Shareholders are not creditors, and do not figure at all in such a tranmsaction.
If Kimball see that there is a real risk of SCO going bankrupt, and SCO being able to burn the remaining assets, the proper action would be to grant Novell these damages.
Clearly the current SCO management are criminals, and in order for justice to be served, the company should seek bankrupcy. This would put the company under receivership, and would ensure that the remaining process was in no danger of being exploited by the criminals currently in charge of SCO.
The shareholders only would get a considferation if there are any assets left, after the company returns from bankrupcy, or when it is liquidated.
SCO has announced several times that BS&F has a prtnership with them. Even Boies himself sat in on one of SCO's erarnings conference calls, and vexed eloquently about how thas was more of a partnership than a client-alwfirm relationship.
Now since then, the fiscal love affair has cooled off abit, but BS&F is supposedly fully covered to carry on the litigation.
Given how much Kimball has been hoodwinked by SCO over the last 2 years, I don't see him having any pangs about confiscating their Aerol chairs to secure the money SCO allegedly stole from Novell.
Th ecounrt would not want to be in a situation where teh plaintiff gets to burn all their assets in litigation, flame out, and at last not have the money to pay the winner. That would be setting up the innocent parties in the lawsuit for a pyrrhic victory.
This topic has been filled with 500 completely worthless comments, while the most comprehensive expose on Vista is languishing as AC post with 0 points.
Mark LeMay, the latest beneficial owner of Vista.com, was reportedly involved in a now-bankrupt point-of-sale consulting business. The business was a public stock ASPE.pk (Aspeon aka Aspeon Consulting) renamed from Javelin systems (Nasdaq JVLN) Aspeon has a few recent SEC filings, related to changing bankruptcy directors.
Aspeon built point-of-sale terminals for McDonalds, and were the first to roll out Window NT retail terminals.
SCOX provides the OS for McDonalds store terminals, so this new beneficial owner must have deep roots with SCOX.
The critical missing piece in the VISTA-SCOX story is why SCOX invested millions of dollars to buy promissary notes and stock from John Wall in the Fall 2002, when obstensibly they were shopping for capital for SCOX, and not looking to invest the little capital SCOX had in other ventures.
When SCOX secured MS and Baystar funding in 2003, the Vista investment was blithely written off with minimal recompense. The asymmetry of this capital exchange makes the deal look very suspicious.
Wall was one of the early inverstors in the Caldera/SCO scam.
The company also owns some dubious energy company (most likely a tax-writeoff stunt).
MS knew must have known about Vista, and this might poosibly be a somewhat indirect way of funelling money to further finance the SCO litigation machine.
If you put on your tinfoil hat, this name is not an accident, but a way to finance SCO without alerting the antitrust watch dogs.
These images will have copyrights. In order to be sure that you are not downloading copyrighted images, you would need to disable automatic image download as well.
Even the web pages themselves are copyrighted (although they usually have the date wrong Acme Inc (c) 2003).
In order for a user to surf withuout breaking swedish law every 20 seconds, he wopuld have to maintain a list of URL's that are known not to contain any copyrighted material, because the act of pointing the browser to them to see if a page as a (c) at the bottom requires the page to be downloaded.
In order for Swedish ISP's to avoid dbecoming accessories to breaking of Swedish law, they would need to monitor all pages for (c) notice.
Not only that, the lack of (c) notice does not guarantee that a page is free and unencumbered form copyrights. The Berne Convention which Sweden, US and most other countries have signed on to, regarding intelectual property grants the creator of an intellectual work ownership and control over said works, wheterh they are affixed with a copyright notice or not.
So, this means Swedish ISP from nmow on will be forced to filter all content, and only let theough content that explicitly is identified as public domain, or under a license that explicitly grants the page to be downloaded.
This law is very strange. If you went to a book store, and bought a conterfeited book, should it be your responsibility to contact the publisher to confirm that you bought a rolalty-paid copy? Or if you visit your library, should it be your duty to ensure that the books you borrow werew purchased thruogh th eproper channels?
This law, while it might appear to the lawmakers to address a loophole, and chart out a grey area of the law, instead has taken freedom away from the citizens, plus added more grey areas to the law.
By necessity startups will have to hoodwink quite a few people. They need to exaggerate their business plan to get money from VCs. They need to market products before thay have the time and money to write them. It doesn't matter, because the featues will be whatever he first cstomer decides on.
If they interview, it might be because they are close to landing a customer. If the deal falls through (it usually does) , they might string you along for the next potential customer.
Of course, they won't tell you such things in an interview. "We'll hire you, if we get a customer". Nobody would sign on to that.
When interviewing with these kind of companies. you must ask about their revenue, funding, burn rate, customers etc. If they try to BS you about that sort of thing, just move on.
I used to have my domain registered with a discount gig (think it was domainshop.com), that was later bought up by those crooks at Verisign.
That started a short but very unpleasant relationship. I would receive countless amounts of spam, and when it was time to renew, the price had gone up A LOT, and it would cost me A LOT also to have the service tranferred to a competing service. I wonder hwo many of those customers stayed on with Verisign. Couldn't have been many.
I chose instead to let my domain expire, and again Verisign was messing with me. It took much longer than the advertized amout of time for the domain name to be released, so I had to try and fail many times before I eventually could reclaim my domain.
The moral is: If you find a cheap registrar, make sure you've subscribed for a long period. Even if they'd go belly up after the first year, you're probably better off than signing with Verisign. And if they get bought by Verisign, the renewal is not going to gobble your whole nestegg. And who knows, after 5 years, maybe even Verisign will have adjusted their prices to compete.
Since I went with godaddy.com several years ago, I've not received a single spam mail, and they've been easy to deal with, and they even have a neat mail forwarding service.
Wi-fi is the kind of convenient service customers one day will expect for free.
It doesn't give a shop a comparative advantage by having the service, but it gives them a comparative disadvantage by not having it. In other words, any site will need it to keep their customers.
Just like having clean toilets is necessary for a restaurant, or customers will go somewhere else, having free Wi-Fi access will become one of your minimum requirements for spending time and money at a particluar venue, such as a coffee shop, supermarket, school, train, etc.
Surely there will always be some sites, where they can charge a heavily marked up price, because the customer is already spending a fortune to be there, with nowhere else to go, such as hotels.
Some hotels will charge you $10 a day for a lousy line, while others give it away for free.
With wifi catching on, and with MS software being central in a car's brain, the possibilties are endless.
People will have their cars recalled 3-4 times a year to apply the latest patch.
You might have viruses that spread from car to car.
There'll be the IloveYou kind of virus, or blaster kind of virus, that will shut down traffic and cause millions of accidents within hours of release to the wild.
There's the jerusalem style of virus that will crash all cars on the planet at a predetermined time.
There'll be backdoors and IRC robots, where the script kiddies in stead of trying to shut down a web site in a DDDOS attack, will instead take control over cars, and use real people as objects in a videogame.
Or more innocent viruses that hijacks a car's stereo, and starts blasting Wang Chung at full volume.
Scary. The scariest part is that this is not crazy science fiction. By all signs, I don't see that any of this is avoidable, given MS current dominance, their awful track record on security, and the extremely weak consumer protection laws.
Will SCO be dumb enough to send a bill first? Preferably through the US Mail?
Yes, they are dumb enough. When they first annnounced this scheme, they said they intended to send out invoices shortly to 1500 companies, and were taking sales call. That back in June or so.
However, they quickly found out the problem with sending out invoices: They don't know how many CPUS those companies are running on Linux, and they have no idea what versionson Linux infringes their "IP".
In addition, several people contacted SCO and asked to receive invoices. Most, if not all of those requests were from individuals who would instantly file a complaint with FTC, SEC, Postal inspectors and state GA upon receipt of such invoice.
SCO recanted, and claimed the licencing scheme would only be available to large corporate customers.
Now they claim they're in the middle of negotioations with customers. In heir last press conference, they boasted about the progress, and announced that they would license or litigate.
They have proven time and time again that they are dumb enough. However, they are closely watched by the public, and every trap they have set for themselves have been narrowly avoided, by learning about the consequences from sites like groklaw.
Same with this. The "license" they negotiate will be an odd one. In order to cover their asses, the license must include language that the licensee can not sue them or file complaints against them in a criminal court, and that the license is void if disclosed to 3d parties. My guess is that the victim's lawyers will contact law enfourcement already in the negotiation phase, and get special priority by using RICO, and charge SCOX with extortion, fraud and barratry. If the case is handled under RICO, Canopy(Yarro), and Boies law firm will have their asses fried as well.
My prediction is that this scheme will blow up in their faces as usual, and the corner that they have painted themselves into will shrink and shrink. Then they're dead for Mail fraud.
Instead of fighting to get airtime on local radio stations, simply rent one of those propeller planes that flies over cities with a trailing banner at large events.
Pool the money among several local bands to pay the cost of the plane.
Fly over outdoor concerts, parks, etc., and drop thousands of these paper thin records. Banner just says "Rock Drop" or some such thing, or the names of all bands included.
If they can make them bio degradable, there might not be too much damage to the environment.
This case is still only in the discovery phase, so a subpoena is simple to get the person to show up for an interview, with both IBM and SCO lawyers present.
What they are doing now is both sides interviewing each other and getting all the facts on the table. Only if SCO manages to get something like an admission out of them would they want them to stand as witness.
I predict that SCO will get nothing out of this subpoena, but that some of these people might end up as witnesses for IBM. The goal of SCO is of course to sow doubt about GPL and doubt about linux being a unix clone. This will of course not work, because SCO has no idea what the heck they're doing.
Every move by SCO so far has only dug them a bigger hole.
The worst tech decisions usually happen in very early phases of a project.
Many projects goes through a lifecycle of 1)Slideware. Before anything is written at all, while still hunting for the first pilot deal, entrepeneurs tout their idea: "Our product enables...." 2)Demoware As soon as you have at least one customer interested, you need to whip up a demo. This is often done by hiring an intern for the summer to whip up some screens, and some simple interaction. 3)Real Ware In the worst case, the system is not designed properly, but is simply an extension of the intern's summer work. This is not the intern's fault.
Another possibility for screwup: If it is a hardware company with no significan sw experience, they'll just put their best hw engineers to hack a system.
But I think the most common errors is to try to catch up lost time. In attempting to deliver a project on time, the engineers need to make many short cuts, with an expectation to do it right at some later time. "Need to use a proper database here when we get time", "This function needs better error checking", "This library ought to have been tested for coverage", "this bubble sort really sucks, but I don't think we'll ever have a large data set..", "I know C++ would have been a better language for this, but my staff only knows Basic"
What they don't realise, is that "a later time" never comes. Design decisions is something you might be stuck with forever, and all others issues will be forgottten unless they blow up in someones face.
File a patent on all new ideas. If you're lucky, one of your visitors will implement your idea and you can collect. The other reason you want to file a patent, is defensive. Otherwise, the company that just visited might file their own patent, and when your device is ready to go to market, they'll shut you down.
The other comment I have to the article, is that it is not always such a good idea to have something new and unique. In the very early phases of funding, VCs or angels have no idea if it will fly or not. If they can find at least one other company with the same basic idea, they consider that a validation of the market, and thus, the investment to be less risky. Being first on any market is such a two edged sword. Anyonme remember the Apple Newton?
The sad thing is the injustice when dealing with white collar crime. People who steal a few cars can get years of proson sentence, maybe as much as 5 years for every $10,000 they stole. Now, look at the white collar criminals. Since people really can't fathom number over one million or so, penalties are on a logarithmic scale, untill they become erratic because the really big crooks have huge legal teams.
Steal 10,000 get 5 years Steal 100,000 get 10 years Steal 1 million get 15 years Steal 5 milions get 2 years Steal 1 billion get 4 years. Steal 50 billion settle for 2 billion, admit no wrongdoing and get 0 years.
There is nothing evil with per-seat linux licensing, except that it's probaby a bad business decision, considering that others could offer the same value & service for much less, or for free. In order to get wide acceptance they'd need to distribute dirt cheap to end users, and charge a competitive price to corporate customers who would pay extra for support.
And you're a daft boy (Sorry "Are you being served?") . SCO had been showing these 2 code snippets under NDA for 6 months, and even managed to hire Boies & co based on them. It is publicly verified and proven by a string of press releases and industry analyst commentators that SCO claimed these snippets as infringing code. An assertion that could only be made if they thought similart code equalled infringement. Only after their snippets were analyzed by outsiders (in less than 24 hours) was the true provenance revealed. SCO had not managed that task in 6+ months.
Simple math then, shows that the open source community analysis is at least 180 times more efficient, and 100 % more accurate than SCO. SCO has an impossible game of catch-up on their hands. SCO is the naked emperor who desperately needs to hire a tailor, after having mortally insulted all tailors.
So, don't go around calling this reporter daft before you check your own assertions for daftness.
Pretty much like worker's compensation. If you lose your legs and arms at a workplace with worker's compensation, you'll get a token amount. Without worker's compensation, you can sue the company or insurer for actual damages plus tort.
The seal is purely a favor to manufacturers, as worker's comp is a favor to employers.
Yes, as a matter of fact, we *should* start caning graffiti vandals in this country.
I don't get yer logic. In these toot for toot and I for I times, the proper punishment for taggers is to tag them. An exact copy tattoo of their "artwork" seems fitting, plus some artwork belonging to a rival gang, prominently placed on the forehead.
Virus writers could be sent as test rabbits to some spooky lab in Maryland, where they no doubt experiment with biological weapons.
Slashdot Mirror
Shareholders are not creditors, and do not figure at all in such a tranmsaction.
If Kimball see that there is a real risk of SCO going bankrupt, and SCO being able to burn the remaining assets, the proper action would be to grant Novell these damages.
Clearly the current SCO management are criminals, and in order for justice to be served, the company should seek bankrupcy. This would put the company under receivership, and would ensure that the remaining process was in no danger of being exploited by the criminals currently in charge of SCO.
The shareholders only would get a considferation if there are any assets left, after the company returns from bankrupcy, or when it is liquidated.
I can't see why not.
SCO has announced several times that BS&F has a prtnership with them. Even Boies himself sat in on one of SCO's erarnings conference calls, and vexed eloquently about how thas was more of a partnership than a client-alwfirm relationship.
Now since then, the fiscal love affair has cooled off abit, but BS&F is supposedly fully covered to carry on the litigation.
Given how much Kimball has been hoodwinked by SCO over the last 2 years, I don't see him having any pangs about confiscating their Aerol chairs to secure the money SCO allegedly stole from Novell.
Th ecounrt would not want to be in a situation where teh plaintiff gets to burn all their assets in litigation, flame out, and at last not have the money to pay the winner. That would be setting up the innocent parties in the lawsuit for a pyrrhic victory.
My old laptop's fan was making horrible noises, so one day, I just killed it by poking it with a pencil till it stopped.
The laptop has worked fine ever since, and no more noise.
The hard drive is still noisy, but I am afraid to use the same procedure on that piece.
Yes, please mod parent up.
This topic has been filled with 500 completely worthless comments, while the most comprehensive expose on Vista is languishing as AC post with 0 points.
Fixing broken links
o n.html
http://www.hospitalitynet.org/news/4003007.htm
http://www.irvineworldnews.com/Bstories/dec6/aspe
From Yahoo board:
Mark LeMay, the latest beneficial owner of Vista.com, was reportedly involved in a now-bankrupt point-of-sale consulting business. The business was a public stock ASPE.pk (Aspeon aka Aspeon Consulting) renamed from Javelin systems (Nasdaq JVLN) Aspeon has a few recent SEC filings, related to changing bankruptcy directors.
Aspeon built point-of-sale terminals for McDonalds, and were the first to roll out Window NT retail terminals.
SCOX provides the OS for McDonalds store terminals, so this new beneficial owner must have deep roots with SCOX.
The critical missing piece in the VISTA-SCOX story is why SCOX invested millions of dollars to buy promissary notes and stock from John Wall in the Fall 2002, when obstensibly they were shopping for capital for SCOX, and not looking to invest the little capital SCOX had in other ventures.
When SCOX secured MS and Baystar funding in 2003, the Vista investment was blithely written off with minimal recompense. The asymmetry of this capital exchange makes the deal look very suspicious.
Source NT story:
Source NT story
Source McDonalds story
Correction: CFO and CFO. Not CEO.
See Vista reverse merger benefits SCO?
Also note that Vistas CFO is Bob Bench, formner CEO of SCO.
Wall was one of the early inverstors in the Caldera/SCO scam.
The company also owns some dubious energy company (most likely a tax-writeoff stunt).
MS knew must have known about Vista, and this might poosibly be a somewhat indirect way of funelling money to further finance the SCO litigation machine.
If you put on your tinfoil hat, this name is not an accident, but a way to finance SCO without alerting the antitrust watch dogs.
Any web site you go to will have images.
These images will have copyrights. In order to be sure that you are not downloading copyrighted images, you would need to disable automatic image download as well.
Even the web pages themselves are copyrighted
(although they usually have the date wrong Acme Inc (c) 2003).
In order for a user to surf withuout breaking swedish law every 20 seconds, he wopuld have to maintain a list of URL's that are known not to contain any copyrighted material, because the act of pointing the browser to them to see if a page as a (c) at the bottom requires the page to be downloaded.
In order for Swedish ISP's to avoid dbecoming accessories to breaking of Swedish law, they would need to monitor all pages for (c) notice.
Not only that, the lack of (c) notice does not guarantee that a page is free and unencumbered form copyrights. The Berne Convention which Sweden, US and most other countries have signed on to, regarding intelectual property grants the creator of an intellectual work ownership and control over said works, wheterh they are affixed with a copyright notice or not.
So, this means Swedish ISP from nmow on will be forced to filter all content, and only let theough content that explicitly is identified as public domain, or under a license that explicitly grants the page to be downloaded.
This law is very strange.
If you went to a book store, and bought a conterfeited book, should it be your responsibility to contact the publisher to confirm that you bought a rolalty-paid copy?
Or if you visit your library, should it be your duty to ensure that the books you borrow werew purchased thruogh th eproper channels?
This law, while it might appear to the lawmakers to address a loophole, and chart out a grey area of the law, instead has taken freedom away from the citizens, plus added more grey areas to the law.
This company is still more or less a startup.
By necessity startups will have to hoodwink quite a few people. They need to exaggerate their business plan to get money from VCs. They need to market products before thay have the time and money to write them. It doesn't matter, because the featues will be whatever he first cstomer decides on.
If they interview, it might be because they are close to landing a customer. If the deal falls through (it usually does) , they might string you along for the next potential customer.
Of course, they won't tell you such things in an interview. "We'll hire you, if we get a customer".
Nobody would sign on to that.
When interviewing with these kind of companies. you must ask about their revenue, funding, burn rate, customers etc. If they try to BS you about that sort of thing, just move on.
I used to have my domain registered with a discount gig (think it was domainshop.com), that was later bought up by those crooks at Verisign.
That started a short but very unpleasant relationship. I would receive countless amounts of spam, and when it was time to renew, the price had gone up A LOT, and it would cost me A LOT also to have the service tranferred to a competing service. I wonder hwo many of those customers stayed on with Verisign. Couldn't have been many.
I chose instead to let my domain expire, and again Verisign was messing with me. It took much longer than the advertized amout of time for the domain name to be released, so I had to try and fail many times before I eventually could reclaim my domain.
The moral is:
If you find a cheap registrar, make sure you've subscribed for a long period. Even if they'd go belly up after the first year, you're probably better off than signing with Verisign. And if they get bought by Verisign, the renewal is not going to gobble your whole nestegg. And who knows, after 5 years, maybe even Verisign will have adjusted their prices to compete.
Since I went with godaddy.com several years ago, I've not received a single spam mail, and they've been easy to deal with, and they even have a neat mail forwarding service.
Exactly.
Wi-fi is the kind of convenient service customers one day will expect for free.
It doesn't give a shop a comparative advantage by having the service, but it gives them a comparative disadvantage by not having it. In other words, any site will need it to keep their customers.
Just like having clean toilets is necessary for a restaurant, or customers will go somewhere else, having free Wi-Fi access will become one of your minimum requirements for spending time and money at a particluar venue, such as a coffee shop, supermarket, school, train, etc.
Surely there will always be some sites, where they can charge a heavily marked up price, because the customer is already spending a fortune to be there, with nowhere else to go, such as hotels.
Some hotels will charge you $10 a day for a lousy line, while others give it away for free.
It doesn't need to be a very funky piece of software, though.
Simpy set the home page of your browser to an URL such as www.mydomain.com/secret_index.html, which is simply a redirect to your regular home page.
If the computer disappears, simply wait for a hit to that URL.
With wifi catching on, and with MS software being central in a car's brain, the possibilties are endless.
People will have their cars recalled 3-4 times a year to apply the latest patch.
You might have viruses that spread from car to car.
There'll be the IloveYou kind of virus, or blaster kind of virus, that will shut down traffic and cause millions of accidents within hours of release to the wild.
There's the jerusalem style of virus that will crash all cars on the planet at a predetermined time.
There'll be backdoors and IRC robots, where the script kiddies in stead of trying to shut down a web site in a DDDOS attack, will instead take control over cars, and use real people as objects in a videogame.
Or more innocent viruses that hijacks a car's stereo, and starts blasting Wang Chung at full volume.
Scary. The scariest part is that this is not crazy science fiction. By all signs, I don't see that any of this is avoidable, given MS current dominance, their awful track record on security, and the extremely weak consumer protection laws.
Will SCO be dumb enough to send a bill first? Preferably through the US Mail?
Yes, they are dumb enough. When they first annnounced this scheme, they said they intended to send out invoices shortly to 1500 companies, and were taking sales call. That back in June or so.
However, they quickly found out the problem with sending out invoices: They don't know how many CPUS those companies are running on Linux, and they have no idea what versionson Linux infringes their "IP".
In addition, several people contacted SCO and asked to receive invoices. Most, if not all of those requests were from individuals who would instantly file a complaint with FTC, SEC, Postal inspectors and state GA upon receipt of such invoice.
SCO recanted, and claimed the licencing scheme would only be available to large corporate customers.
Now they claim they're in the middle of negotioations with customers. In heir last press conference, they boasted about the progress, and announced that they would license or litigate.
They have proven time and time again that they are dumb enough. However, they are closely watched by the public, and every trap they have set for themselves have been narrowly avoided, by learning about the consequences from sites like groklaw.
Same with this. The "license" they negotiate will be an odd one. In order to cover their asses, the license must include language that the licensee can not sue them or file complaints against them in a criminal court, and that the license is void if disclosed to 3d parties. My guess is that the victim's lawyers will contact law enfourcement already in the negotiation phase, and get special priority by using RICO, and charge SCOX with extortion, fraud and barratry. If the case is handled under RICO, Canopy(Yarro), and Boies law firm will have their asses fried as well.
My prediction is that this scheme will blow up in their faces as usual, and the corner that they have painted themselves into will shrink and shrink.
Then they're dead for Mail fraud.
Among a whole slew of other crimes.
Instead of fighting to get airtime on local radio stations, simply rent one of those propeller planes that flies over cities with a trailing banner at large events.
Pool the money among several local bands to pay the cost of the plane.
Fly over outdoor concerts, parks, etc., and drop thousands of these paper thin records. Banner just says "Rock Drop" or some such thing, or the names of all bands included.
If they can make them bio degradable, there might not be too much damage to the environment.
What they are doing now is both sides interviewing each other and getting all the facts on the table. Only if SCO manages to get something like an admission out of them would they want them to stand as witness.
I predict that SCO will get nothing out of this subpoena, but that some of these people might end up as witnesses for IBM. The goal of SCO is of course to sow doubt about GPL and doubt about linux being a unix clone. This will of course not work, because SCO has no idea what the heck they're doing.
Every move by SCO so far has only dug them a bigger hole.
The worst tech decisions usually happen in very early phases of a project.
...."
Many projects goes through a lifecycle of
1)Slideware.
Before anything is written at all, while still hunting for the first pilot deal, entrepeneurs tout their idea: "Our product enables
2)Demoware
As soon as you have at least one customer interested, you need to whip up a demo. This is often done by hiring an intern for the summer to whip up some screens, and some simple interaction.
3)Real Ware
In the worst case, the system is not designed properly, but is simply an extension of the intern's summer work. This is not the intern's fault.
Another possibility for screwup:
If it is a hardware company with no significan sw experience, they'll just put their best hw engineers to hack a system.
But I think the most common errors is to try to catch up lost time. In attempting to deliver a project on time, the engineers need to make many short cuts, with an expectation to do it right at some later time. "Need to use a proper database here when we get time", "This function needs better error checking", "This library ought to have been tested for coverage", "this bubble sort really sucks, but I don't think we'll ever have a large data set..", "I know C++ would have been a better language for this, but my staff only knows Basic"
What they don't realise, is that "a later time" never comes. Design decisions is something you might be stuck with forever, and all others issues will be forgottten unless they blow up in someones face.
File a patent on all new ideas. If you're lucky, one of your visitors will implement your idea and you can collect. The other reason you want to file a patent, is defensive. Otherwise, the company that just visited might file their own patent, and when your device is ready to go to market, they'll shut you down.
The other comment I have to the article, is that it is not always such a good idea to have something new and unique. In the very early phases of funding, VCs or angels have no idea if it will fly or not. If they can find at least one other company with the same basic idea, they consider that a validation of the market, and thus, the investment to be less risky. Being first on any market is such a two edged sword. Anyonme remember the Apple Newton?
The sad thing is the injustice when dealing with white collar crime. People who steal a few cars can get years of proson sentence, maybe as much as 5 years for every $10,000 they stole. Now, look at the white collar criminals. Since people really can't fathom number over one million or so, penalties are on a logarithmic scale, untill they become erratic because the really big crooks have huge legal teams.
Steal 10,000 get 5 years
Steal 100,000 get 10 years
Steal 1 million get 15 years
Steal 5 milions get 2 years
Steal 1 billion get 4 years.
Steal 50 billion settle for 2 billion, admit no wrongdoing and get 0 years.
There is nothing evil with per-seat linux licensing, except that it's probaby a bad business decision, considering that others could offer the same value & service for much less, or for free. In order to get wide acceptance they'd need to distribute dirt cheap to end users, and charge a competitive price to corporate customers who would pay extra for support.
this is a rather daft assumption.
And you're a daft boy (Sorry "Are you being served?") . SCO had been showing these 2 code snippets under NDA for 6 months, and even managed to hire Boies & co based on them. It is publicly verified and proven by a string of press releases and industry analyst commentators that SCO claimed these snippets as infringing code. An assertion that could only be made if they thought similart code equalled infringement. Only after their snippets were analyzed by outsiders (in less than 24 hours) was the true provenance revealed. SCO had not managed that task in 6+ months.
Simple math then, shows that the open source community analysis is at least 180 times more efficient, and 100
% more accurate than SCO. SCO has an impossible game of catch-up on their hands. SCO is the naked emperor who desperately needs to hire a tailor, after having mortally insulted all tailors.
So, don't go around calling this reporter daft before you check your own assertions for daftness.
Exactly right.
Pretty much like worker's compensation. If you lose your legs and arms at a workplace with worker's compensation, you'll get a token amount. Without worker's compensation, you can sue the company or insurer for actual damages plus tort.
The seal is purely a favor to manufacturers, as worker's comp is a favor to employers.
Yes, as a matter of fact, we *should* start caning graffiti vandals in this country.
I don't get yer logic. In these toot for toot and I for I times, the proper punishment for taggers is to tag them. An exact copy tattoo of their "artwork" seems fitting, plus some artwork belonging to a rival gang, prominently placed on the forehead.
Virus writers could be sent as test rabbits to some spooky lab in Maryland, where they no doubt experiment with biological weapons.