The pirating of games is illegal in itself. Why should pirating games make another device illegal?
Crowbars aren't illegal even if they may be used to
break into a house. CD writers aren't illegal even though they may be used to, and are extensively used to, pirate music.
Whether it may be easier for Sony to prevent copying or not with the mods in question (I've no idea - I couldn't care less about Playstation), my point still stands: The courts are increasingly applying laws in a way that is eroding rights we have for practically everything else than software and assorted computer equipment.
It's a worrying trend, because it means that rights that people fought long and hard to get in the first place are now being taken away with the excuse that software and computers is something completely different, and require different rules.
Why?
What makes computer software more worthy of protection and restrictions than a printed book?
What makes computer hardware more worthy of protection than a car?
And no, Sony losing money for each PS sold isn't a good argument - if Sony can't recoup those costs without coopting the law, then Sonys business model is flawed.
This is wrong. Ownership does not imply copyright - the two are completely orthogonal.
When you buy a book you own it. That does not give you copyright to the text embodied in it - you are still bound by copyright law that allow you to make copies for personal use (in most countries anyway), and in other very restricted circumstances, and that clearly forbid you from mass copying whether for profit or not.
The same copyright laws protect the text of the
book whether it is in printed or electronic form.
The same way, if you were buying software outright instead of buying a license to use it, you would
be buying that embodiment on it, subject to all the same constraints of copyright law.
In other words your argument is fatally flawed, but it is a good example of exactly the kind of arguments that the software industry (and indeed the movie and music industry) have been trying to use in order to justify their licensing scheme.
Licenses are being used not to enforce copyright - copyright law enforces copyright - they are there to enforce restrictions that go beyond the protection that is given by law.
Ever heard of the first sale doctrine? Essentially, it used to be the case that whenever a product had been sold to you, the seller had no say on how you used their product. That is, if you wanted to buy a TV and modify it to use it as a spaceship, that's your right, and nothing the TV manufacturer does can take that right away from you in countries where the
first sale doctrine is law.
Now the first sale doctrine is being eroded in two ways:
1) software is typically "licensed", not sold. If courts continue to find that software, even when distributed shrink wrapped for a one off fee can legally be considered to be licensed and not sold, software makers can put a lot more restrictions on their customers than with an outright sale. For licensed products you are not the owner, you are merely granted certain rights to the product for a specified time period (which may be unlimited) under certain terms. If you'd bought the product outright, you'd only be restricted by law, not by
license terms dictated by the owner.
2) Companies are given increasing consessions for
using patent, copyright and trade secret laws to make modifications to their products impractical - the first use doctrine will still protect you in many countries against doing modification yourself, but increasingly consessions made by the courts prevents people from providing mods or doing them for profit.
Why should this be right?
Would you tolerate a "license agreement" the next time you buy a car that prevent you from putting in a different car stereo, or that prevents you from opening the hood and doing modifications that haven't been bought from the manufacturer and approved by them?
The car isn't theirs anymore, so why should they have any say on how you use it, as long as you don't violate copyright, trademark or patent law in building exact duplicates for sale?
Yet with software and, increasingly, hardware, we tolerate buying "licenses" instead of buying the product, and being tied down to restrictive agreements that would be null and void or even illegal in most other cases. In many jurisdictions, a product will normally be considered to be sold outright if the license is perpetual and there is only one fixed payment when aquiring the license, and any license agreement
can then be found to be invalid - unfortunately,
software and computer related hardware seems to be treated as an exception more and more places.
No. Yahoo is banking on the fact that they will be providing content that isn't freely available in electronic form anywhere, including from Google. That include academic journals and all kind of magazines that does not publish their full issues for free on the net.
Maybe you won't, but if the database is good I can see lots of universities paying for the Yahoo services. What they're hinting at is what Northern Light has been doing for a long time - charging for contect which isn't available for free on the internet, but which can be very interesting.
I'd love to pay, for instance to have instant access to all back articles from Dr Dobbs Journal or C/C++ Users Journal over the internet, as that is stuff that isn't available on the net today (both of them only publish a small number of their articles online). Today, if you want electronic access to back issues of those journals, you need to buy their CDs. Which is fine when you happen to
have the CD around when you need it. But having access to it over the net would be so much more convenient.
Northern Light doesn't have anywhere near the traffic volume that Yahoo has. As I see it Northern Lights problem isn't their cost of satisfying each transaction, but that their base costs have been too high to justify a relatively low volume service.
If Yahoo pushes this hard to all their search users,
then their volume will likely be a lot higher.
Imagine every Yahoo search resulting in a few hits to premium documents first, and then the normal search results. If you choose to click on the links for the premium documents, you go to a page with the abstract, the price, and information about the service (sort of what Northern Light does now). This is an incredible marketing channel if you happen to have the traffic volume Yahoo has.
If they are not going to turn into the Gestapo and break down peoples doors any time soon, then why do they need the right to do it?
Either they have added language in their that they don't see the consequences of, in which case they'll fix it quickly once people make a fuss over it, or they do indeed see uses for these clauses.
In either case it's worth spending time on.
Protection of privacy and of your freedoms are useless if noone wants to abuse them. They are there as a protection in case someone decides to abuse them in the future.
It's not the same. He has been indicted in Norway, because they claim he has broken Norwegian law.
Besides, there is no extradition treaty between Norway and the US, and Norwegian courts are in general careful about extraditing anyone to the US due to a general scepticism of the US court system.
What the "doomsday prinsiple" referred to on the
site you linked says can be distilled into: "given probability X of humanity becoming extinct at any point, then the probability of humanity being extinct increases over time." That is of course true. They follow that up with saying "thus the
more humans have lived before you, the more likely
it is that you are towards the end of the total number of people that will be born". Which is also true.
However, the first problem is that we don't know how likely it is that humanity will become extinct at any one point in time.
Further, all other factors being equal (which they obviously aren't due to changes in population size, changes in our environment, changes in technology level etc.), the longer humanity survives, the more statistical reason we have to adjust our chance of extinction at any one point in time down, as if the chance of extinction is high, then it would be highly unlikely that we'd
made it this far.
Given your reference to applying the argument to
my age, then by your reasoning, the older I get the higher my chance of dying soon is. But this is plain wrong for the general case, and can easily be demonstrated to be by looking at real data.
The reason it is wrong is that we have no fixed upper limit on the length of our life and no fixed statistical chance of dying at any point in
our life. At birth, my chances of dying at various ages can be calculated fairly well, and from that my chance of being dead at any particular point in time is relatively easy to calculate, since we have a vast amount of data on it, and it will approach 100% after a fixed amount of time.
But at any given time it is not given that if I live an hour longer, my chances of dying in the next ten year increases. In fact you'll find that all else being equal (I don't suddenly decide to live a healthy life, for instance), for many time intervals my chances of dying in the next ten years will decrease.
Why? Because at some ages we are more likely to die than others. If you survive your first year, for instance, you are more likely to be free of birth defects that would kill you early, and thus your life expectancy increases. The same is true for many other periods of your life, even towards the end: Living past a certain age may indicate that you're at low risc for a lot of diseases and problems that statistically would show up in most high risc patients before that age, and thus give you a statistically a higher chance of living ten more years than what you had a year or two earlier.
The same line of argument holds for the human race, but we can't calculate the actual chance of extinction because we have no data to calculate the chances with. We can make rough guesstimates, but thats it. Even so, it is pretty clear that if we just take factors we can estimate, the chance of survival will increase or decrease over time.
To go back to the doomsday principle, the example on their webpages uses a constant population for any unit of time. This is clearly not true for humanity, as the number has been growing steadily, so using the "birth number" as they suggest would flaw their entire argument.
If the entire population of humanity over time will reach 200 billion, then you also need to know the distribution in time of those 200 billion to know whether it is likely or not that you should be conserned about being number 199 billion.
This is easily illustrated by pointing out that common estimates of the number of people that have already died are typically lower than the current population of earth.
The problem is again that we don't know the chance of extinction, we have now basis for assuming we know the expansion of the human race in numbers or
placement in the galaxy, nor do we have any basis for estimating the total number of humans that will live.
All of this means that we lack the fundamental basis for using the doomsday principle for anything but hyperbole.
Indeed, the fundamental assumption of the doomsday principle is making an estimate of the chance of extinction at any point in time, and that a higher
number of people born before you means that humanity is more likely to go extinct soon.
But this breaks down as it is easily shown that as with age, for some increases the probability of extinction will indeed go down. Given a population of 1 I give you a close to 100% chance of extinction after 120 years. If that population is increased to two, the chance is relatively high that they will be of opposite sex, capable of having children, and will have children. The chance of reaching 120 before extinction is still small, but it is most certainly higher.
Thus, you having a high "birth number" may actually mean that the chance of humanity to survive the next 1000 years or a million years from your birth may be higher than it would have been had you been born a generation ago, when the population was dramatically smaller. Of course a lot of other factors also affect this.
To finally touch on the aliens. Yes, if we get to
randomly choose who to become from X number of individuals being born, and a large part of X are non humans, then the chance of choosing human would be small.
However, we have no reason to assume that we ended up as humans as a result of a random process. Actually we have tons of reasons to assume we ended up humans as a decidedly non-random biological process.
And even if we did end up human on a completely
random basis, to be able to estimate the likely
size of an alien population, we would need to know
at the very least the chance of us becoming human.
Currently we can't tell whether our data sample
is accurate (if there's no aliens), or completely
useless (if there are lots of aliens, and we just
don't know about them), so we can't make any reasonable assumptions about that chance.
Which means that using self observations is completely futile and statistically utterly bogus - it's like trying to calculate the likelyhood of being born black by taking a sample of white babies, isolating them at birth so they can't know anything about the existence of black people, and letting them estimate the chance of that existence without using any knowledge of biology.
Whether you put (C) in your software doesn't affect who has the copyright, and in many cases university rules say that anything you create while a student or employee that uses university resources will automatically belong to the university.
Re:Nightmarish "Progress"
on
The Euro
·
· Score: 2
Neither is required for the Euro to succeed. Within half a year none of the currencies replaced by the Euro will be legal tender anymore anywhere. That means that the 12 countries using Euro all will require payment of taxes in Euro, and practically all trading in those countries will occur in Euro.
This is not a toy currency - it is a currency that now has a market as large as the US market, and within a few years massively larger as new countries join the EU and accept the Euro.
You can infer no such thing, as the "imaginary time" thing makes it perfectly possible that in Tolkiens "imaginary time" God slipped into an alternate dimension/timeline/universe/your-preferred-choice- here,
and Something Else took its place for a while...
I like it, and I think that one of the reasons it is so powerful is that it is taken from mythology - it is not just pulled out of the air. Sure, it's still fantasy, but its fantasy but tradition, and fantasy that people used to believe in hundreds of years ago. Both dwarves and elves for instance have an integral part in norse mythology (and indeed Tolkien seems to have taken quite a few names from there).
Several of the other characters as well have names
from norse mythology. If you read the Seeress prophecy (Voluspa), you'll find a whole load of names that are used in Lord of the rings. Some of
the names from these sections of Voluspa, for instance, should be familiar (yes, I know there's
tons of names in them that Tolkien didn't use too:):
10.
Then Módsognir became
the greatest
of all the dwarfs,
and Durin the other;
they made many
manlike figures
dwarfs of earth,
as Durin said.
11.
Nýi, Nidi,
Nordri, Sudri,
Austri, Vestri,
Althjóf, Dvalin,
Bívor, Bávor,
Bömbur, Nóri,
Án and Ánar,
Ái, Mjödvitnir.
12.
Veig and Gandálf,
Vindálf and Thorin,
Thrór and Thráin,
Thekk, Lit and Vit,
Nár and Nárád,
I have now correctly,
Regin and Rádsvid,
reported the dwarfs.
That's entirely up to the filesystem. And with ext2fs at least, they are NOT stored right "beside the filename" in the directory entry - they are stored in the i-nodes that are just referenced from the directory entry.
Most people here seem to miss the point. Lindows is going after the Windows desktop market, not the Linux market. It is being positioned as an alternative to Windows, not to Linux. The ability to run Windows apps is what matters, and the ability to run Linux app is just an added bonus.
The only real desktop market at this time is for Windows desktops. So how to you compete in that market? The most obvious answer is: Run Windows apps as well as Windows, and do something that Windows doesn't do. In this case, they're trying to achieve that by taking Wine on Linux, extend it and package it as a Windows clone.
They get to benefit from all driver work and performance enhancements done by the open source community for Linux and Wine, and add to that to be able to put out a Windows environment at far lower development cost than Microsoft. Leveraging open source is quite possibly the ONLY way
to compete in the Windows market, considering the
immense sales revenues Microsoft has to fund their development.
This is a good thing, regardless of whether you like Windows or not: If Lindows succeeds, Microsoft will be forced to cut prices to compete.
If you like Windows you will benefit from lower prices, if you hate Windows you will benefit from having Microsoft busy spending their resources on a more direct competitor as well as with less money to spend on squashing competitors, as being forced to cut prices will have a very real effect on their earnings.
His employer has apparently been pushing for this solution for a long time, since they face "only"
a maximum of 500.000 USD in fines, while Dmitri would face years in prison and a much larger fine, and Elcomsoft is on trial anyway. Having a someone they know and trust added as a witness where they stand to loose a maximum of 500.000 USD (and how would a US court manage to force a Russian company to pay a fine?) seems like a low price for them for freeing an employee and friend.
The maximum punishment for ElcomSoft is 500.000 USD. It's highly unlikely that a few sales will cause the court to come back with the maximum punishment. Hardly much of a set of bargaining chips for DOJ.
We weren't "given" anything from Sweden. Norway was under Swedish rule from 1814 to 1905 because Norway was given to the Swedes as a punishment for Denmark for supporting Napoleon in the Napoleonic wars.
Before then Norway was under Danish rule from the 1300's, and prior to that it was a sovereign monarchy.
Re:Innovation? Yes. Better than a scooter? No.
on
This is IT?
·
· Score: 2
Regardless of what you may think about the quality of innovation, he at least knows how to make money, as he has shown in the past. As we all know (Bill Gates, anyone?), being able to makes tons of money does not equate to necessarily knowing how to make quality products. But apart from what I think about Segway for other reasons, I think Kamen is a good enough businessman that he stands a good chance of making money on this.
Which means there's a good chance of getting people to buy them.
And Kamen isn't the only one that is convinced. Doerr (one of the main investors) hasn't exactly gotten where he is today by gambling.
8mph is about the same as average car speeds during rush hour in London, and I'm sure it's not much better in other crowded cities.
Re:redundancy results in price
on
This is IT?
·
· Score: 2
Uhm, because the gyros and the boards are what keeps it stable? Would you like a gyro or board to fail when you're leaning forward going at max speed, and have it fall over?
Its speed is higher than the average speed in rush hour in central London... So why does people still
drive here? Because it beats the tube and it beats walking if you need to go far enough...
I'd buy one in an instant, and the cost would easily be recovered by the drop in rent I'd get from being able to move 2-3 times further away from the office.
Slashdot Mirror
Crowbars aren't illegal even if they may be used to break into a house. CD writers aren't illegal even though they may be used to, and are extensively used to, pirate music.
Whether it may be easier for Sony to prevent copying or not with the mods in question (I've no idea - I couldn't care less about Playstation), my point still stands: The courts are increasingly applying laws in a way that is eroding rights we have for practically everything else than software and assorted computer equipment.
It's a worrying trend, because it means that rights that people fought long and hard to get in the first place are now being taken away with the excuse that software and computers is something completely different, and require different rules.
Why?
What makes computer software more worthy of protection and restrictions than a printed book?
What makes computer hardware more worthy of protection than a car?
And no, Sony losing money for each PS sold isn't a good argument - if Sony can't recoup those costs without coopting the law, then Sonys business model is flawed.
When you buy a book you own it. That does not give you copyright to the text embodied in it - you are still bound by copyright law that allow you to make copies for personal use (in most countries anyway), and in other very restricted circumstances, and that clearly forbid you from mass copying whether for profit or not.
The same copyright laws protect the text of the book whether it is in printed or electronic form.
The same way, if you were buying software outright instead of buying a license to use it, you would be buying that embodiment on it, subject to all the same constraints of copyright law.
In other words your argument is fatally flawed, but it is a good example of exactly the kind of arguments that the software industry (and indeed the movie and music industry) have been trying to use in order to justify their licensing scheme.
Licenses are being used not to enforce copyright - copyright law enforces copyright - they are there to enforce restrictions that go beyond the protection that is given by law.
Now the first sale doctrine is being eroded in two ways:
1) software is typically "licensed", not sold. If courts continue to find that software, even when distributed shrink wrapped for a one off fee can legally be considered to be licensed and not sold, software makers can put a lot more restrictions on their customers than with an outright sale. For licensed products you are not the owner, you are merely granted certain rights to the product for a specified time period (which may be unlimited) under certain terms. If you'd bought the product outright, you'd only be restricted by law, not by license terms dictated by the owner.
2) Companies are given increasing consessions for using patent, copyright and trade secret laws to make modifications to their products impractical - the first use doctrine will still protect you in many countries against doing modification yourself, but increasingly consessions made by the courts prevents people from providing mods or doing them for profit.
Why should this be right?
Would you tolerate a "license agreement" the next time you buy a car that prevent you from putting in a different car stereo, or that prevents you from opening the hood and doing modifications that haven't been bought from the manufacturer and approved by them?
The car isn't theirs anymore, so why should they have any say on how you use it, as long as you don't violate copyright, trademark or patent law in building exact duplicates for sale?
Yet with software and, increasingly, hardware, we tolerate buying "licenses" instead of buying the product, and being tied down to restrictive agreements that would be null and void or even illegal in most other cases. In many jurisdictions, a product will normally be considered to be sold outright if the license is perpetual and there is only one fixed payment when aquiring the license, and any license agreement can then be found to be invalid - unfortunately, software and computer related hardware seems to be treated as an exception more and more places.
I'd love to pay, for instance to have instant access to all back articles from Dr Dobbs Journal or C/C++ Users Journal over the internet, as that is stuff that isn't available on the net today (both of them only publish a small number of their articles online). Today, if you want electronic access to back issues of those journals, you need to buy their CDs. Which is fine when you happen to have the CD around when you need it. But having access to it over the net would be so much more convenient.
If Yahoo pushes this hard to all their search users, then their volume will likely be a lot higher.
Imagine every Yahoo search resulting in a few hits to premium documents first, and then the normal search results. If you choose to click on the links for the premium documents, you go to a page with the abstract, the price, and information about the service (sort of what Northern Light does now). This is an incredible marketing channel if you happen to have the traffic volume Yahoo has.
Either they have added language in their that they don't see the consequences of, in which case they'll fix it quickly once people make a fuss over it, or they do indeed see uses for these clauses.
In either case it's worth spending time on.
Protection of privacy and of your freedoms are useless if noone wants to abuse them. They are there as a protection in case someone decides to abuse them in the future.
It's not the same. He has been indicted in Norway, because they claim he has broken Norwegian law. Besides, there is no extradition treaty between Norway and the US, and Norwegian courts are in general careful about extraditing anyone to the US due to a general scepticism of the US court system.
What the "doomsday prinsiple" referred to on the site you linked says can be distilled into: "given probability X of humanity becoming extinct at any point, then the probability of humanity being extinct increases over time." That is of course true. They follow that up with saying "thus the more humans have lived before you, the more likely it is that you are towards the end of the total number of people that will be born". Which is also true.
However, the first problem is that we don't know how likely it is that humanity will become extinct at any one point in time.
Further, all other factors being equal (which they obviously aren't due to changes in population size, changes in our environment, changes in technology level etc.), the longer humanity survives, the more statistical reason we have to adjust our chance of extinction at any one point in time down, as if the chance of extinction is high, then it would be highly unlikely that we'd made it this far.
Given your reference to applying the argument to my age, then by your reasoning, the older I get the higher my chance of dying soon is. But this is plain wrong for the general case, and can easily be demonstrated to be by looking at real data.
The reason it is wrong is that we have no fixed upper limit on the length of our life and no fixed statistical chance of dying at any point in our life. At birth, my chances of dying at various ages can be calculated fairly well, and from that my chance of being dead at any particular point in time is relatively easy to calculate, since we have a vast amount of data on it, and it will approach 100% after a fixed amount of time.
But at any given time it is not given that if I live an hour longer, my chances of dying in the next ten year increases. In fact you'll find that all else being equal (I don't suddenly decide to live a healthy life, for instance), for many time intervals my chances of dying in the next ten years will decrease.
Why? Because at some ages we are more likely to die than others. If you survive your first year, for instance, you are more likely to be free of birth defects that would kill you early, and thus your life expectancy increases. The same is true for many other periods of your life, even towards the end: Living past a certain age may indicate that you're at low risc for a lot of diseases and problems that statistically would show up in most high risc patients before that age, and thus give you a statistically a higher chance of living ten more years than what you had a year or two earlier.
The same line of argument holds for the human race, but we can't calculate the actual chance of extinction because we have no data to calculate the chances with. We can make rough guesstimates, but thats it. Even so, it is pretty clear that if we just take factors we can estimate, the chance of survival will increase or decrease over time.
To go back to the doomsday principle, the example on their webpages uses a constant population for any unit of time. This is clearly not true for humanity, as the number has been growing steadily, so using the "birth number" as they suggest would flaw their entire argument.
If the entire population of humanity over time will reach 200 billion, then you also need to know the distribution in time of those 200 billion to know whether it is likely or not that you should be conserned about being number 199 billion.
This is easily illustrated by pointing out that common estimates of the number of people that have already died are typically lower than the current population of earth.
The problem is again that we don't know the chance of extinction, we have now basis for assuming we know the expansion of the human race in numbers or placement in the galaxy, nor do we have any basis for estimating the total number of humans that will live.
All of this means that we lack the fundamental basis for using the doomsday principle for anything but hyperbole.
Indeed, the fundamental assumption of the doomsday principle is making an estimate of the chance of extinction at any point in time, and that a higher number of people born before you means that humanity is more likely to go extinct soon.
But this breaks down as it is easily shown that as with age, for some increases the probability of extinction will indeed go down. Given a population of 1 I give you a close to 100% chance of extinction after 120 years. If that population is increased to two, the chance is relatively high that they will be of opposite sex, capable of having children, and will have children. The chance of reaching 120 before extinction is still small, but it is most certainly higher.
Thus, you having a high "birth number" may actually mean that the chance of humanity to survive the next 1000 years or a million years from your birth may be higher than it would have been had you been born a generation ago, when the population was dramatically smaller. Of course a lot of other factors also affect this.
To finally touch on the aliens. Yes, if we get to randomly choose who to become from X number of individuals being born, and a large part of X are non humans, then the chance of choosing human would be small.
However, we have no reason to assume that we ended up as humans as a result of a random process. Actually we have tons of reasons to assume we ended up humans as a decidedly non-random biological process.
And even if we did end up human on a completely random basis, to be able to estimate the likely size of an alien population, we would need to know at the very least the chance of us becoming human.
Currently we can't tell whether our data sample is accurate (if there's no aliens), or completely useless (if there are lots of aliens, and we just don't know about them), so we can't make any reasonable assumptions about that chance.
Which means that using self observations is completely futile and statistically utterly bogus - it's like trying to calculate the likelyhood of being born black by taking a sample of white babies, isolating them at birth so they can't know anything about the existence of black people, and letting them estimate the chance of that existence without using any knowledge of biology.
Whether you put (C) in your software doesn't affect who has the copyright, and in many cases university rules say that anything you create while a student or employee that uses university resources will automatically belong to the university.
This is not a toy currency - it is a currency that now has a market as large as the US market, and within a few years massively larger as new countries join the EU and accept the Euro.
The common English translation is "The seeress prophecy", which a search should confirm.
Yes, I'm just being difficult :-)
I like it, and I think that one of the reasons it is so powerful is that it is taken from mythology - it is not just pulled out of the air. Sure, it's still fantasy, but its fantasy but tradition, and fantasy that people used to believe in hundreds of years ago. Both dwarves and elves for instance have an integral part in norse mythology (and indeed Tolkien seems to have taken quite a few names from there).
10. Then Módsognir became the greatest of all the dwarfs, and Durin the other; they made many manlike figures dwarfs of earth, as Durin said.
11. Nýi, Nidi, Nordri, Sudri, Austri, Vestri, Althjóf, Dvalin, Bívor, Bávor, Bömbur, Nóri, Án and Ánar, Ái, Mjödvitnir.
12. Veig and Gandálf, Vindálf and Thorin, Thrór and Thráin, Thekk, Lit and Vit, Nár and Nárád, I have now correctly, Regin and Rádsvid, reported the dwarfs.
Read the article - this point is actually discussed in it, but several people dismisses it.
That's entirely up to the filesystem. And with ext2fs at least, they are NOT stored right "beside the filename" in the directory entry - they are stored in the i-nodes that are just referenced from the directory entry.
The only real desktop market at this time is for Windows desktops. So how to you compete in that market? The most obvious answer is: Run Windows apps as well as Windows, and do something that Windows doesn't do. In this case, they're trying to achieve that by taking Wine on Linux, extend it and package it as a Windows clone.
They get to benefit from all driver work and performance enhancements done by the open source community for Linux and Wine, and add to that to be able to put out a Windows environment at far lower development cost than Microsoft. Leveraging open source is quite possibly the ONLY way to compete in the Windows market, considering the immense sales revenues Microsoft has to fund their development.
This is a good thing, regardless of whether you like Windows or not: If Lindows succeeds, Microsoft will be forced to cut prices to compete. If you like Windows you will benefit from lower prices, if you hate Windows you will benefit from having Microsoft busy spending their resources on a more direct competitor as well as with less money to spend on squashing competitors, as being forced to cut prices will have a very real effect on their earnings.
His employer has apparently been pushing for this solution for a long time, since they face "only" a maximum of 500.000 USD in fines, while Dmitri would face years in prison and a much larger fine, and Elcomsoft is on trial anyway. Having a someone they know and trust added as a witness where they stand to loose a maximum of 500.000 USD (and how would a US court manage to force a Russian company to pay a fine?) seems like a low price for them for freeing an employee and friend.
The maximum punishment for ElcomSoft is 500.000 USD. It's highly unlikely that a few sales will cause the court to come back with the maximum punishment. Hardly much of a set of bargaining chips for DOJ.
Before then Norway was under Danish rule from the 1300's, and prior to that it was a sovereign monarchy.
Which means there's a good chance of getting people to buy them.
And Kamen isn't the only one that is convinced. Doerr (one of the main investors) hasn't exactly gotten where he is today by gambling.
8mph is about the same as average car speeds during rush hour in London, and I'm sure it's not much better in other crowded cities.
Uhm, because the gyros and the boards are what keeps it stable? Would you like a gyro or board to fail when you're leaning forward going at max speed, and have it fall over?
I'd buy one in an instant, and the cost would easily be recovered by the drop in rent I'd get from being able to move 2-3 times further away from the office.