My impression is that on the one hand he has SCO telling that they could win billions and billions of dollars from their lawsuits if the judge will just give them a chance, and on the other hand he has IBM, Novell and the US Trustee telling him "let's stick a fork in this turkey and call it done." And he knows neither side is impartial.
He probably thinks that, unless he wants to research the merits of SCO's case against IBM, Novell and the rest of the world, he can't make a reasonable evaluation of SCO's chances, nor is that his responsibility.
Therefore he chose the middle road. Leave SCO in Chapter 11, but assign a Trustee to run the business and evaluate SCO's business and legal prospects in their lawsuits.
Of course we know any tech-savvy Trustee will laugh at SCO's lawsuit lottery and recommend conversion to Chapter 7, and indeed the current US Trustee recommended just that.
Also, a past president (Carter?) banned all nuclear fuels reprocessing in the U.S. with an executive order. Back then, reprocessing = PUREX and banning PUREX was understandable (it WAS a major proliferation risk), but now there are many other reprocessing technologies that are not proliferation risks but are still banned under the wording of the executive order.
President Reagan lifted the ban in 1981, but did not provide the substantial subsidy that would have been necessary to start up commercial reprocessing.
an educated guess would be that as part of the contracts that apple signed with the various labels the music purchased is not allowed to flow on players which allow for easy redistribution of the content.
Be that as it may, if I didn't sign that contract and it's not in the EULA, then it's not my problem.
However my point was that Pystar was clearly in violation of Apple's operating system license agreement while the Palm Pre, to the best of my knowledge, is not.
The Pre pretending to be an iPhone when connecting to iTunes is similar to Psystar making PCs think they're Macs.
Well, it may seem similar, but Pystar was clearly violating Apple's license that only allows Apple's operating system on Apple hardware.
I don't know of anywhere in the iTunes license that prohibits downloading songs to non-Apple hardware, like the Palm Pre. Perhaps Apple will change that in their next update to iTunes.
Let's start a commercial space station. First, connect a module to the ISS. Then, when those idiots plan to burn it down in 2016 via re-entry, disconnect it and start a new space station with that single module.
The biggest problem from a space development point of view is that the ISS's orbit has too high an inclination.
So it's useless as a waystation for flights to geosync orbit, the moon or mars, which is where all the interesting stuff is. Anything you attach to ISS is going to have the same problem.
What you want to do is throw some inflatable modules from Bigelow Aerospace into equitorial or near-equitorial orbit and assemble a private, commercial station.
Does SCO even have the right to sell their Unix business without the approval of Novell?
I don't think SCO requires Novell's approval, I don't think the original SCO required Novell's approval to sell their Unix business to then Caldera, but I admit I could be wrong.
But they most definitely require the bankruptcy court's approval.
And if it's anything like SCO's last "deal", Novell, IBM and the US Trustee are going to have a lot to say about it in court.
Is this recent? I recall TPB years ago claiming the reason their site was legal because there were no laws against being an accessory to copyright infringment in Sweden, as there were in other countries.
Granted, I expected the Swedish legislature or whatever to close that loophole.
Having the judge be a member of copyright protection organizations isn't bias. Copyright is the law, and he's a judge...how is this a story?
The specific issue is that (as I understand it) being an accessory to copyright infringement isn't, or wasn't, a crime in Sweden like it is in most other countries (I don't know if that's changed recently or not).
You may not agree with it, but judges can't (or shouldn't) go around making up laws.
1. The disposal of the waste is not done in an environmentally responsible way.
Much of what we consider "waste" could be reprocessed into perfectly good nuclear fuel. We don't do it because... Well, I don't know why, but other countries like Japan and France do.
No, making an area too radioactive to support life for the next 10,000 years is NOT environmentally responsible.
Think it through. First, reprocessing reduces the amount of actual "waste" to a fraction of the original. Second, the most radioactive elements have the shortest half-lives. So that the high-level radioactive "waste" is going to be virtually gone after 500 to 600 years, not 10,000 years. A significant amount of time but nowhere near 10,000 years.
Yeah, the low-level stuff is going to take longer, but after 500 to 600 years the "waste" is going to be about as radioactive as the ore it was mined from. Do you compulsively worry about Uranium mines in the US and Canada?
Heck, if you really want to get rid of it, just glassify it and dump it in a subduction zone and return it to the earth's core.
2. The current market cost of nuclear energy does not reflect the cost environmentally responsible waste disposal.
Reprocess the "waste", which significantly reduces the amount of actual "waste", and sell the fuel back to the utilities.
3. Nuclear energy is inherently dangerous, and even a small accident/sabotage can become a major catastrophe.
Three Mile Island was the worst disaster in a commercial nuclear power plant in US history, where almost everything that could go wrong did go wrong, and the release of radioactive material into the environment was virtually negligible. And we have safer designs now.
4. Nuclear energy is not sustainable. When the fuel supplies are gone, so is the energy.
First, we can extend our nuclear fuel supply by reprocessing our nuclear "waste". Second, Thorium is about 4 times as abundent as Uranium and can be used with Uranium as fuel. Third, there are breeder reactors that produce more fuel than they consume so we never have to run out.
One thing that always struck me about nuclear power proponents was the myopia of the larger issues.
One thing that always struck me about nuclear power opponents is that they don't want to find solutions to larger issues.
Where are you going to house and feed the millions of people in NYC, Washington DC, Boston, etc, etc? Just drive them out into the countryside and drop them off?
Even then, people can/will buy generators, will buy water left in the stores.
Generators will sell out in an hour, food and water will sell out in a day. Warehouses will be empty in about a week. Most factories and processing plants will only have limited emergency power and that's usually only designed for a few hours or days of use. After that you're SOL.
Apart from still selling netbook pros and actively selling tens of thousands in 2006.
Well, Ars suggests Psion's revenue claims are suspect.
These numbers are somewhat suspect for two reasons. First, Psion claims that peak netBook revenue occurred in 2006, three years after the netBook Pro went off the market and the same year Psion renewed its trademark. How could users buy two million dollars of accessories for only $135,000 worth of netBooks? The timing is off.
Second, the numbers seem too small. The netBook sold for $1300, so Psion's $5.35 million in total sales over the last ten years would amount to a mere 4100 netbooks. This seems too low, even for a fizzled product, especially considering the relative success of the Psion 3 and Psion 5 in the 90s.
Just taking Psion's revenue claims of US$2073207 (from the Ars article) in 2006 (their alleged peak year). $2073207 divided by $1300 is just under 1600 units. Hardly tens of thousands.
But I don't know enough to make a judgement, I'm just saying.
I have to say I'm with Psion on this one, their competitors have released a near-identical product and used their brand name, of course they're pissed. Legally speaking the size of their market share has zero relevance.
Except that Psion appearently stopped selling netbooks 6 years ago, in 2003. Although they appearently renewed their trademark in 2006.
My understanding is that this problem is common in the food industry. Food companies often produce small quantities of a product to maintain their trademarks, because in a case like this they can point and say "see, we're still using this trademark".
But Psion appearently completely stopped producing netbooks.
I remember seeing a Zippy comic strip taped to a door at the electronic arts building of my alma mater in 1990. It had him walking along, laughing, saying, "Satellite Uplink" repeatedly, similar to your post.
To what does this refer? I've been pondering it for 18 years.
As you've observed, a recurring theme in the Zippy comic strip is for Zippy to simply repeat a phrase over and over again.
Zippy is easier to understand once you stop expecting it to make sense.
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However, the judge's reasoning is far from clear.
My impression is that on the one hand he has SCO telling that they could win billions and billions of dollars from their lawsuits if the judge will just give them a chance, and on the other hand he has IBM, Novell and the US Trustee telling him "let's stick a fork in this turkey and call it done." And he knows neither side is impartial.
He probably thinks that, unless he wants to research the merits of SCO's case against IBM, Novell and the rest of the world, he can't make a reasonable evaluation of SCO's chances, nor is that his responsibility.
Therefore he chose the middle road. Leave SCO in Chapter 11, but assign a Trustee to run the business and evaluate SCO's business and legal prospects in their lawsuits.
Of course we know any tech-savvy Trustee will laugh at SCO's lawsuit lottery and recommend conversion to Chapter 7, and indeed the current US Trustee recommended just that.
The usual bureacratic solution in a case like this is to make it illegal to hook-up oscilloscopes to parking meters in San Francisco.
Quibble. President Reagan lifted the ban in 1981.
an educated guess would be that as part of the contracts that apple signed with the various labels the music purchased is not allowed to flow on players which allow for easy redistribution of the content.
Be that as it may, if I didn't sign that contract and it's not in the EULA, then it's not my problem.
However my point was that Pystar was clearly in violation of Apple's operating system license agreement while the Palm Pre, to the best of my knowledge, is not.
The Pre pretending to be an iPhone when connecting to iTunes is similar to Psystar making PCs think they're Macs.
Well, it may seem similar, but Pystar was clearly violating Apple's license that only allows Apple's operating system on Apple hardware.
I don't know of anywhere in the iTunes license that prohibits downloading songs to non-Apple hardware, like the Palm Pre. Perhaps Apple will change that in their next update to iTunes.
Someone please correct me if I'm wrong.
Let's start a commercial space station. First, connect a module to the ISS. Then, when those idiots plan to burn it down in 2016 via re-entry, disconnect it and start a new space station with that single module.
The biggest problem from a space development point of view is that the ISS's orbit has too high an inclination.
So it's useless as a waystation for flights to geosync orbit, the moon or mars, which is where all the interesting stuff is. Anything you attach to ISS is going to have the same problem.
What you want to do is throw some inflatable modules from Bigelow Aerospace into equitorial or near-equitorial orbit and assemble a private, commercial station.
It runs Linux and I find it difficult to believe that they are making any serious attempt to "lock it down."
If you can't access at least a shell prompt out of the box, I'm sure someone will post a youtube how-to video within 5 minutes of release.
I don't think SCO requires Novell's approval, I don't think the original SCO required Novell's approval to sell their Unix business to then Caldera, but I admit I could be wrong.
But they most definitely require the bankruptcy court's approval.
And if it's anything like SCO's last "deal", Novell, IBM and the US Trustee are going to have a lot to say about it in court.
Unless I'm mistaken (and I probably am), a person must perform a miracle before they can be declared a saint.
If he wins, that would probably qualify.
Is this recent? I recall TPB years ago claiming the reason their site was legal because there were no laws against being an accessory to copyright infringment in Sweden, as there were in other countries.
Granted, I expected the Swedish legislature or whatever to close that loophole.
The specific issue is that (as I understand it) being an accessory to copyright infringement isn't, or wasn't, a crime in Sweden like it is in most other countries (I don't know if that's changed recently or not).
You may not agree with it, but judges can't (or shouldn't) go around making up laws.
Much of what we consider "waste" could be reprocessed into perfectly good nuclear fuel. We don't do it because... Well, I don't know why, but other countries like Japan and France do.
Think it through. First, reprocessing reduces the amount of actual "waste" to a fraction of the original. Second, the most radioactive elements have the shortest half-lives. So that the high-level radioactive "waste" is going to be virtually gone after 500 to 600 years, not 10,000 years. A significant amount of time but nowhere near 10,000 years.
Yeah, the low-level stuff is going to take longer, but after 500 to 600 years the "waste" is going to be about as radioactive as the ore it was mined from. Do you compulsively worry about Uranium mines in the US and Canada?
Heck, if you really want to get rid of it, just glassify it and dump it in a subduction zone and return it to the earth's core.
Reprocess the "waste", which significantly reduces the amount of actual "waste", and sell the fuel back to the utilities.
Three Mile Island was the worst disaster in a commercial nuclear power plant in US history, where almost everything that could go wrong did go wrong, and the release of radioactive material into the environment was virtually negligible. And we have safer designs now.
First, we can extend our nuclear fuel supply by reprocessing our nuclear "waste". Second, Thorium is about 4 times as abundent as Uranium and can be used with Uranium as fuel. Third, there are breeder reactors that produce more fuel than they consume so we never have to run out.
One thing that always struck me about nuclear power opponents is that they don't want to find solutions to larger issues.
... build more nuclear power plants.
Yeah, I know, -1 Flamebait.
Here ya go.
Why would they have no means of leaving?
Where are you going to house and feed the millions of people in NYC, Washington DC, Boston, etc, etc? Just drive them out into the countryside and drop them off?
Even then, people can/will buy generators, will buy water left in the stores.
Generators will sell out in an hour, food and water will sell out in a day. Warehouses will be empty in about a week. Most factories and processing plants will only have limited emergency power and that's usually only designed for a few hours or days of use. After that you're SOL.
Apart from still selling netbook pros and actively selling tens of thousands in 2006.
Well, Ars suggests Psion's revenue claims are suspect.
Just taking Psion's revenue claims of US$2073207 (from the Ars article) in 2006 (their alleged peak year). $2073207 divided by $1300 is just under 1600 units. Hardly tens of thousands.
But I don't know enough to make a judgement, I'm just saying.
I have to say I'm with Psion on this one, their competitors have released a near-identical product and used their brand name, of course they're pissed. Legally speaking the size of their market share has zero relevance.
Except that Psion appearently stopped selling netbooks 6 years ago, in 2003. Although they appearently renewed their trademark in 2006.
My understanding is that this problem is common in the food industry. Food companies often produce small quantities of a product to maintain their trademarks, because in a case like this they can point and say "see, we're still using this trademark".
But Psion appearently completely stopped producing netbooks.
I'm not saying who's right, I'm just saying.
You said it more succinctly than I was going to.
Command and Conquer Gold GDI and NOD ISOs are free, legal downloads.
Along with MechCommander, MechCommander 2 and MechCommander Gold.
Yum.
As you've observed, a recurring theme in the Zippy comic strip is for Zippy to simply repeat a phrase over and over again.
Zippy is easier to understand once you stop expecting it to make sense.
Great. Now I have a picture in my mind of Zippy incessantly repeating "Brownian Ratchet, Brownian Ratchet, Brownian Ratchet".
Better put a warning label on them, just in case.
Wasn't there also something called microwaveable Ice Cream?
You may be thinking of thermoacoustic refrigeration.
Ben and Jerry's Ice Cream funded some research at Pennsylvania State University to develop a thermoacoustic chiller for their company.
Motorized barstools are cooler.