SCO was going under. They own the rights to Unix as I understand it. They figured IBM would buy them out if they go under. They figured a lawsuit against IBM would likely end quietly in a settlement where IBM just bought SCO and made the SCO execs a lot of money.
IBM decided to fight. SCO is doing damage control. They know that even if the court finds that code was stolen from System V Unix and put in Linux they have maybe a one in a million chance that the court will actually order that Linux will be essentially turned over to SCO to sell.
Basically SCO is in a lawsuit lottery right now. They have nothing better to do since they don't really have a business left. They are gambling 50-100 million in legal fees and operating expenses for the next few years on a very very slim chance that they could end up effectively monopolizing linux and the potential trillion dollar payoff that would lead to.
They will most likely loose and possibly end up being seized by IBM when they countersue for their legal fees which will be 10-20 million and by that point, that is all that SCO will be worth.
Even if they win at trial, they will not be permitted to control linux. The offending source code (if any) will simply be removed by developers.
While a band does get a large chunk of the price of their shirts and other merchandise, a lot of times the shady vendors simply never send them their check.
Privacy is a right. The fourth ammendment is often interpreted as including the right to privacy in regards to government intrusion. In addition you have a common law right to privacy, thats why you can sue for invasion of privacy. Although that is generally limited to photographing and recording your image or voice for commercial use without permission. Still federal law requires the government to not disclose certain information it collects about you and when the government violates its own laws you should be able to recover damages and be compensated otherwise the government will continue to make sweetheart deals with marketers who want to buy your information from government databases.
Well there are plenty of companies that have been around for a while that would appreciate the opportunity to embed their image on a historical figure. You know Abercrombie and Fitch is just aching to make themselves seem less racist by dressing up Lincoln in their gear. Even if the clothes from that era sold by A and F are nothing like the ones from today, brand recognition is still there.
The more the laws are written by marketing companies that insist on their right to use other people's property to send their unsolicited and unwanted advertisements there will be plenty of anti-spam jobs and business opportunities for geeks like us.
In addition we can keep blacklisting large blocks of addresses as we please. That is the best private right of action that we have. As long as the DMA does not get a law passed that prohibits black hole lists and filters then we are at least empowered to protect ourselves with our ingenuity.
Actually CNN is an excellent news source in its international version (on tv) which Americans can't get. Its the American CNN that has been stripped of its balance and content and is only slightly less patriotic than Fox News.
One of the most annoying and deceptive ways gator and other spyware gets on computers is by popping up those installation prompts unsolicited. They just keep popping it up as if installation is a requirement to use the web site in question.
Microsoft puts a check box on their prompt that says "always trust x-corporation" but they should also have a box that says "never trust content from x-corporation" Then users can't get rid of those installation pop-ups they don't want.
I took a class from the full time dean of tech at my school and I work for her dept as a student asst (really a resnet technician) so I am pretty sure If I were to discover something like that I would be safe in approaching her about it. In addition one of my more immediate supervisors is the son of the former president of the school so I am sure I could secure my safety. But then again why would I help my school for free, they don't help me for free.
I have been doing freelance support, teaching old ladies how to email, setting up home networks, and installing drives and adapters into pc's for a couple years now. If you bust your ass and spend a lot of time and a reasonable amount of money advertising (flyers, newspaper ads, a radio commercial etc. then you can make a fair living at this. You can easily charge $60-$120 for an hours work and you charge even more when small businesses call and need emergency service. I charge 80 an hour at this point and for emergencies at night I have charged as much as 200 an hour. It definitely keeps me in the lunch money while I go to college full time.
I was talking to this old guy who used to work for Bell Labs the other night and he said his son was once "dressed down" for walking off the elevator at work in front of a woman at IBM. I think he is a VP at Cisco now.
CD sales are down for a few major reasons. One people see less value in them than they used to and they are expensive and risky compared to other forms of entertainment. That is they don't give you the bang for the buck that a dvd or a concert ticket does and you never know if your gonna even like the music on the cd.
Two, the RIAA has been by their own numbers selling 25% less albums than were for sale in previous years. Compare that to only a 10% decline in their cd sales.
Three: CD's as a loss leader. Stores that sell CD's as their primary business cannot compete with stores like Best Buy, Walmart, Kmart, and Wiz and Circuit City that sell them at a loss because they bring people in to buy high margin items like TV's, clothing, and computers.
Four: P2P "piracy" and disdain for the RIAA and its tactics. When people copy a movie they say "oh cool I don't have to buy a ticket to see this movie" When people download a CD, they say "Heh sticking it to the RIAA again" The music industry has the worst reputation. Even worse than hollywood and oil companies and politicians
The last few weeks of school someone hacked our dns servers and started redirecting people who wanted bestbuy.com and a bunch of other sites to one of those generic cybersquater spam search sites.
It sounds nice on the surface but what about situation where a particular person or organization is criticized and the people doing the criticizing don't want to hear any response. Or they do not even want to risk being identified by that person or group.
Do abusive husbands and parents get a right to respond on support group msg boards. Do abusive cult gulag schools get a right to respond to their critics who are so traumatized by the experience of being held against their will for years that they are afraid of being identified and kidnapped by the cult again?
There must be some kind of limit to what can be demanded of a salaried employee. Technically a 40 hour workweek is standard and in a pinch salaried tech employees may need to work longer hours. Also when you take the job the description should include how many hours a week are expected.
The question I have is that there must be some reasonable limit. Unless stated otherwise it is reasonable to assume that you took a 8x5 job (40 hours a week) at a certain salary. Since you can't demand overtime pay your employer should compensate you for working extra hours either by paying overtime voluntarily or by shifting what would have been your off time.
What is reasonable? Can your employer demand that you work an extra 20 hours in a week, an extra 40? At one point does the employer violate your rights. There is no way an employer who hired you for 40 hours a week can suddenly demand 100 hours a week with no compensation. If so why can't he just demand your every waking moment, hell why not 24/7.
I had a similar issue this year. I work help desk at my University. In exchange for free housing during the summer they wanted two of us to work 35-40 hours a week (9-5pm or 10-5pm) at 7-9 dollars an hour and in addition be on call 13 hours a day (9am-10pm) 7 days a week. This meant that in exchange for their overpriced housing (2500 dollars each for 3 months= $833/month x2=$1666 for 400-500 square feet) we would work 40 hours a week well below the fair market wage for our jobs and in addition be on call 49 hours extra per week nuking our entire summer and probably making it unfeasible to take classes during the summer which would be the whole point of us staying there anyways.
Even our boss said it was a rotten deal and get this originally the powers that be wanted to only give housing to one person for those kinds of hours. One person on call or at work almost 90 hours at 3-5 dollars/hour under the fair wage and less than half of those hours paid in cash.
I still have not found a job at home yet after about a month but I have made almost as much money just doing a few computer gigs in the same time span that I would have been working so much for so little.
Yeah I would agree with the guy who said not to use dhcp. It makes it more difficult to find cheaters, hackers etc. You want to be able to instantly know the persons name and their seating location from their ip/mac address so even though initially it can be a pain in the ass to setup everyone.
The other thing to do is to allow dhcp but use mac address controls and when people sign in they give you their mac address and it gets put on the dhcp server's list.
I don't think there are any legally enforceable royalties they pay to sell used cd's. THere was until last year an independent music store within 100 yards of my house that sold used Cd's and I don't recall the bitter (he was a very bitter man) ever complain about it. I think he mentioned being hassled over it one time but I don't think he actually ended up paying anything and he complained a lot. Actually his big complaint was that the record companies would not sell to him directly and he had to get new albums from wholesale warehouses at higher prices than tower or Amazon or BN.
Its a sound business decision
on
Google vs. Evil
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· Score: 1
I think the reasoning behind google's decision is actually quite logical. Porn is legal and makes up a massive share of the web economy. Ciggarrettes and Alcohol while legal, have many restrictions placed on them as to where they can be sold and who can sell them. Because each state taxes ciggarrettes differently (that is why a pack in VA costs about 2 bucks and a pack in NY costs 6 bucks.) Alcohol is the same way. Many states have laws that make it a crime to ship alcohol into the state without a special license. The same can go for ciggarretes which in many states it is illegal to bring more than 2 cartons or so into the state. Bringing more is considered a form of tax evasion or smuggling. Since websites offer to sell booze and smokes at the cheapest prices available, chances are that ordering from these sites is possibly illegal for a large portion of US customers. In addition there are significant and ever changing advertising restrictions on booze and smokes that google would have to comply with or face stiff fines. Its a problem they are better off avoiding.
I bought a Windows ME upgrade about 18 months ago and after realizing it sucks donkey balls, I tried to return it to Office Depot. Of course they would not take it back because it was opened so I called the beast itself. After manuevering through an hour or so of tech support idiots I got an address, an rma, and info on getting a refund.
I sent it in along with an explanatatory note as to why I want to return it and about a month later I got a refund check for the total cost. The retail price, the sales tax, and the cost of shipping it back to them. I got it all. I guess 20 billion in cash makes them not think much of giving out refunds.
Similar things happened at Hofstra University earlier in the year. The school recieved a letter from the RIAA and a bunch of people starting getting their connection turned off. I heard one or two supposedly had their computers seized by the fbi for sharing a lot of movies and stuff. The school is acting as an ISP and because of the DMCA they are immune from liability as long as they investigate when they are notified by copyright holders that users on their network are infringing. Seizing the computers is a drastic measure that is probably not legal for the academy to do anyways. Only law enforcement can seize things.
I think they should have a law that requires that lawyers get disbarred for threatening legal action where they know that there is no actionable issue at hand. And the client corporations should be made liable for financial and punitive damages for false legal threats.
I am all for blocking Asian Spammmers, my friend got on some kind of crazy list in Korean or Vietnamese and he can't even read it to find out if he can unsubscribe or if it is spam. He gets like 200 spams a day on an email address linked to his domain name that he pays for.
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SCO was going under. They own the rights to Unix as I understand it. They figured IBM would buy them out if they go under. They figured a lawsuit against IBM would likely end quietly in a settlement where IBM just bought SCO and made the SCO execs a lot of money.
IBM decided to fight. SCO is doing damage control. They know that even if the court finds that code was stolen from System V Unix and put in Linux they have maybe a one in a million chance that the court will actually order that Linux will be essentially turned over to SCO to sell.
Basically SCO is in a lawsuit lottery right now. They have nothing better to do since they don't really have a business left. They are gambling 50-100 million in legal fees and operating expenses for the next few years on a very very slim chance that they could end up effectively monopolizing linux and the potential trillion dollar payoff that would lead to.
They will most likely loose and possibly end up being seized by IBM when they countersue for their legal fees which will be 10-20 million and by that point, that is all that SCO will be worth.
Even if they win at trial, they will not be permitted to control linux. The offending source code (if any) will simply be removed by developers.
While a band does get a large chunk of the price of their shirts and other merchandise, a lot of times the shady vendors simply never send them their check.
Privacy is a right. The fourth ammendment is often interpreted as including the right to privacy in regards to government intrusion. In addition you have a common law right to privacy, thats why you can sue for invasion of privacy. Although that is generally limited to photographing and recording your image or voice for commercial use without permission. Still federal law requires the government to not disclose certain information it collects about you and when the government violates its own laws you should be able to recover damages and be compensated otherwise the government will continue to make sweetheart deals with marketers who want to buy your information from government databases.
Well there are plenty of companies that have been around for a while that would appreciate the opportunity to embed their image on a historical figure. You know Abercrombie and Fitch is just aching to make themselves seem less racist by dressing up Lincoln in their gear. Even if the clothes from that era sold by A and F are nothing like the ones from today, brand recognition is still there.
The more the laws are written by marketing companies that insist on their right to use other people's property to send their unsolicited and unwanted advertisements there will be plenty of anti-spam jobs and business opportunities for geeks like us.
In addition we can keep blacklisting large blocks of addresses as we please. That is the best private right of action that we have. As long as the DMA does not get a law passed that prohibits black hole lists and filters then we are at least empowered to protect ourselves with our ingenuity.
Deep down everyone is a Ferengi.
I apologize if I am wrong but I thought Linus Torvalds lives in Sweden or Norway or somewhere in Europe.
The US courts have no jurisdiction and no way to compel Linus to appear if he is living outside of the US.
Actually CNN is an excellent news source in its international version (on tv) which Americans can't get. Its the American CNN that has been stripped of its balance and content and is only slightly less patriotic than Fox News.
Lets graft some fruit and nut plants onto marijuana plants.
One of the most annoying and deceptive ways gator and other spyware gets on computers is by popping up those installation prompts unsolicited. They just keep popping it up as if installation is a requirement to use the web site in question.
Microsoft puts a check box on their prompt that says "always trust x-corporation" but they should also have a box that says "never trust content from x-corporation" Then users can't get rid of those installation pop-ups they don't want.
I took a class from the full time dean of tech at my school and I work for her dept as a student asst (really a resnet technician) so I am pretty sure If I were to discover something like that I would be safe in approaching her about it. In addition one of my more immediate supervisors is the son of the former president of the school so I am sure I could secure my safety. But then again why would I help my school for free, they don't help me for free.
I have been doing freelance support, teaching old ladies how to email, setting up home networks, and installing drives and adapters into pc's for a couple years now. If you bust your ass and spend a lot of time and a reasonable amount of money advertising (flyers, newspaper ads, a radio commercial etc. then you can make a fair living at this. You can easily charge $60-$120 for an hours work and you charge even more when small businesses call and need emergency service. I charge 80 an hour at this point and for emergencies at night I have charged as much as 200 an hour. It definitely keeps me in the lunch money while I go to college full time.
I remember reading recently that Bigpond was gonna be blacklisted for allowing spammers on their service.
I was talking to this old guy who used to work for Bell Labs the other night and he said his son was once "dressed down" for walking off the elevator at work in front of a woman at IBM. I think he is a VP at Cisco now.
CD sales are down for a few major reasons. One people see less value in them than they used to and they are expensive and risky compared to other forms of entertainment. That is they don't give you the bang for the buck that a dvd or a concert ticket does and you never know if your gonna even like the music on the cd.
Two, the RIAA has been by their own numbers selling 25% less albums than were for sale in previous years. Compare that to only a 10% decline in their cd sales.
Three: CD's as a loss leader. Stores that sell CD's as their primary business cannot compete with stores like Best Buy, Walmart, Kmart, and Wiz and Circuit City that sell them at a loss because they bring people in to buy high margin items like TV's, clothing, and computers.
Four: P2P "piracy" and disdain for the RIAA and its tactics. When people copy a movie they say "oh cool I don't have to buy a ticket to see this movie" When people download a CD, they say "Heh sticking it to the RIAA again" The music industry has the worst reputation. Even worse than hollywood and oil companies and politicians
The last few weeks of school someone hacked our dns servers and started redirecting people who wanted bestbuy.com and a bunch of other sites to one of those generic cybersquater spam search sites.
It sounds nice on the surface but what about situation where a particular person or organization is criticized and the people doing the criticizing don't want to hear any response. Or they do not even want to risk being identified by that person or group.
Do abusive husbands and parents get a right to respond on support group msg boards. Do abusive cult gulag schools get a right to respond to their critics who are so traumatized by the experience of being held against their will for years that they are afraid of being identified and kidnapped by the cult again?
There must be some kind of limit to what can be demanded of a salaried employee. Technically a 40 hour workweek is standard and in a pinch salaried tech employees may need to work longer hours. Also when you take the job the description should include how many hours a week are expected.
The question I have is that there must be some reasonable limit. Unless stated otherwise it is reasonable to assume that you took a 8x5 job (40 hours a week) at a certain salary. Since you can't demand overtime pay your employer should compensate you for working extra hours either by paying overtime voluntarily or by shifting what would have been your off time.
What is reasonable? Can your employer demand that you work an extra 20 hours in a week, an extra 40? At one point does the employer violate your rights. There is no way an employer who hired you for 40 hours a week can suddenly demand 100 hours a week with no compensation. If so why can't he just demand your every waking moment, hell why not 24/7.
I had a similar issue this year. I work help desk at my University. In exchange for free housing during the summer they wanted two of us to work 35-40 hours a week (9-5pm or 10-5pm) at 7-9 dollars an hour and in addition be on call 13 hours a day (9am-10pm) 7 days a week. This meant that in exchange for their overpriced housing (2500 dollars each for 3 months= $833/month x2=$1666 for 400-500 square feet) we would work 40 hours a week well below the fair market wage for our jobs and in addition be on call 49 hours extra per week nuking our entire summer and probably making it unfeasible to take classes during the summer which would be the whole point of us staying there anyways.
Even our boss said it was a rotten deal and get this originally the powers that be wanted to only give housing to one person for those kinds of hours. One person on call or at work almost 90 hours at 3-5 dollars/hour under the fair wage and less than half of those hours paid in cash.
I still have not found a job at home yet after about a month but I have made almost as much money just doing a few computer gigs in the same time span that I would have been working so much for so little.
Yeah I would agree with the guy who said not to use dhcp. It makes it more difficult to find cheaters, hackers etc. You want to be able to instantly know the persons name and their seating location from their ip/mac address so even though initially it can be a pain in the ass to setup everyone.
The other thing to do is to allow dhcp but use mac address controls and when people sign in they give you their mac address and it gets put on the dhcp server's list.
I was so close to the whole first post, too bad I had to search for my password.
Anyways I would say wire up the place with Cat5e or use 80211g if you don't want to cut your walls apart.
I don't think there are any legally enforceable royalties they pay to sell used cd's. THere was until last year an independent music store within 100 yards of my house that sold used Cd's and I don't recall the bitter (he was a very bitter man) ever complain about it. I think he mentioned being hassled over it one time but I don't think he actually ended up paying anything and he complained a lot. Actually his big complaint was that the record companies would not sell to him directly and he had to get new albums from wholesale warehouses at higher prices than tower or Amazon or BN.
I think the reasoning behind google's decision is actually quite logical. Porn is legal and makes up a massive share of the web economy. Ciggarrettes and Alcohol while legal, have many restrictions placed on them as to where they can be sold and who can sell them. Because each state taxes ciggarrettes differently (that is why a pack in VA costs about 2 bucks and a pack in NY costs 6 bucks.) Alcohol is the same way. Many states have laws that make it a crime to ship alcohol into the state without a special license. The same can go for ciggarretes which in many states it is illegal to bring more than 2 cartons or so into the state. Bringing more is considered a form of tax evasion or smuggling. Since websites offer to sell booze and smokes at the cheapest prices available, chances are that ordering from these sites is possibly illegal for a large portion of US customers. In addition there are significant and ever changing advertising restrictions on booze and smokes that google would have to comply with or face stiff fines. Its a problem they are better off avoiding.
I bought a Windows ME upgrade about 18 months ago and after realizing it sucks donkey balls, I tried to return it to Office Depot. Of course they would not take it back because it was opened so I called the beast itself. After manuevering through an hour or so of tech support idiots I got an address, an rma, and info on getting a refund.
I sent it in along with an explanatatory note as to why I want to return it and about a month later I got a refund check for the total cost. The retail price, the sales tax, and the cost of shipping it back to them. I got it all. I guess 20 billion in cash makes them not think much of giving out refunds.
Similar things happened at Hofstra University earlier in the year. The school recieved a letter from the RIAA and a bunch of people starting getting their connection turned off. I heard one or two supposedly had their computers seized by the fbi for sharing a lot of movies and stuff.
The school is acting as an ISP and because of the DMCA they are immune from liability as long as they investigate when they are notified by copyright holders that users on their network are infringing. Seizing the computers is a drastic measure that is probably not legal for the academy to do anyways. Only law enforcement can seize things.
I think they should have a law that requires that lawyers get disbarred for threatening legal action where they know that there is no actionable issue at hand. And the client corporations should be made liable for financial and punitive damages for false legal threats.
I am all for blocking Asian Spammmers, my friend got on some kind of crazy list in Korean or Vietnamese and he can't even read it to find out if he can unsubscribe or if it is spam. He gets like 200 spams a day on an email address linked to his domain name that he pays for.