your actions after that point aren't unusual and follow an established normal pattern for you, you're probably in a much stronger position (at least until actual legal papers arrive). If your actions after the communication deviate strongly from your normal pattern (eg. you normally keep e-mail for years, but immediately after an inquiry from someone you start deleting them immediately), a judge is going to look askance at that.
They could, but it's easy to get tripped up. For instance, one of the default settings in Windows XP is to synchronize time to a network time server belonging to Microsoft. If you weren't careful to keep the machine isolated during the install and all patching, you'd end up with a big discrepancy in timestamps as the clock jumped forward to the correct time during the last part of the install process. It'd also show up in the timestamps on patches, they might show as having been installed before they were issued or they'd be all lumped together at the very end when they should've been installed in a steady stream starting at the claimed install date and getting progressively more recent as patches were applied automatically. It might be hard to prove exactly when the drive was wiped, but it'd be easy to show that the fingerprint of the timestamps doesn't match what it'd be if the drive was as old as it claimed to be and had aged at 1 second per second since then.
That depends on whether or not I'm gaining anything from it or not. And I (like a lot of people) don't measure gain only in terms of short-term monetary gain.
It's kind of like the auto-repair commercial: "You can pay me now, or you can pay me later.". I can certainly improve my immediate financial position by neglecting the maintenance on my car. If I skip that oil change and the new filters, I have more cash in my pocket and my car hasn't been affected. Yet. But I don't do that because I know that "Yet." is significant. If I save that money in the short term by neglecting routine maintenance, at some point down the road I'm going to end up paying for some pretty major repairs. Those repairs are going to cost me a lot more than I ever saved on oil changes, not to mention the cost of renting a replacement while my car's in the shop for a few weeks having the engine and transmission rebuilt. So it's in my best interests, financially and otherwise, to accept the extra costs of doing the routine maintenance. It may not give me any immediate benefits, but long-term it's going to cost me less than the alternative.
You said the magic word: reorganization. The reason the US Trustee gave for asking for conversion to Chapter 7 or dismissal was that SCO wasn't making any progress towards reorganizing, they had no reasonable prospects for ever being able to reorganize and turn themselves into a going concern again, and all they were doing was wasting what money they had left to pay creditors with. Chapter 11 isn't intended to be a permanent shield against creditors, and the Trustee is saying SCO isn't supposed to use it as such.
It's a combination of California law (specifically California Business and Professions Code section 16600) and court decisions. The courts ruled that "restrains" doesn't mean "completely prevents", it means "limits in any way", which means if out of 100 possible lawful jobs available to you a non-compete agreement prevents you from taking even one of them it violates 16660.
Myself, I've always disagreed with the "inevitable disclosure" idea. After all, the company that's trying to apply it benefited from it itself. Unless they have a policy of only hiring new grads fresh out of school with no work history, they hired you in the first place because of the things you'd learned at previous jobs that you'd bring along with you. And now that they've benefited from that, they want to prevent anyone else from benefiting as well? Not kosher.
No, he didn't. He found he could rule on summary judgement that SCO owed money, but exactly how much involved questions of fact that he had to defer to the trial. Since he couldn't pin down an amount, he couldn't order a constructive trust until after the trial. And of course SCO filed for bankruptcy the day before the trial was to start. Later the bankruptcy judge unstayed the case as far as determining the amount SCO owed went, and Judge Kimball finally ruled on the matter last August.
Novell did ask during the bankruptcy proceedings to have the money put into a trust, and SCO's attorneys argued that wasn't neccesary. I expect that'll come back to haunt SCO during the Ch.7 proceedings.
At this point, though, the big monster in the room isn't Novell, it's IBM. Novell may be PO'd, but IBM... is Darth Vader back before George turned him into a whiny emo kid.
Why was the CRA a bad idea? It didn't, after all, say banks had to make loans to people who couldn't afford them. What it said was "We've caught you refusing to give loans to certain groups regardless of their ability to repay. And as a society we don't think locking those groups out completely is in our best interests. So, given your proven track record, if you want to refuse to give loans to people in those groups you're going to need to provide written justification pointing out the exact financial basis for the rejection.". Under the rules, the banks could perfectly well refuse to give loans out to people in those groups whose financial situation would make the loans too risky. All they'd have to do is, for instance, write up a report attaching the guy's credit report and noting "He's defaulted on these loans for these amounts in the past 3 years, and we don't make loans to anybody with that record." (backing it up, of course, by showing they indeed didn't make loans to anybody with that kind of record).
When I hear people talking about how that's so unreasonable, I can't help but recall that the banks were in fact caught refusing to give loans to a black man with a certain credit record but were perfectly happy to give that same loan to a white man with the exact same credit record. When you've been caught with your hand in the cookie jar repeatedly, it's not unreasonable for your Mom to start taking steps. When I hear people saying how if the banks can't loan money willy-nilly to anybody they won't loan at all, I can't help but hear the brat in the playground who if he can't have it all his way throws a tantrum and threatens to take all his toys home. I think the term is "does not play well with others".
I worked in Web analytics, so I can speak to this somewhat. One problem with Google Analytics is it depends on Javascript and Web bugs to get it's numbers. Linux users are more likely than others to have things like AdBlock Plus, NoScript, Webmonkey et. al. installed and configured. If the scripts don't run and the Web bug isn't fetched, the Web-analytics firm has no idea the browser's hit the page. The result is systemic undercounting. Oddly, it can be compensated for by log parsing, but few firms actually do that.
To give you an idea of the scale, we can look at cookie-blocking stats. Right now about 17.5% of users block or delete third-party cookies, and about 7.5% block or delete first-party cookies. The nasty part is the "or delete". That's those users who have their browser set to accept cookies but delete them when they close the browser window. That completely hoses Web analytics stats in all kinds of ways.
Yes, but the US also has another policy: you get a credit against US taxes for any foreign income taxes paid on the same income. Essentially you pay only the difference between what you paid in taxes to the country you generated the income in and what you'd owe in US taxes on that income.
What has these companies riled is that they've arranged it so they pay little or no income tax in the country they generate income in, so they can't get much if any credit.
They'll try. They'll be faced with the other side of the equation, though: as prices go up, demand drops. So they'll have to decide how much they can afford to lose in sales.
To me it only seems fair. As a private citizen I don't get out of paying taxes just because my income was outside the US. I have to file and pay taxes on that income, the only thing I get is a credit against US taxes due for the amount of taxes I paid on that income in that foreign country. The corporations are mad because they had a sweet deal going: don't pay US taxes on foreign income, and make a deal to avoid paying foreign taxes on that same income because they're a US company bringing all those jobs to the foreign country. And now Obama's looking to ruin their nice little sweetheart deal.
The problem with frames, from a user standpoint, is that it breaks the URL bar. When you click on a link in a frame, the link's target replaces the contents of that frame. Since the frameset hasn't changed, the URL in the URL bar doesn't change either. That means the URL the users sees doesn't reflect the set of frames displayed on the page. If he bookmarks the page and uses that bookmark later, he gets something completley different from what was there when he left (the frameset returns to the default frame contents when you first arrive, not the set of new pages that were in it when he left).
This isn't an unsolvable problem, it just requires work by the Web designer. Rather than having pages containing only frame content and having links in frames replace the frame contents, the designer needs to design each page to include the frameset and have links replace the entire frameset. Some of the frames on the new page will of course have the same content as on the previous page, eg. side menus. That style doesn't break the URL bar.
Note that the article isn't talking about the use of frames to construct a Web site. It's describing the practice of using frames to embed entire pages from another Web site inside a frame on a page of the framer's Web site.
You can see the difference if you look at the URLs. If you go to http://www.slashdot.org/, you'll see Slashdot's page with that URL in the URL bar. But imagine going to http://www.silverglass.org/slashdot/ and seeing Slashdot's page with a Silverglass Tech title at the top and a silverglass.org URL in the URL bar. That's framing: I'm constructing a page with two frames in it, my title bar at the top and the lower frame loading the entire Slashdot page. And unless Slashdot does some special coding of their links (to force them to replace the entire page rather than simply loading wherever they are), you'll never see that you're not at slashdot.org. I can even probably play Javascript games to rewrite all the URLs on the Slashdot pages to translate "${x}.slashdot.org" to "www.silverglass.org/slashdot/${x}" in links.
You start to see how evil it can get.
Oh, and your #include tag? That's what a frame is, and what it's supposed to be used for.
Communistic? The GPL? I don't know, I don't think you can get more communistic than the view that code other people develop should be handed over to you for your benefit just because you "need" it. Those of us who favor the GPL take a more capitalistic view: if you want something I created, you're going to need to give me something of value to me in exchange.
Only in terms of what currency is acceptable to the seller. What, after all, is the difference between a doctor saying "I'll treat you if you'll pay me $100.", or to a farmer "I'll treat you if you'll give me a dozen eggs from your chickens." or a car mechanic "I'll treat you if you'll do a tune-up on my car."?
Wrong, at least in the important aspects. If he hands out complete source with each copy, he doesn't have to give you the source (at least not unless he's giving you a copy of the binaries). But that's also the case where it's trivial for you to get the source, just get a copy of whatever he's selling or talk to someone who has. If he's giving out binaries without accompanying source, then he's distributing under 6b (GPLv3) or 3b (GPLv2) and the license says his written offer extends to any third party. Not just people he gave copies to, any third party who asks. That's because the license allows people who received copies from him to pass along copies non-commercially and the indirect recipients have all the rights under the GPL that direct recipients have including the right to demand the source code. If you ask him for the source and he refuses to give it to you, he's failing to meet the 6b/3b terms of the license and has no license for the copies he's distributed (yes, a court's already ruled that this is the case). He's now in copyright violation territory.
No, the GPL doesn't dictate what you can do with your code. If you seperate your code from any GPL'd code, you can do anything you want with it. And if you combine it with GPL'd code, well, the end result isn't entirely your code anymore.
It's nothing new in business. Most proprietary licenses are the same thing: they'll give you their code only if you give them your money in return. The GPL is the same deal, it's just that the "payment" is in kind instead of cash: I'll give you my code only if you give me your code in return. I fail to see how this is either unfair or difficult to grasp. It's not like we haven't been making this kind of exchange for thousands of years, after all.
The GPL (paragraph 3 in GPLv3, paragraph 6 in GPLv3) says otherwise. You can read the paragraph for yourself here, but to summarize the options it provides:
Provide the source on the same physical media as the binaries.
Provide a written offer, good for at least 3 years from the time of distribution, to provide any third party with the source code (or access to the source code) upon request.
Pass along the written offer you got for the source code. Permitted only for non-commercial redistribution.
Offer access to download the source code from the same place as access to download the binaries is offered.
In all cases, the GPL requires your competitor to make the code available to you or to provide it to you upon request.
So, how can I get a copy of my competitor's source code?
Two ways, which one depends on how your competitor released his source code. If he shipped the source code along with the binaries, or offered it for download alongside the binaries, then you just either buy a copy of his game or download a copy and the sources. If he shipped binaries only, then you invoke your right under the GPL (6c in GPLv3, 3b in GPLv2) to request a copy of the source code (and if he doesn't provide it, you file a copyright infringement suit against him for distributing your code without a license).
Yes, but then if the code's the sort where your competitor doesn't need to distribute it externally, then you didn't need to distribute it either and it'd never be neccesary to worry about open-sourcing it.
One thing the GPL offers that BSD-type licenses don't: protection from competitors. When a business releases it's code under a BSD-type license, it's competitors are free to take that code and expand upon it to make new products while keeping their code secret. As a business that means that you're always giving to your competitors but they don't have to give anything to you in return. The GPL, by contrast, allows your competitor to use your code as the basis for their enhanced product only if they give you their code in return. That means that whenever your competitor uses your code to gain a competitive advantage, you can grab his code in return and match him. You're never left holding the short end of the code-exchange stick. The only way a competitor can use your code without letting you use any improvements he makes is to not make any changes to your code at all. But if he's not making any changes or enhancements, you always have the first-mover advantage and he'll never be able to offer anything you aren't already offering. From a business standpoint, if you're going to open the source code at all the GPL provides assurance that the only way your competitors can hitch a free ride is if they accept always being in second place behind you when it comes to new features.
That's assuming you can open the code in the first place. For code that's not critical to your business it's an easy answer. If the code is critical to your business, the first question you need to ask is whether or not you can open it to the world in the first place. Opening it means the entire world can see the exact thing that sets your business apart from others in that case, OTOH it also means the entire world can offer improvements and that means you're effectively getting a development department not even giants like IBM and Microsoft can afford for free. Keeping it closed means you can avoid revealing the keys to your success, OTOH it also means there's huge amounts of useful software out there that you can't use and will have to pay to get (either in cash to buy commercial versions or in time to duplicate the functionality). I can't say whether the trade-off's worth it for any particular business or not, but as a businessman you'd better be asking that question and getting a solid, well-grounded answer to it.
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Um, dude? Release candidate. Testing code, not the final product you have to pay for. I don't think it's unreasonable for Microsoft to put an end date on their RC code, and it's probably a good thing to give people plenty of warning that their testing copy's going to stop working (especially when it's going to be a year before that date hits and people'll have lots of time to forget they aren't running the actual released version).
Oh, I'm sure they will. But as I said, this is an area of law with 2 centuries of case law behind it to define exactly where the boundaries are. There's not a lot of wiggle room for the RIAA's lawyers.
And as I keep noting, "when you are served" is not the relevant legal standard. The standard is "when you know, or have reasonable grounds to believe, you will be sued". Being served is just a cut-off point: once you're served it's practically impossible to argue that you didn't know you were being sued. Once you've gotten a letter from their attorneys demanding a settlement it's a good bet the duty's started. Note that whether you're guilty or not is irrelevant, even if you're pure as the driven snow you're obliged to preserve evidence if you think they're going to sue anyway. Yes, even if you know they're going to lose the suit. It's whether you will be sued, not whether they'll win. The duty may begin even earlier, for instance if news of a John Doe suit you'd reasonably fall under hits the papers. In that situation it'll depend on how you acted. If you suddenly did a clean reinstall, wiping out everything, just 3 days after that news broke, a judge will probably look askance at the "coincidence". OTOH, if you can document a power outage affecting your home just before the reinstall and claim that when power came back the drive was corrupted and wouldn't boot and you had to reinstall, the judge may believe you. If you've got additional back-up documentation, eg. an invoice from a local computer-repair place that did the reinstall for you confirming your drive was corrupted plus receipts for the usual range of small software bits you had to re-buy 'cause you didn't have backup copies of them (downloaded stuff like StyleXP, for instance, where it's easier to buy a new copy than recover the keys needed to reinstall the old one) you'll be in an even stronger position. Once you've been contacted directly those excuses don't fly nearly as well. You'll need to show that it wasn't under your control, wasn't reasonably expected and was something that it'd be unreasonable to be taking precautions against. While you may get away with reinstalling over a corrupted drive caused by a power failure before direct contact, for instance, after direct contact the court would expect you to preserve the corrupted drive as evidence it really was corrupted and use a brand-new drive to rebuild your system.
Hence my advice to not create evidence in the first place. Make it policy long before any hint of a lawsuit to wipe your browser history, clear the cache, clear cookies, delete all temporary files etc. at the end of every browsing session. Make it a policy to work only in a VMware virtual machine and to revert the guest image to a standard copy every day. And document a reason for doing this (eg. to eliminate any malware that does get through the anti-virus software and firewall) that doesn't involve legal action of any type. Or better yet, don't do anything that'd leave any evidence you'd need to destroy. The best defense is to not have any trace of illegality on your system in the first place. If you've got a system where the only downloaded content is provably legal (eg. videos and music obtained directly from the creators and paid for if they're asking payment), that's the best defense. And when the RIAA asks for your drives, don't refuse to hand them over completely. Refuse to hand over the originals, certainly, but the counter-offer should be to have 2 forensic images made under the joint supervision of the RIAA's and your expert, one copy going to the RIAA and one to you. The RIAA wins a lot of the hard-drive examination cases because the defendant tries to keep them from getting the drive at all which just annoys the judge. If you go "We're fully willing to produce it for you, but we're not letting you have sole, unsupervised control of the original while it's the only extant copy.", the judge is more likely to agree with you.
In short, treat the judge like the GM in a tabletop role-playing game. If you try to game things to get away with something the rules pretty clearly intend you shouldn't be able to do, expect him to Do Something About It that you'll like even less than not having gotten away with it.
Still won't fly. You're ignoring the 2 centuries of law defining all this. It's not specific to these cases, here we're talking about law applicable to all lawsuits of all types. And the judge doesn't have discretion in how to make the call, courts higher than him (whose rulings he has to follow) have laid down the rules. One of them, for instance, is that the lawsuit begins when the papers are served on the defendant. Not neccesarily when the defendant receives them, but not just when the plaintiff's attorney tries to send them either. And normally service by mail (where there might be a difference) is only allowed once the plaintiff has exhausted all other means of service directly to the defendant or his attorney.
You can get screwed up if your attorney tries to get fancy, but if he treats it as a bog-standard question of service, discovery and duty to preserve evidence with no reference to copyright or Constitutional rights or anything he'll be able to force a predictable outcome simply because this question's been addressed so thoroughly elsewhere.
Note: that outcome will not be one where you get to destroy evidence after any reasonable person would know they've been sued or are about to be sued. The courts have been there, done that, pounded the game-player into the ground up to his ankles the long way. I'll say this: if you're worrying about how to dispose of evidence because you're going to be sued, you've obviously screwed up your planning. The only safe way to destroy evidence is to not create it in the first place, or failing that to destroy it long before there's any hint of a lawsuit in the air and in accordance with a policy that doesn't mention lawsuits or legal action even in passing.
So, this is simply a user account system. You upload items to your user account on the server. How they're stored is determined by the server, see any system (eg. SourceForge) that allows users to upload things but doesn't expose the physical internal storage architecture via the UI. Access to items is determined by authorization data associated with the user account, controlled by the server and the server administrators. If the administrators revoke your account's access to an item, the server won't let you access it.
None of this is new, we've been doing it for decades. Even in the Windows world this goes back as far as NT 3.1. And once you've got this, the rest of their stuff is horribly obvious.
Except that the law, IIRC, says the duty to preserve evidence begins when you know or reasonably believe you will be sued, not when you're served with papers. So if you destroy evidence in the expectation of being served with a lawsuit, you've just breached that duty to preserve and the judge will hammer you for it. And yes, it's written that way exactly to allow the judge to nail people who know they're going to be sued and try to get rid of the evidence before the papers actually arrive.
Technically I believe it's when you know or have good reason to believe you're about to be sued. Once you've been served you definitely fall into the "know" category. Before that... it depends a lot on the circumstances. If you get a letter from their attorney, on office letterhead where it's clear they are an attorney, you'll probably need a really strong argument to convince a judge you didn't have good reason to believe you were going to be sued. Even if you responded with what they wanted and were clearly in the right, a judge would expect you to excercise some prudence and not go trashing evidence until you'd gotten a confirmation from the attorney that they were satisfied or until some reasonable time had gone by without any further communication. If the letter's from some non-attorney yobbo you've never heard of before in your life, and you can show your actions after that point aren't unusual and follow an established normal pattern for you, you're probably in a much stronger position (at least until actual legal papers arrive). If your actions after the communication deviate strongly from your normal pattern (eg. you normally keep e-mail for years, but immediately after an inquiry from someone you start deleting them immediately), a judge is going to look askance at that.
They could, but it's easy to get tripped up. For instance, one of the default settings in Windows XP is to synchronize time to a network time server belonging to Microsoft. If you weren't careful to keep the machine isolated during the install and all patching, you'd end up with a big discrepancy in timestamps as the clock jumped forward to the correct time during the last part of the install process. It'd also show up in the timestamps on patches, they might show as having been installed before they were issued or they'd be all lumped together at the very end when they should've been installed in a steady stream starting at the claimed install date and getting progressively more recent as patches were applied automatically. It might be hard to prove exactly when the drive was wiped, but it'd be easy to show that the fingerprint of the timestamps doesn't match what it'd be if the drive was as old as it claimed to be and had aged at 1 second per second since then.
That depends on whether or not I'm gaining anything from it or not. And I (like a lot of people) don't measure gain only in terms of short-term monetary gain.
It's kind of like the auto-repair commercial: "You can pay me now, or you can pay me later.". I can certainly improve my immediate financial position by neglecting the maintenance on my car. If I skip that oil change and the new filters, I have more cash in my pocket and my car hasn't been affected. Yet. But I don't do that because I know that "Yet." is significant. If I save that money in the short term by neglecting routine maintenance, at some point down the road I'm going to end up paying for some pretty major repairs. Those repairs are going to cost me a lot more than I ever saved on oil changes, not to mention the cost of renting a replacement while my car's in the shop for a few weeks having the engine and transmission rebuilt. So it's in my best interests, financially and otherwise, to accept the extra costs of doing the routine maintenance. It may not give me any immediate benefits, but long-term it's going to cost me less than the alternative.
You said the magic word: reorganization. The reason the US Trustee gave for asking for conversion to Chapter 7 or dismissal was that SCO wasn't making any progress towards reorganizing, they had no reasonable prospects for ever being able to reorganize and turn themselves into a going concern again, and all they were doing was wasting what money they had left to pay creditors with. Chapter 11 isn't intended to be a permanent shield against creditors, and the Trustee is saying SCO isn't supposed to use it as such.
It's a combination of California law (specifically California Business and Professions Code section 16600) and court decisions. The courts ruled that "restrains" doesn't mean "completely prevents", it means "limits in any way", which means if out of 100 possible lawful jobs available to you a non-compete agreement prevents you from taking even one of them it violates 16660.
Myself, I've always disagreed with the "inevitable disclosure" idea. After all, the company that's trying to apply it benefited from it itself. Unless they have a policy of only hiring new grads fresh out of school with no work history, they hired you in the first place because of the things you'd learned at previous jobs that you'd bring along with you. And now that they've benefited from that, they want to prevent anyone else from benefiting as well? Not kosher.
No, he didn't. He found he could rule on summary judgement that SCO owed money, but exactly how much involved questions of fact that he had to defer to the trial. Since he couldn't pin down an amount, he couldn't order a constructive trust until after the trial. And of course SCO filed for bankruptcy the day before the trial was to start. Later the bankruptcy judge unstayed the case as far as determining the amount SCO owed went, and Judge Kimball finally ruled on the matter last August.
Novell did ask during the bankruptcy proceedings to have the money put into a trust, and SCO's attorneys argued that wasn't neccesary. I expect that'll come back to haunt SCO during the Ch.7 proceedings.
At this point, though, the big monster in the room isn't Novell, it's IBM. Novell may be PO'd, but IBM... is Darth Vader back before George turned him into a whiny emo kid.
Why was the CRA a bad idea? It didn't, after all, say banks had to make loans to people who couldn't afford them. What it said was "We've caught you refusing to give loans to certain groups regardless of their ability to repay. And as a society we don't think locking those groups out completely is in our best interests. So, given your proven track record, if you want to refuse to give loans to people in those groups you're going to need to provide written justification pointing out the exact financial basis for the rejection.". Under the rules, the banks could perfectly well refuse to give loans out to people in those groups whose financial situation would make the loans too risky. All they'd have to do is, for instance, write up a report attaching the guy's credit report and noting "He's defaulted on these loans for these amounts in the past 3 years, and we don't make loans to anybody with that record." (backing it up, of course, by showing they indeed didn't make loans to anybody with that kind of record).
When I hear people talking about how that's so unreasonable, I can't help but recall that the banks were in fact caught refusing to give loans to a black man with a certain credit record but were perfectly happy to give that same loan to a white man with the exact same credit record. When you've been caught with your hand in the cookie jar repeatedly, it's not unreasonable for your Mom to start taking steps. When I hear people saying how if the banks can't loan money willy-nilly to anybody they won't loan at all, I can't help but hear the brat in the playground who if he can't have it all his way throws a tantrum and threatens to take all his toys home. I think the term is "does not play well with others".
I worked in Web analytics, so I can speak to this somewhat. One problem with Google Analytics is it depends on Javascript and Web bugs to get it's numbers. Linux users are more likely than others to have things like AdBlock Plus, NoScript, Webmonkey et. al. installed and configured. If the scripts don't run and the Web bug isn't fetched, the Web-analytics firm has no idea the browser's hit the page. The result is systemic undercounting. Oddly, it can be compensated for by log parsing, but few firms actually do that.
To give you an idea of the scale, we can look at cookie-blocking stats. Right now about 17.5% of users block or delete third-party cookies, and about 7.5% block or delete first-party cookies. The nasty part is the "or delete". That's those users who have their browser set to accept cookies but delete them when they close the browser window. That completely hoses Web analytics stats in all kinds of ways.
Yes, but the US also has another policy: you get a credit against US taxes for any foreign income taxes paid on the same income. Essentially you pay only the difference between what you paid in taxes to the country you generated the income in and what you'd owe in US taxes on that income.
What has these companies riled is that they've arranged it so they pay little or no income tax in the country they generate income in, so they can't get much if any credit.
They'll try. They'll be faced with the other side of the equation, though: as prices go up, demand drops. So they'll have to decide how much they can afford to lose in sales.
To me it only seems fair. As a private citizen I don't get out of paying taxes just because my income was outside the US. I have to file and pay taxes on that income, the only thing I get is a credit against US taxes due for the amount of taxes I paid on that income in that foreign country. The corporations are mad because they had a sweet deal going: don't pay US taxes on foreign income, and make a deal to avoid paying foreign taxes on that same income because they're a US company bringing all those jobs to the foreign country. And now Obama's looking to ruin their nice little sweetheart deal.
The problem with frames, from a user standpoint, is that it breaks the URL bar. When you click on a link in a frame, the link's target replaces the contents of that frame. Since the frameset hasn't changed, the URL in the URL bar doesn't change either. That means the URL the users sees doesn't reflect the set of frames displayed on the page. If he bookmarks the page and uses that bookmark later, he gets something completley different from what was there when he left (the frameset returns to the default frame contents when you first arrive, not the set of new pages that were in it when he left).
This isn't an unsolvable problem, it just requires work by the Web designer. Rather than having pages containing only frame content and having links in frames replace the frame contents, the designer needs to design each page to include the frameset and have links replace the entire frameset. Some of the frames on the new page will of course have the same content as on the previous page, eg. side menus. That style doesn't break the URL bar.
Note that the article isn't talking about the use of frames to construct a Web site. It's describing the practice of using frames to embed entire pages from another Web site inside a frame on a page of the framer's Web site.
You can see the difference if you look at the URLs. If you go to http://www.slashdot.org/, you'll see Slashdot's page with that URL in the URL bar. But imagine going to http://www.silverglass.org/slashdot/ and seeing Slashdot's page with a Silverglass Tech title at the top and a silverglass.org URL in the URL bar. That's framing: I'm constructing a page with two frames in it, my title bar at the top and the lower frame loading the entire Slashdot page. And unless Slashdot does some special coding of their links (to force them to replace the entire page rather than simply loading wherever they are), you'll never see that you're not at slashdot.org. I can even probably play Javascript games to rewrite all the URLs on the Slashdot pages to translate "${x}.slashdot.org" to "www.silverglass.org/slashdot/${x}" in links.
You start to see how evil it can get.
Oh, and your #include tag? That's what a frame is, and what it's supposed to be used for.
Communistic? The GPL? I don't know, I don't think you can get more communistic than the view that code other people develop should be handed over to you for your benefit just because you "need" it. Those of us who favor the GPL take a more capitalistic view: if you want something I created, you're going to need to give me something of value to me in exchange.
Only in terms of what currency is acceptable to the seller. What, after all, is the difference between a doctor saying "I'll treat you if you'll pay me $100.", or to a farmer "I'll treat you if you'll give me a dozen eggs from your chickens." or a car mechanic "I'll treat you if you'll do a tune-up on my car."?
Wrong, at least in the important aspects. If he hands out complete source with each copy, he doesn't have to give you the source (at least not unless he's giving you a copy of the binaries). But that's also the case where it's trivial for you to get the source, just get a copy of whatever he's selling or talk to someone who has. If he's giving out binaries without accompanying source, then he's distributing under 6b (GPLv3) or 3b (GPLv2) and the license says his written offer extends to any third party. Not just people he gave copies to, any third party who asks. That's because the license allows people who received copies from him to pass along copies non-commercially and the indirect recipients have all the rights under the GPL that direct recipients have including the right to demand the source code. If you ask him for the source and he refuses to give it to you, he's failing to meet the 6b/3b terms of the license and has no license for the copies he's distributed (yes, a court's already ruled that this is the case). He's now in copyright violation territory.
No, the GPL doesn't dictate what you can do with your code. If you seperate your code from any GPL'd code, you can do anything you want with it. And if you combine it with GPL'd code, well, the end result isn't entirely your code anymore.
It's nothing new in business. Most proprietary licenses are the same thing: they'll give you their code only if you give them your money in return. The GPL is the same deal, it's just that the "payment" is in kind instead of cash: I'll give you my code only if you give me your code in return. I fail to see how this is either unfair or difficult to grasp. It's not like we haven't been making this kind of exchange for thousands of years, after all.
The GPL (paragraph 3 in GPLv3, paragraph 6 in GPLv3) says otherwise. You can read the paragraph for yourself here, but to summarize the options it provides:
In all cases, the GPL requires your competitor to make the code available to you or to provide it to you upon request.
So, how can I get a copy of my competitor's source code?
Two ways, which one depends on how your competitor released his source code. If he shipped the source code along with the binaries, or offered it for download alongside the binaries, then you just either buy a copy of his game or download a copy and the sources. If he shipped binaries only, then you invoke your right under the GPL (6c in GPLv3, 3b in GPLv2) to request a copy of the source code (and if he doesn't provide it, you file a copyright infringement suit against him for distributing your code without a license).
Yes, but then if the code's the sort where your competitor doesn't need to distribute it externally, then you didn't need to distribute it either and it'd never be neccesary to worry about open-sourcing it.
One thing the GPL offers that BSD-type licenses don't: protection from competitors. When a business releases it's code under a BSD-type license, it's competitors are free to take that code and expand upon it to make new products while keeping their code secret. As a business that means that you're always giving to your competitors but they don't have to give anything to you in return. The GPL, by contrast, allows your competitor to use your code as the basis for their enhanced product only if they give you their code in return. That means that whenever your competitor uses your code to gain a competitive advantage, you can grab his code in return and match him. You're never left holding the short end of the code-exchange stick. The only way a competitor can use your code without letting you use any improvements he makes is to not make any changes to your code at all. But if he's not making any changes or enhancements, you always have the first-mover advantage and he'll never be able to offer anything you aren't already offering. From a business standpoint, if you're going to open the source code at all the GPL provides assurance that the only way your competitors can hitch a free ride is if they accept always being in second place behind you when it comes to new features.
That's assuming you can open the code in the first place. For code that's not critical to your business it's an easy answer. If the code is critical to your business, the first question you need to ask is whether or not you can open it to the world in the first place. Opening it means the entire world can see the exact thing that sets your business apart from others in that case, OTOH it also means the entire world can offer improvements and that means you're effectively getting a development department not even giants like IBM and Microsoft can afford for free. Keeping it closed means you can avoid revealing the keys to your success, OTOH it also means there's huge amounts of useful software out there that you can't use and will have to pay to get (either in cash to buy commercial versions or in time to duplicate the functionality). I can't say whether the trade-off's worth it for any particular business or not, but as a businessman you'd better be asking that question and getting a solid, well-grounded answer to it.