"Microsoft, despite dismissing open-source code publicly, has used software from others to create their own products."
"Craig Mundie, senior vice president of Microsoft, said last May. '(There) is a real problem in the licensing model that many open-source software products employ: the General Public License.'"
This really makes you wonder if Microsoft's stance against the GPL is really about getting more code from the open source community to use in their own projects. If there was a public backlash against the GPL, the community may feel pressure to change to other license models, and Microsoft could get more of code for their projects written for free.
UrSux.com also has a lot of links to horribly designed web sites, as well as commentary. It annoyed one web site owner so much that he created a UrSuxSux site! UrSux.com's author also created an opposite site, Ur0wnz.com.
I completely agreed with you the first time I saw the "gotcha" page, but then I started thinking. What if someone was really looking for pre-IPO terrorism-related companies, and they're starting their research with many companies before they commit money. They will probably only send money to one or two companies, and chances are they wouldn't include McWhortle. By having the gotcha page so close to the home page, there's enough information to intrigue someone, but the lesson isn't lost on people who might end up sending their money to a different scam.
Amarillo cattlemen forced Oprah Winfrey the queen of daytime talk shows to come to my hometown and defend herself in federal court because they claimed Winfrey and guests made ugly false comments about their cows and harmed the sensitive critters' reputations.
Paul Engler owns and fattens almost TT cattle making him the country's biggest cow man. Engler and some others who own the beef cattle that outnumber humans in the Texas Panhandle got mad at Oprah over comments about "mad cow disease" bovine spongiform encephalopathy on an April KK show about "dangerous foods."
Mad cow disease causes Prion proteins to collect in the brain and create holes making the tissue look like a sponge under the microscope and leaving the cow demented neurologically dysfunctional and eventually dead.
The disease is called "scrapie" in sheep because they scrape against things and stagger around. The terminal progressive spongy-brain illness is called Creutzfeld-Jakob disease in humans.
The British linked human cases to mad cow disease found in British or European herds but no cases of mad cow disease have been found in U.S. cattle.
Vegetarian activist Howard Lyman claimed on the Oprah show that grinding dead cows and feeding them to live cows (a practice banned last summer) could spread mad cow disease across the United States and make AIDS seem like the common cold.
"It has just stopped me cold from eating another burger" Oprah declared on the show.
Engler and mad cowboy cohorts claimed influential Oprah's comments and her show caused the cattle market to hit bottom and cost them millions.
They sued Oprah her production company and Lyman under the Texas False Disparagement of Perishable Food Products law. The law makes a person liable for damages if he tells the public a perishable food is unsafe and knows the information is false.
The Texas law and similar laws in other states commonly are known as "veggie libel laws" because they protect the reputations of vegetables such as broccoli and the lowly rutabaga.
The states passed veggie libel laws after Washington state apple growers lost a lawsuit against CBS over a KA " Minutes" segment about the potential danger of Alar a chemical used on apples.
The Oprah case early this year was expected to be the first constitutional test of the state food disparagement laws but U.S. District Judge Mary Lou Robinson ruled during the five-week trial that the Texas veggie libel law didn't apply. Robinson ruled live cattle aren't a "perishable food product."
The federal judge also ruled testimony showed the defendants didn't say anything they knew was false. She let the trial go on as a business disparagement case requiring the mad cattlemen to prove the defendants maliciously and deliberately lied about them specifically to hurt their feelings and pocketbooks.
Oprah won.
The jurors ended trial of the lawsuit after deciding the first question whether comments on the Oprah show specifically were about Engler and the other plaintiffs who weren't named on the program.
Jurors said no to the identity question -- eliminating any further deliberations of liability or damages and ending the trial -- but the panel viewed the case as a First Amendment issue.
The Associated Press quoted male juror Pat Gowdy: "We felt that a lot of rights have eroded in this country. Our freedom of speech may be the only one we have left to regain what we've lost."
Oprah told a cheering crowd outside Amarillo's federal courthouse: "Free speech not only lives it rocks!"
She testified she isn't a journalist but rather a moderator of discussion of issues and opinions. Oprah said people have a right to express their views.
Her attorney Charles Babcock argued the case was about the First Amendment "robust debate" and "the unfettered interchange of ideas."
The federal courts still may decide the case and constitutional issues because the cattlemen planned to appeal.
What really irked the cattlemen was a segment edited out of the questioned show. Comments by guests in the unused segment ruined their cows' reputations the cattlemen mooed.
In the segment the late Henny Youngman Don Rickles Andrew Dice Clay and Howard Stern practiced their comedy routines mostly insult jokes on a captive audience -- cows in a Panhandle feedlot.
Youngman used his famous line "Take my cow please."
Rickles told the captive cows "Hello dummies! You're so ugly when you were born the doctor slapped your mother."
The Diceman shouted at the bovine audience "Where'd you get that *#@!X+* head?! I have to tell 'ya that's the biggest *#@!X+* head I ever saw!"
Stern deadpanned to the four-legged test critters: "I've seen better private parts -- on me."
The comedians' attacks on the characters of the cows didn't work. The penned members of the focus group of cattle didn't laugh.
CDMA2000 1X promises twice the voice capacity of current networks and data speeds of up to 144 kilobits per second initially. Realistically, Verizon said users should see speeds of 40 to 60 kilobits per second on average. Verizon said it will initially roll out 1X on 20 percent of its networks with nationwide availability by the end of the year.Source
Verison isn't calling it 3G -- the whole point of this article is that they haven't announced it at all. Where are you getting your 20-30k numbers? The Forbes link you gave says it IS 3G, and will provide 40-60kbps in the real world.
The five free online file conversions that lamj mentioned are available at CreatePDF.Adobe.com. It allows you to convert from almost any document format, and even optimize for print or regular display. It will even let you to password protect the PDFs it produces, though this may require the non-trial version.
Actually, with the onset of Tagged PDF and PDF Reflow, paper size is completely variable. One excellent example of this is the Acrobat Reader for Palm. (Also PocketPC). These completely reformat the PDFs so they are viewable on the extremely skinny displays that PDAs have. In addition, in Acrobat 5 Reader you can reflow your PDF with larger fonts, maintaining the author-intended margins.
In the future, products like Acrobat Distiller Server will allow for documents to be automatically generated especially for certain display sizes, when reflow alone isn't enough. But for most documents, reflow automatically resizes fonts and margins wonderfully.
How long until a company comes along with another extremely restrictive license and no one complains? Everyone on slashdot always complains about repeat posts... eventually with more and more restrictive license attempts, Slashdot and other communities will stop informing us about them for fear of being redundant.
This happens all the time with other technologies, such as DoubleClick's ad tracking (though recently discontinued). The first company gets chastised, but then other companies come along and are no longer controversial enough for mass media to report.
Shouldn't something be done to stop licenses like this completely, without always resorting to consumer pressure?
You can still find evidence of the posts/sites in question!
The ComputerXpress Raging Bull forum was the message board used by the bulk of the defendants in this case. Undestone and Ogravity, still active, were defendants. Most of the offending posts have been removed, but there are some interesting posts by the defendants in the first 100 messages. Ogravity also set up a site about ComputerXpress and penny stock scams here. This site was mentioned in the appelate court opinion [pdf].
Keep in mind that ComputerXpress changed its name from Stop-n-Sock [nasd-otc:USAV], and used the domain CostPlusFive.com.
SVG specifications have been evolving for quite some time, and Adobe is one of the companies in the forefront of SVG acceptance. At Adobe's SVG website you can download the SVG plug-in (2.4meg, Win32/Mac) and then see demos of what SVG is capable of. One of the coolest things SVG can do over Flash is client-side image filters, such as marbled textures, flaming text, and embossing, without the user having to download a large raster image.
The biggest problem facing SVG going forward is the strong alliance between Microsoft and Macromedia, the makers of Flash. This alliance lead to the tight integration of Flash in Internet Explorer 5.5. Fortunately Adobe has worked out a deal with Microsoft to automatically download the SVG viewer on-demand in future releases, much like Internet Explorer automatically installs the Flash viewer now.
Personally I think the biggest strength of SVG lies in its text/xml format, because any current HTML generating tool (perl, php, cold fusion, asp) can generate SVG code just as easily.
It's the first outer moon to be discovered in 25 years. The three moons discovered in 1979 (Metis, Adrastea, and Thebe) are inner moons. The distinction between inner and outer moons arises from the fact that there are eight moons at a distance less than 2 million kilometers (the "inner" moons) and ten moons at a distance greater than 11 million kilometers. There are no moons between 2 and 11 million kilometers.
Do you feel that the Linux community has fallen victim to Transmeta's brilliant public relations? Since Linus Torvalds has joined Transmeta, everyone has become aware of Transmeta's entire product line... and not only that, most of you are crazy about it! Don't get me wrong; Transmeta really does have a great product with Crusoe. However, I am curious as to how differently Crusoe would have been accepted had Torvalds not helped in its development.
Slashdot Mirror
"Microsoft, despite dismissing open-source code publicly, has used software from others to create their own products."
"Craig Mundie, senior vice president of Microsoft, said last May. '(There) is a real problem in the licensing model that many open-source software products employ: the General Public License.'"
This really makes you wonder if Microsoft's stance against the GPL is really about getting more code from the open source community to use in their own projects. If there was a public backlash against the GPL, the community may feel pressure to change to other license models, and Microsoft could get more of code for their projects written for free.
This must be the start of a scam to get New York locked into higher water wholesaling prices.
:)
Beware of owning any exciting water wholesaling companies come next fall!
UrSux.com also has a lot of links to horribly designed web sites, as well as commentary. It annoyed one web site owner so much that he created a UrSuxSux site! UrSux.com's author also created an opposite site, Ur0wnz.com.
I completely agreed with you the first time I saw the "gotcha" page, but then I started thinking. What if someone was really looking for pre-IPO terrorism-related companies, and they're starting their research with many companies before they commit money. They will probably only send money to one or two companies, and chances are they wouldn't include McWhortle. By having the gotcha page so close to the home page, there's enough information to intrigue someone, but the lesson isn't lost on people who might end up sending their money to a different scam.
Oprah's comment about mad cows makes cowboys mad
Amarillo cattlemen forced Oprah Winfrey the queen of daytime talk shows to come to my hometown and defend herself in federal court because they claimed Winfrey and guests made ugly false comments about their cows and harmed the sensitive critters' reputations.
Paul Engler owns and fattens almost TT cattle making him the country's biggest cow man. Engler and some others who own the beef cattle that outnumber humans in the Texas Panhandle got mad at Oprah over comments about "mad cow disease" bovine spongiform encephalopathy on an April KK show about "dangerous foods."
Mad cow disease causes Prion proteins to collect in the brain and create holes making the tissue look like a sponge under the microscope and leaving the cow demented neurologically dysfunctional and eventually dead.
The disease is called "scrapie" in sheep because they scrape against things and stagger around. The terminal progressive spongy-brain illness is called Creutzfeld-Jakob disease in humans.
The British linked human cases to mad cow disease found in British or European herds but no cases of mad cow disease have been found in U.S. cattle.
Vegetarian activist Howard Lyman claimed on the Oprah show that grinding dead cows and feeding them to live cows (a practice banned last summer) could spread mad cow disease across the United States and make AIDS seem like the common cold.
"It has just stopped me cold from eating another burger" Oprah declared on the show.
Engler and mad cowboy cohorts claimed influential Oprah's comments and her show caused the cattle market to hit bottom and cost them millions.
They sued Oprah her production company and Lyman under the Texas False Disparagement of Perishable Food Products law. The law makes a person liable for damages if he tells the public a perishable food is unsafe and knows the information is false.
The Texas law and similar laws in other states commonly are known as "veggie libel laws" because they protect the reputations of vegetables such as broccoli and the lowly rutabaga.
The states passed veggie libel laws after Washington state apple growers lost a lawsuit against CBS over a KA " Minutes" segment about the potential danger of Alar a chemical used on apples.
The Oprah case early this year was expected to be the first constitutional test of the state food disparagement laws but U.S. District Judge Mary Lou Robinson ruled during the five-week trial that the Texas veggie libel law didn't apply. Robinson ruled live cattle aren't a "perishable food product."
The federal judge also ruled testimony showed the defendants didn't say anything they knew was false. She let the trial go on as a business disparagement case requiring the mad cattlemen to prove the defendants maliciously and deliberately lied about them specifically to hurt their feelings and pocketbooks.
Oprah won.
The jurors ended trial of the lawsuit after deciding the first question whether comments on the Oprah show specifically were about Engler and the other plaintiffs who weren't named on the program.
Jurors said no to the identity question -- eliminating any further deliberations of liability or damages and ending the trial -- but the panel viewed the case as a First Amendment issue.
The Associated Press quoted male juror Pat Gowdy: "We felt that a lot of rights have eroded in this country. Our freedom of speech may be the only one we have left to regain what we've lost."
Oprah told a cheering crowd outside Amarillo's federal courthouse: "Free speech not only lives it rocks!"
She testified she isn't a journalist but rather a moderator of discussion of issues and opinions. Oprah said people have a right to express their views.
Her attorney Charles Babcock argued the case was about the First Amendment "robust debate" and "the unfettered interchange of ideas."
The federal courts still may decide the case and constitutional issues because the cattlemen planned to appeal.
What really irked the cattlemen was a segment edited out of the questioned show. Comments by guests in the unused segment ruined their cows' reputations the cattlemen mooed.
In the segment the late Henny Youngman Don Rickles Andrew Dice Clay and Howard Stern practiced their comedy routines mostly insult jokes on a captive audience -- cows in a Panhandle feedlot.
Youngman used his famous line "Take my cow please."
Rickles told the captive cows "Hello dummies! You're so ugly when you were born the doctor slapped your mother."
The Diceman shouted at the bovine audience "Where'd you get that *#@!X+* head?! I have to tell 'ya that's the biggest *#@!X+* head I ever saw!"
Stern deadpanned to the four-legged test critters: "I've seen better private parts -- on me."
The comedians' attacks on the characters of the cows didn't work. The penned members of the focus group of cattle didn't laugh.
They just got mad.
CDMA2000 1X promises twice the voice capacity of current networks and data speeds of up to 144 kilobits per second initially. Realistically, Verizon said users should see speeds of 40 to 60 kilobits per second on average. Verizon said it will initially roll out 1X on 20 percent of its networks with nationwide availability by the end of the year. Source
Verison isn't calling it 3G -- the whole point of this article is that they haven't announced it at all. Where are you getting your 20-30k numbers? The Forbes link you gave says it IS 3G, and will provide 40-60kbps in the real world.
A more complete version of this article was released four days ago by C|Net. The decision only seems to effect the Chinese language versions.
The five free online file conversions that lamj mentioned are available at CreatePDF.Adobe.com. It allows you to convert from almost any document format, and even optimize for print or regular display. It will even let you to password protect the PDFs it produces, though this may require the non-trial version.
Actually, with the onset of Tagged PDF and PDF Reflow, paper size is completely variable. One excellent example of this is the Acrobat Reader for Palm. (Also PocketPC). These completely reformat the PDFs so they are viewable on the extremely skinny displays that PDAs have. In addition, in Acrobat 5 Reader you can reflow your PDF with larger fonts, maintaining the author-intended margins.
In the future, products like Acrobat Distiller Server will allow for documents to be automatically generated especially for certain display sizes, when reflow alone isn't enough. But for most documents, reflow automatically resizes fonts and margins wonderfully.
How long until a company comes along with another extremely restrictive license and no one complains? Everyone on slashdot always complains about repeat posts... eventually with more and more restrictive license attempts, Slashdot and other communities will stop informing us about them for fear of being redundant.
This happens all the time with other technologies, such as DoubleClick's ad tracking (though recently discontinued). The first company gets chastised, but then other companies come along and are no longer controversial enough for mass media to report.
Shouldn't something be done to stop licenses like this completely, without always resorting to consumer pressure?
You can still find evidence of the posts/sites in question!
The ComputerXpress Raging Bull forum was the message board used by the bulk of the defendants in this case. Undestone and Ogravity, still active, were defendants. Most of the offending posts have been removed, but there are some interesting posts by the defendants in the first 100 messages. Ogravity also set up a site about ComputerXpress and penny stock scams here. This site was mentioned in the appelate court opinion [pdf].
Keep in mind that ComputerXpress changed its name from Stop-n-Sock [nasd-otc:USAV], and used the domain CostPlusFive.com.
SVG specifications have been evolving for quite some time, and Adobe is one of the companies in the forefront of SVG acceptance. At Adobe's SVG website you can download the SVG plug-in (2.4meg, Win32/Mac) and then see demos of what SVG is capable of. One of the coolest things SVG can do over Flash is client-side image filters, such as marbled textures, flaming text, and embossing, without the user having to download a large raster image.
The biggest problem facing SVG going forward is the strong alliance between Microsoft and Macromedia, the makers of Flash. This alliance lead to the tight integration of Flash in Internet Explorer 5.5. Fortunately Adobe has worked out a deal with Microsoft to automatically download the SVG viewer on-demand in future releases, much like Internet Explorer automatically installs the Flash viewer now.
Personally I think the biggest strength of SVG lies in its text/xml format, because any current HTML generating tool (perl, php, cold fusion, asp) can generate SVG code just as easily.
I mean 2 and 11 billion kilometers. Doh.
It's the first outer moon to be discovered in 25 years. The three moons discovered in 1979 (Metis, Adrastea, and Thebe) are inner moons. The distinction between inner and outer moons arises from the fact that there are eight moons at a distance less than 2 million kilometers (the "inner" moons) and ten moons at a distance greater than 11 million kilometers. There are no moons between 2 and 11 million kilometers.
Satellite Dist(Mm) Found
--------- -------- -----
Metis 128 1979
Adrastea 129 1979
Amalthea 181 1892
Thebe 222 1979
Io 422 1610
Europa 671 1610
Ganymede 1070 1610
Callisto 1883 1610
Leda 11094 1974
Himalia 11480 1904
Lysithea 11720 1938
Elara 11737 1905
Ananke 21200 1951
Carme 22600 1938
Pasiphae 23500 1908
Sinope 23700 1914
S/1999 J1 24000 2000
Do you feel that the Linux community has fallen victim to Transmeta's brilliant public relations? Since Linus Torvalds has joined Transmeta, everyone has become aware of Transmeta's entire product line... and not only that, most of you are crazy about it! Don't get me wrong; Transmeta really does have a great product with Crusoe. However, I am curious as to how differently Crusoe would have been accepted had Torvalds not helped in its development.