I started out with a good laugh, but finished by scratching my head and wondering if they really could do this.
The Russians are cash-strapped and they have always been short of certain technologies, like up-to-date computers. They are, however, masters at cost-effective space programs and re-using hardware for different purposes. Think of the Progress cargo ship, which is little more than a re-arranged Soyuz.
Big-dollar NASA could never pull something like this off. Years of "making do" might enable the Russians to succeed.
Sure, I've been tempted by corporate jets in the past, but they were never quite right for me.
Too slow or too big or too cramped or too something or the other.
These new supersonic jets sound like just the ticket.
Wonder how much I can get for my old Plymouth Laser in trade? It needs a new clutch, and the radio is, um, random, but it runs ok if you ignore the oil smake starting out.
Hope they'll give me plenty, because I'll need to keep the monthly payments down.
Sounds like you live in a very interesting parallel universe.
Last I looked, Konqueror was the very nice central piece to the KDE desktop. I use and enjoy it every day, as do many others.
There are things that I hope will improve, but nothing about Konqueror -- and certainly nothing about its developers or development -- is a fiasco.
As to Mozilla, the original "but wait, you can't really pass judgment until you try the nightlies" software, now THERE is a fiasco.
Talk about ignoring the needs of the community! While people were crying for a decent browser (not so much crying now), the Mozilla team went happily about making their cross platform development environment or whatever they're calling it today.
While they fiddled, no IE browser share burned away. Given that most development was done by Netscape people on salary, not by volunteers, this is just plain inexcusable.
Konqueror fiasco, indeed!
I'm truly glad that the KDE team, at least, had someone who gave a damn about what the community needed and placed that over their "ain't that swell" hacker ego.
1. The copyright office recognizes that backups are often done on a "whole device" basis, data and all. The current archival exception doesn't actually protect this right -- it covers only computer programs. Although there is a good case for finding fair use, the CO recommends a statutory change protecting the right to do backups this way.
2. Though against a wholesale exemption of RAM copies as infringement, the CO supports special legislative exemption for streaming reproduction of licensed digital works.
Though carefully worded and limited, any official support for a right to make temporary buffer copies that are essential to the purpose of using properly licensed works for their fundamental purpose is a good thing.
I've been working with kword 1.1 for a while now.
Though still pretty feature light, it is much more stable than it had been.
I've taken to typing in chapters with kword, then integrating them into larger documents done with StarOffice. Not the best way to work, but let's me use the very snappy and pleasant-to-use kword for the biggest part of the work, while using StarOffice's larger feature set for the final heavy lifting.
One real big plus: the koffice print support (at least if you have CUPS) is awesome.
Hope they figure out that tooth problem. Would hate to have our astronauts miss that golden fresh Martian sweet corn.
BTW: Did anybody else get a hoot out of those videos from Devan (spelling?) Island. I think it's wild that grown up, presumably intelligent, people are trying to simulate extended stays on the Martian surface.
Not only do they learn a lot, but they get to wear those neato space suits.
It has come to my attention that some of you think that we should incorporate ourselves as a religion based on tightly holding on to our intellectual property and trampling anyone who thinks their pitiful little rights matter.
This would be pointless. I know that some of you are concerned because some religions have sprung up that worship free speech and such things.
Just remember what happened years ago when John Lennon made the mistake of saying that the Beatles were bigger than Jesus.
He was wrong. The Beatles weren't. We, however, are.
This story has almost spawned a second story: The reactions of the Linux Press and the Linux Community and the ways in which they differ.
Since Rob Knapp and I put up our petition asking LT to come clean, I've heard from members of the LT community and members of the Linux press.
The journalistic responses I got were mostly disheartening. Most didn't want to "attack" a comrade in arms. Some said that nobody cares what goes on in talkbacks, anyway. One of the original naysayers, to his credit, did go back and check his own biases by asking what other people thought.
What this journalist found is what many members of the LT community expressed to me: Sure, we take talkbacks with a grain of salt. However, when the forum posts a policy and says that it will be fair, we expect the forum itself to play by its own rules. The people who run a moderated forum have a fair amount of power with regard to the contents of that forum. It is wrong to exercise that power cynically.
This is especially true of a site like LT, that built, and, I fear, is squandering, a valuable and positive reputation among its community members.
I would like to end with a word about Michael Hall, the current LT editor.
Michael is in a nearly impossible position. The Linux Today staff is mostly gone. So far as I can tell, the only free-lance writer still being published is Dennis Powell.
Michael is doing yeoman's work trying to keep LT useful to its community. That's a tall order for one person. I ask people not to take their frustrations with LT out on Michael personally.
Umm. There's a reason why kids are generally expected to have parents or guardians. It's that kids tend to be less knowledgable and less sophisticated than adults, and more trusting.
Most cultures and legal systems endeavor to protect kids in ways that they do not protect adults.
Bounty hunters? What's next, posses and commando operations? Maybe they'll glom onto a bank of DS-3s and start downloading major sources to death (Yah, buddy. You used a lot more bandwidth this month. You gotta come up with $93,000 or we gonna cut you off.)
Of course, somebody's going to pay for it all and that somebody is whoever buys CDs, movies, etc. Gotta love technology.
I don't know how many sources Joe had, but I do know that he researched this story. He contacted me for some of my opinions on LT, but, so far as I can tell, the only contribution I made (assuming others didn't make it as well) was to notice that LT's talkback policy changed a couple of months ago, eliminating language about frowning on deceptive practices.
I seriously hope that these charges are not true. I have spent a lot of time there, and count some of its former staffers (damned dot.com bust) among my friends.
I have to admit, slow and dim-witted as I am, even I had noticed a couple of funny things.
Here are a couple of posts that really stuck in my head:
http://linuxtoday.com/news_story.php3?ltsn=2001- 02 -21-001-20-OP-BZ-CY-0027
(George Tirebiter telling ac he had posted his response to another article)
The interesting thing here is that Tirebiter's response doesn't seem remotely
right for an LT reader. Why?
1. Because it crosses articles
2. Because Tirebiter must have some reason to assume that ac didn't post
the link in response to two different articles - something he couldn't know
without being an insider
3. If one hadn't just read the ac post containing the link, searching for
it would have been all but impossible with the broken LT search engine.
Searching for AC chokes. The only way to make is show up (at least back when
I tried it) was to search for "1999". Not exactly intuitive.
http://linuxtoday.com/news_story.php3?ltsn=2001- 03 -07-001-21-OP-DT-RH-0019
(Clark Addison telling me that I must not be an attentive LT reader or I
would have noticed the InstallShield banner adds)
1. Just odd to have a reader drawing my attention to the banner ads.
2. This is the guy's third post and second on this article. His first post
was three days earlier.
3. Funny -- there is a Tirebiter response on this, too.
Clark Addison had two more posts (3/13 and 14) then disappears into the ether.
If you're dealing with a Fortune 500 company, you are dealing with a company that already invests serious resources in supporting software and software users -- OR -- a company that may well use IBM Global (Solutions|Services? I forget which). In either case you've got some arguments.
First the IBM case:
IBM GS has Linux knowledge and the ability to provide reasonable support for a number of Open Source tools (hey! They do WebSphere, you know).
Depending on how far up the Fortune 500 you are, you may or may not have savvy folks on site, however.
The other case:
The company is already spending a fortune and probably has a great deal of expertise it doesn't even know about. An audit of possible uses is likely to turn up savings sufficient to fund some level of internal support. The more machines to leverage, the cheaper that internal support becomes in relation to the Windows/etc licenses saved.
Don't be so sure that it's not a valid contract.
Contracts are made in many ways, sometimes by custom. Custom, by the way, would be something like unjust enrichment: You watch a housepainter paint your house by mistake, never saying a word for the three days that he comes and works. When he presents the bill, you tell him about his mistake and refuse to pay. He could take you to court and win.
First, though, your stuff doesn't become public domain unless you explicitly make it so. Google only claims a non-exclusive license, which is a sort of IP "default" in the absence of explicit agreements.
All of the necessary elements for a contract arguably are there. There certainly are multiple parties. In the case of posting through Google, it's Google. Consideration comes in the form of being allowed to post to the newsgroup and having your posting accepted -- even if its fully automatic. Somebody is running those servers.
By posting something, you agree by implication, to make your posting available to anyone who reads the newsgroup postings.
That's pretty close to the definition of a non-exclusive license to distribute your posting.
I suppose you could even try the house-painter's argument: It would be unjust if you could take advantage of all those services for free, without granting that minimal level of rights (in the form of the non-exclusive license) needed to make the service reasonable.
I imagine this could be a really good thing for people who live in remote areas, but BSOD jokes are more fun.
"There ain't no proper equipment here in Moose Elbow. Ya gotta go on over to Seal Nose on the third friday of the month, except for months with an "A" in the name. Then you go on the second Tuesday."
As far as I'm concerned, California has every right to strict environmental standards, if that's what they want.
They have every right to expand their population more quickly than their ability to supply power, if that's what they want to do.
They even have the right to cap energy prices for consumers without regard to producer prices.
They have to live there. They have to make the choices.
What they don't have a right to do is make me pay twice for my energy. I don't want to struggle to pay high energy prices brought on by market conditions and then pay again because Californians don't want to be subject to the same forces that I am.
I don't care how California solves it's problem so long as I don't solve California's problem.
I'm sure the details will show I'm all wrong (they usually do), but this seems like a covert Linux story. Why?
The market for very expensive supercomputers is limited to those organizations and countries with the money to buy them.
Seems to me that companies wanting to spread newly legal high-power computing around could do well by constructing machines with clustered/SMP'd off-the-shelf parts and little or no R&D $$ Linux (Beowulf?).
A couple of things about this story -- and points raised in earlier posts are interesting in light of the NSA's recent release of a secure Linux.
First: A backdoor that had existed for years was discovered relatively quickly (hey -- nothing happens overnight) after the code was opened up and began to see common use.
Second: As others have pointed out, security by obscurity does work after a fashion and up to a point. Trouble is, so does vulnerability by obscurity.
The unfortunate thing, if you read some of the comments below, is that many people are perfectly willing to let them get away with it. People like using eBay and get some good deals, so they will tolerate ridiculous business practices.
This is also the ultimate irony whenever "privacy and the internet" become hot topics on some news show. The fact is, most of us willingly give away sensitive information without thinking twice. How many people, for example, fill out those contest entry forms set out at shopping malls, etc.
In the end, you only know that you have convictions when they get inconvenient.
I sure don't want to play off one country vs. another. I'll bet most people would rather live in their homeland than anywhere else.
As to corporations "stripping away our few remaining rights", I think you need to take another look. Believe me, we still have a healthy supply of rights.
It's true that some corporations have been pumping and getting legislation (like DMCA) that does violence to some of our fundamental rights. I still hold out hope, by the way, that they will lose by the time these issues work their way up to the Supreme Court.
The reality, however, is that corporations really don't care very much about our rights. They don't especially want to take them away or to protect them. They want to make money. Hollywood is the great example. Let some mother or priest or someone exercise their First Amendment right to call for boycotting some movie, and moviemakers will wrap themselves in the flag and bleat about freedom of speech. Let you or me try to exercise our legal write to access a DVD to which we have purchased a license, or our Constitutionally guaranteed fair use rights, and they will push the rediculous copy protection circumvention clauses of the DMCA.
It ain't personal, it's just business.
The good news is that it's completely unprincipled and open to attack. The attack could even come in the form of other businesses who realize that they have a financial incentive to protect those rights that are being trampled. That, by the way, is how the original "time-shifting" case transpired. It was Hollywood vs. Sony for the write to tape TV shows.
The price of liberty is eterneal vigilence, as true today as it was in 1790.
Actually, I wrote the piece a year ago and it has appeared in a number of places, including OSOpinion, LinuxToday, opendvd.org and my own website, dinotrac.com.
Maldivian, please consider yourself a friend after the fact. Although I do ask for attribution when somebody posts one of my pieces, that seems to have been handled and not harm was done.
Quite the opposite, in fact. Judge Motion has been introduced to a few more people and I've gotten some really nice e-mails. Yahoo!! (the exclamation, not the portal)
I would like to share the gist of my favorite e-mail so far, even though it wasn't prompted by this posting. While all that mess was going on down in Florida, one friend watched the proceedings of Judge Sauls in the Leon County court. He e-mailed me to say that Judge Motion was alive and well in Leon County. I took it as quite the compliment.
Slashdot Mirror
I started out with a good laugh, but finished by scratching my head and wondering if they really could do this.
The Russians are cash-strapped and they have always been short of certain technologies, like up-to-date computers. They are, however, masters at cost-effective space programs and re-using hardware for different purposes. Think of the Progress cargo ship, which is little more than a re-arranged Soyuz.
Big-dollar NASA could never pull something like this off. Years of "making do" might enable the Russians to succeed.
Sure, I've been tempted by corporate jets in the past, but they were never quite right for me.
Too slow or too big or too cramped or too something or the other.
These new supersonic jets sound like just the ticket.
Wonder how much I can get for my old Plymouth Laser in trade? It needs a new clutch, and the radio is, um, random, but it runs ok if you ignore the oil smake starting out.
Hope they'll give me plenty, because I'll need to keep the monthly payments down.
Sounds like you live in a very interesting parallel universe.
Last I looked, Konqueror was the very nice central piece to the KDE desktop. I use and enjoy it every day, as do many others.
There are things that I hope will improve, but nothing about Konqueror -- and certainly nothing about its developers or development -- is a fiasco.
As to Mozilla, the original "but wait, you can't really pass judgment until you try the nightlies" software, now THERE is a fiasco.
Talk about ignoring the needs of the community! While people were crying for a decent browser (not so much crying now), the Mozilla team went happily about making their cross platform development environment or whatever they're calling it today.
While they fiddled, no IE browser share burned away. Given that most development was done by Netscape people on salary, not by volunteers, this is just plain inexcusable.
Konqueror fiasco, indeed!
I'm truly glad that the KDE team, at least, had someone who gave a damn about what the community needed and placed that over their "ain't that swell" hacker ego.
Some good with the bad:
1. The copyright office recognizes that backups are often done on a "whole device" basis, data and all. The current archival exception doesn't actually protect this right -- it covers only computer programs. Although there is a good case for finding fair use, the CO recommends a statutory change protecting the right to do backups this way.
2. Though against a wholesale exemption of RAM copies as infringement, the CO supports special legislative exemption for streaming reproduction of licensed digital works.
Though carefully worded and limited, any official support for a right to make temporary buffer copies that are essential to the purpose of using properly licensed works for their fundamental purpose is a good thing.
I don't know about StarOffice 6.0, but StarOffice 5.2's Word Processor handily out-features kword.
OTOH, kword is much more pleasant to use. It's quite snappy. I don't know how to put it, exactly. It's just nicer to use.
I've been working with kword 1.1 for a while now.
Though still pretty feature light, it is much more stable than it had been.
I've taken to typing in chapters with kword, then integrating them into larger documents done with StarOffice. Not the best way to work, but let's me use the very snappy and pleasant-to-use kword for the biggest part of the work, while using StarOffice's larger feature set for the final heavy lifting.
One real big plus: the koffice print support (at least if you have CUPS) is awesome.
Hope they figure out that tooth problem. Would hate to have our astronauts miss that golden fresh Martian sweet corn.
BTW: Did anybody else get a hoot out of those videos from Devan (spelling?) Island. I think it's wild that grown up, presumably intelligent, people are trying to simulate extended stays on the Martian surface.
Not only do they learn a lot, but they get to wear those neato space suits.
It has come to my attention that some of you think that we should incorporate ourselves as a religion based on tightly holding on to our intellectual property and trampling anyone who thinks their pitiful little rights matter.
This would be pointless. I know that some of you are concerned because some religions have sprung up that worship free speech and such things.
Just remember what happened years ago when John Lennon made the mistake of saying that the Beatles were bigger than Jesus.
He was wrong. The Beatles weren't. We, however, are.
Sincerely yours,
Jack Valenti
In addition to signing the petition, if you haven't already done so -- send an e-mail to LTpetition@netscape.net --
You can also send a note to the editors at editors@linuxtoday.com explaining why this behavior is intolerable.
Thanks,
Dean Pannell
(a.k.a. dinotrac)
This story has almost spawned a second story: The reactions of the Linux Press and the Linux Community and the ways in which they differ.
Since Rob Knapp and I put up our petition asking LT to come clean, I've heard from members of the LT community and members of the Linux press.
The journalistic responses I got were mostly disheartening. Most didn't want to "attack" a comrade in arms. Some said that nobody cares what goes on in talkbacks, anyway. One of the original naysayers, to his credit, did go back and check his own biases by asking what other people thought.
What this journalist found is what many members of the LT community expressed to me: Sure, we take talkbacks with a grain of salt. However, when the forum posts a policy and says that it will be fair, we expect the forum itself to play by its own rules. The people who run a moderated forum have a fair amount of power with regard to the contents of that forum. It is wrong to exercise that power cynically.
This is especially true of a site like LT, that built, and, I fear, is squandering, a valuable and positive reputation among its community members.
I would like to end with a word about Michael Hall, the current LT editor.
Michael is in a nearly impossible position. The Linux Today staff is mostly gone. So far as I can tell, the only free-lance writer still being published is Dennis Powell.
Michael is doing yeoman's work trying to keep LT useful to its community. That's a tall order for one person. I ask people not to take their frustrations with LT out on Michael personally.
As always, I speak for no one but myself.
Dean Pannell
(a.k.a. dinotrac)
Most cultures and legal systems endeavor to protect kids in ways that they do not protect adults.
As to the rest of what you said: Sure.
Bounty hunters? What's next, posses and commando operations? Maybe they'll glom onto a bank of DS-3s and start downloading major sources to death (Yah, buddy. You used a lot more bandwidth this month. You gotta come up with $93,000 or we gonna cut you off.)
Of course, somebody's going to pay for it all and that somebody is whoever buys CDs, movies, etc. Gotta love technology.
I don't know how many sources Joe had, but I do know that he researched this story. He contacted me for some of my opinions on LT, but, so far as I can tell, the only contribution I made (assuming others didn't make it as well) was to notice that LT's talkback policy changed a couple of months ago, eliminating language about frowning on deceptive practices.
- 02 -21-001-20-OP-BZ-CY-0027
- 03 -07-001-21-OP-DT-RH-0019
I seriously hope that these charges are not true. I have spent a lot of time there, and count some of its former staffers (damned dot.com bust) among my friends.
I have to admit, slow and dim-witted as I am, even I had noticed a couple of funny things.
Here are a couple of posts that really stuck in my head:
http://linuxtoday.com/news_story.php3?ltsn=2001
(George Tirebiter telling ac he had posted his response to another article)
The interesting thing here is that Tirebiter's response doesn't seem remotely
right for an LT reader. Why?
1. Because it crosses articles
2. Because Tirebiter must have some reason to assume that ac didn't post
the link in response to two different articles - something he couldn't know
without being an insider
3. If one hadn't just read the ac post containing the link, searching for
it would have been all but impossible with the broken LT search engine.
Searching for AC chokes. The only way to make is show up (at least back when
I tried it) was to search for "1999". Not exactly intuitive.
http://linuxtoday.com/news_story.php3?ltsn=2001
(Clark Addison telling me that I must not be an attentive LT reader or I
would have noticed the InstallShield banner adds)
1. Just odd to have a reader drawing my attention to the banner ads.
2. This is the guy's third post and second on this article. His first post
was three days earlier.
3. Funny -- there is a Tirebiter response on this, too.
Clark Addison had two more posts (3/13 and 14) then disappears into the ether.
Two weird posts don't mean anything.
Still...
Dean Pannell
(a.k.a. dinotrac)
If you're dealing with a Fortune 500 company, you are dealing with a company that already invests serious resources in supporting software and software users -- OR -- a company that may well use IBM Global (Solutions|Services? I forget which). In either case you've got some arguments.
First the IBM case:
IBM GS has Linux knowledge and the ability to provide reasonable support for a number of Open Source tools (hey! They do WebSphere, you know).
Depending on how far up the Fortune 500 you are, you may or may not have savvy folks on site, however.
The other case:
The company is already spending a fortune and probably has a great deal of expertise it doesn't even know about. An audit of possible uses is likely to turn up savings sufficient to fund some level of internal support. The more machines to leverage, the cheaper that internal support becomes in relation to the Windows/etc licenses saved.
Don't be so sure that it's not a valid contract.
Contracts are made in many ways, sometimes by custom. Custom, by the way, would be something like unjust enrichment: You watch a housepainter paint your house by mistake, never saying a word for the three days that he comes and works. When he presents the bill, you tell him about his mistake and refuse to pay. He could take you to court and win.
First, though, your stuff doesn't become public domain unless you explicitly make it so. Google only claims a non-exclusive license, which is a sort of IP "default" in the absence of explicit agreements.
All of the necessary elements for a contract arguably are there. There certainly are multiple parties. In the case of posting through Google, it's Google. Consideration comes in the form of being allowed to post to the newsgroup and having your posting accepted -- even if its fully automatic. Somebody is running those servers.
By posting something, you agree by implication, to make your posting available to anyone who reads the newsgroup postings.
That's pretty close to the definition of a non-exclusive license to distribute your posting.
I suppose you could even try the house-painter's argument: It would be unjust if you could take advantage of all those services for free, without granting that minimal level of rights (in the form of the non-exclusive license) needed to make the service reasonable.
"There ain't no proper equipment here in Moose Elbow. Ya gotta go on over to Seal Nose on the third friday of the month, except for months with an "A" in the name. Then you go on the second Tuesday."
I could swear that a (I think) ZD publication serving VARs (Smart Reseller? ) did a ranking of Linux distros ranked LinuxOne as number 1 or 2.
Wondering: Was that really THE LinuxOne?
If so -- What happened to that survey?
A lot of people found it incredible that LinuxOne could have ANY customers, let alone satisfied customers.
Wish I could say that I was skeptical enough about that, but I wasn't.
The L1 story is just plain strange.
As far as I'm concerned, California has every right to strict environmental standards, if that's what they want.
They have every right to expand their population more quickly than their ability to supply power, if that's what they want to do.
They even have the right to cap energy prices for consumers without regard to producer prices.
They have to live there. They have to make the choices.
What they don't have a right to do is make me pay twice for my energy. I don't want to struggle to pay high energy prices brought on by market conditions and then pay again because Californians don't want to be subject to the same forces that I am.
I don't care how California solves it's problem so long as I don't solve California's problem.
I'm sure the details will show I'm all wrong (they usually do), but this seems like a covert Linux story. Why?
The market for very expensive supercomputers is limited to those organizations and countries with the money to buy them.
Seems to me that companies wanting to spread newly legal high-power computing around could do well by constructing machines with clustered/SMP'd off-the-shelf parts and little or no R&D $$ Linux (Beowulf?).
Gosh -- what might Compaq do with Alphas?
A couple of things about this story -- and points raised in earlier posts are interesting in light of the NSA's recent release of a secure Linux. First: A backdoor that had existed for years was discovered relatively quickly (hey -- nothing happens overnight) after the code was opened up and began to see common use. Second: As others have pointed out, security by obscurity does work after a fashion and up to a point. Trouble is, so does vulnerability by obscurity.
The unfortunate thing, if you read some of the comments below, is that many people are perfectly willing to let them get away with it. People like using eBay and get some good deals, so they will tolerate ridiculous business practices.
This is also the ultimate irony whenever "privacy and the internet" become hot topics on some news show. The fact is, most of us willingly give away sensitive information without thinking twice. How many people, for example, fill out those contest entry forms set out at shopping malls, etc.
In the end, you only know that you have convictions when they get inconvenient.
Hey Eniac:
CSIRAC's in position.
Soon we begin the endgame.
Your pal, Hal 9000
I sure don't want to play off one country vs. another. I'll bet most people would rather live in their homeland than anywhere else.
As to corporations "stripping away our few remaining rights", I think you need to take another look. Believe me, we still have a healthy supply of rights.
It's true that some corporations have been pumping and getting legislation (like DMCA) that does violence to some of our fundamental rights. I still hold out hope, by the way, that they will lose by the time these issues work their way up to the Supreme Court.
The reality, however, is that corporations really don't care very much about our rights. They don't especially want to take them away or to protect them. They want to make money. Hollywood is the great example. Let some mother or priest or someone exercise their First Amendment right to call for boycotting some movie, and moviemakers will wrap themselves in the flag and bleat about freedom of speech. Let you or me try to exercise our legal write to access a DVD to which we have purchased a license, or our Constitutionally guaranteed fair use rights, and they will push the rediculous copy protection circumvention clauses of the DMCA.
It ain't personal, it's just business.
The good news is that it's completely unprincipled and open to attack. The attack could even come in the form of other businesses who realize that they have a financial incentive to protect those rights that are being trampled. That, by the way, is how the original "time-shifting" case transpired. It was Hollywood vs. Sony for the write to tape TV shows.
The price of liberty is eterneal vigilence, as true today as it was in 1790.
Actually, I wrote the piece a year ago and it has appeared in a number of places, including OSOpinion, LinuxToday, opendvd.org and my own website, dinotrac.com.
It hasn't been held in reserve anywhere.
Maldivian, please consider yourself a friend after the fact. Although I do ask for attribution when somebody posts one of my pieces, that seems to have been handled and not harm was done. Quite the opposite, in fact. Judge Motion has been introduced to a few more people and I've gotten some really nice e-mails. Yahoo!! (the exclamation, not the portal) I would like to share the gist of my favorite e-mail so far, even though it wasn't prompted by this posting. While all that mess was going on down in Florida, one friend watched the proceedings of Judge Sauls in the Leon County court. He e-mailed me to say that Judge Motion was alive and well in Leon County. I took it as quite the compliment.