This is a really good idea - but not at $15 bux...
Lets just bide our time. Within a year SCO should be down to about 15 cents. That will be a market cap of 3.5 million and yes - each of us should toss in our 15 cents worth at that time.
Having purchased a share each - we should frame it because it never will be worth anything and meanwhile place all the copyrights into the public domain.
The SCO shareholders have no case. Any who held SCO shares have seen a 10x increase since this shit started. They have had MONTHS to bail out at a tidy profit.
Any who bought in after the suit was filed clearly are speculating and deserve whatever medicine gets passed around.
Nuclear weapons have proven to be usless. The world has been held at randsom for 5 decades. If anyone cares to chat with Russian people for instance they will find that Russia was terrified of being attacked by the west.
During WWII most Russian families lost at least one loved one. Having suffered greatly defending their country from Hitler - they were next threatened by Patton.
A few months later the USA announced its crown and glory of horror weapons with the destruction of Nagaski and Hiroshima.
I am sure Russia saw no alternative but to build its own weapons to counter a very real threat. Thus the Cold war ensued.
But while Americans wrapped themselves in the flag and proclaimed their love for peace... what really happened?
Well - we had Joseph McCarthy condeming communists, we had white supremists condeming blacks, we had the criminalization of plants that yeilded fibers for clothing and outright lies and disinformation spewing in the media.
Meanwhile nuclear power was condemned as being unsafe in yet another example of massive dissinformation and lies.
This brings us up to the 60's where the USA decided to get involved in an illegal war in Asia.
Thank god for the 60's & the 70's because by this time young adults were finally starting to smell the coffee (if that is what it was because it sure was brown). So what did we get? The shooting of unarmed protestors at Kent State?
Still, enough pressure was finally applied to the military industrial war machine and the USA finally pulled out of Vietnam. Now, just a few years later we can actually visit Vietnam and see what a beautiful country it really is. And what did the war accomplish? Well, a lot of young boys now face life with missing limbs and terrible wounds. Perhaps they were the lucky ones - many others died horrible deaths. As a father with a 20 Y/O son - I can not imagine him facing Napam dropped for "political reasons" so that other governments will "respect" our power.
Meanwhile the war machine marched on developing even better weapons which they got to test in the Middle East. The issue? Freeing Iraqii oil of course... but you won't hear that in the press.
The truth is that if the gift of nuclear energy were used for peaceful purposes instead of being portrayed as a deamon who's only benefit to mankind lies in its ability to kill people with an efficiency never before even dreamed of by the psychopaths who somehow worm their way into positions of power... If nuclear technology were intelligently and peacefully developed for energy production... then today in the year 2003 the USA could be totally self sufficient from an energy standpoint.
Instead, the dream of prosperity for all peoples on the planet has been perverted in the name of building more efficient killing machines.
Perhaps some of this disinformation came about when wealthy oil barrons in the USA realised their oil would not be worth much in a world powered by nuclear energy. So instead of an important chemical feedstock being saved for our children, it got burnt up about as fast as our wasteful society could extract it from the ground - and all in the name of efficiency and conservation and economic growth and viability.
So tell me, as the average American in the NE looks at his heating bills - just how economically viable is the improperly insulated house he has put up with and paid through the nose to heat?
Yes, there has been a lot of disinformation and manipulation in the interest of certain power factions. And perhaps not much has changed because now we see the attacks on programmers by laws such as the DMCA. We're just at the beginning of this battle probably... As Microsoft attempts to roll out DRM we will no doubt see our rights to use and to program our computers to be further erroded, meanwhile we'll be facing a barrage of patent lawsuits each designed to wear us down.
So the vested interests carry on with their deception and manipulation.
Perhaps if we look at the antics of McCarthy and others over the last 50 years we can gain some appreciation of what we collectively face.
You are correct - you are not a nuclear physicist.
You do need to appreciate that the 1st atomic bombs were built in the 1940's and that the first H-Bomb was envisioned and for the most part also built in the 1940's.
After learning that a bomb _could_ be built it only took the Russians a couple years to actually build them (both nuclear and thermonuclear).
I personally would not have considered the USA or Russia to have been particularly advanced in the 1940's.
It really bothers me that people wrap themselves in a flag and refer to Kyoto and how CO2 is destroying the environment when they know DICK ALL about it and have not even done the most basic research.
I quote: These aspects have been explored only to a limited extent in climate models. No studies deal with true intensity of rainfall......Accordingly, it is important that much more attention should be devoted to precipitation rates and frequency, and the physical processes which govern these quantities.
In fact a change of about 1% (or less) in average water vapour on the planet will have more impact on global warming than all the CO2 put together. Meanwhile we have massive irrigation projects and aquifer mining projects going on all over the planet - and these UNDOUBTABLY have had a significant impact on increasing atmospheric H2O.
One of the arguments against H2O's impact is the idea that H2O is short lived in the atmosphere. That may well be the case but at the same time the introduction of additional H2O is very constant.
So this is like saying my humidifier won't work because its effect is short lived. That may be true but I can refill it often and personal experiance tells me it actually does work.
We have similar bad science going on in the nuclear industry. ITER is decades away. In the mean time mankind is going to have to re-vitalize Nuclear Energy. So we hear disinformation all over the place about how fusion will be so safe and fission is dirty.
Fusion is a neutron source and it is these neutrons we are looking for to burn Uranium and Plutonium. Clearly the ITER core will be irradiated and clearly it will create high level wastes. But the most important fact is that we cannot count on it being available any time soon.
We will need a new energy source about as fast as we can bloody well build it and that is even if we fast track it. North American Gas prices are at a high and Oil is also high; meanwhile it was only a few short months ago the USA petroleum stocks were reported at a 27 year low.
The BP Statistical Review of World Energy shows North American gas production peaked in 2001 and that the North Sea feilds peaked in 1999. In fact it shows Saudi Arabian output is down since 2001 as well - but this might not be supply side.
Long before new power plants are built there will likely be very serious blackouts and industrial shutdowns. The North AMerican Nitrogen fertilizer industry is the first of many examples to follow.
So lets start doing some real research and start checking facts instead of parotting the disinformation and bad science that is constantly spewed around in the media.
If SCO actually does have a court order to block IBM from disclosing their claimed infringement (which I seriously doubt BTW) then we can still get around it.
IBM simply needs to remove any files that SCO has identified and issue a distro. A diff against the latest release will clearly show what SCO is claiming.
It is totally perposterous for SCO to take this position. The code has already been released. It already IS published.
So how can IBM be barred from publishing everything EXCEPT what SCO claims infringes? No doubt SCO will try though. The silly fools.
In any event - a distro devoid of the claimed infringing code will allow every developer in the world who has worked on Linux to note the absence of their code and they can then come forth with the evidence that IBM needs.
They have been available here for over a year. Presnt price I was quoted is $175 CDN and that includes 128mb ram and a 10 GB Hdd w/ cd, fdd, KB amd Mouse. Monitor is extra.
Not the student version. VMWare has a good offer to students.
Actually I do already have VMware... but I did ask about an opensource equivalent. VMware is very good and I will recommend it to everyone.
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As for offering assistance. There is a group of us here in Calgary that are working on getting desktop linux into the public. We will offer ISO's and CD's. The most advanced presently seems to be MAXOS and it can be found here: MAXOS
Its based on Debian (which I use BTW) with additions from Knoppix. Cleaver people can find my email address - just ask and we'll send a CD out. We'll ask for S&H since we might get innudanted (/dotted?).
Debian is great for developers. For the masses - we need to hold some hands.
Those IBM PC's being offered in the UK will be a really great place to start. I personally say we should offer a package but at the same time I say that we should not try to undermine the spirit of the offer. Each and every developer or hacker knows how to defeat anything. If we help the masses - then we need to leave it to the masses to figure out for themselves how to rid themselves of those bloody ads.
It'll give them an incentive to learn something. Moreover - we'll find more than one grandma who solves the puzzle.
So lets work with the offer instead of trying to crash it ok?
I do agree with both of your points. Like you - I also make my time available pro-bono. What I find is that often people who proclaim they can't afford things also are unwilling to use free versions of what they claim they cannot afford.
What I find here is that many people who are straight out of uni and high school and who do have the skills are unwilling to take a chance and try to set up a business for themselves. Instead they look for a job and usually end up pumping gas or parking cars or waiting tables.
Meanwhile, I know some grade 10 high school kids who were doing professional level website development and consulting (as it turns out on my servers - since I said the servers are there for you to use - free of charge). They set up an extremely popular website called Musclecanada.com and did this before they were out of grade 10.
A couple years later I showed it to a friend who shapes and she found a book in there that she told me later was a first class accomplishment on par with anything any of her trainers used. This was done by 15-17 year olds.
Those same kids are now in 3rd year business management. They set up a company straight out out grade 12 and mass marketed with $60,000 advertising budgets which they financed on over 20 visa cards and successfully set up and ran a business with over 20,000 customers - in that first year.
These kids know dick all about computers. It is unfortunate that those who do often tend to be too afraid to get out and try something.
Perhaps this says something about poor folks as well because I find that if I offer to set them up in a machine with a free copy of Linux for instance and openoffice and webbrowsing via mozilla and email services and the gimp and so forth - they tend to not want it. Instead I get asked to install a pirate version of winders. When I refuse they often shrug their shoulders and decline.
The issues here are so bad that a friend of mine was asked by the school his kids attend to try to circumvent piracy measures and when he pointed this out to them he found those doing the asking looked to other people to help them break the law.
Attitude is still a really big part of this equation. So while I agree that poor people need access to computers I also say that we have a big educational hurdle to overcome as well. I am doing my part here.
I did give my daughter a computer. It runs Linux. She can install her own NT 4.0 (legal - I gave her a copy of it too, and a disk to put it on. She can do anything wishes with it). She's starting to find that linux works pretty well for her. At work she uses XP.
Here in Calgary we are trying to deploy linux based systems - specifically into low cost housing projects where people do not have access to machines... these are group access installations.
Hopefully they accept what we can offer. If not - they are on their own I guess.
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As far as these IBM machines are conserned... I really think we need to get some and get openoffice and every other useful package these people need installed and set up a website where they can find out what they need to know in order to take advantage of the offer. We can give them a download ISO for free. If we do not do this, many will try to pirate software and others will probably spend far too much of their money getting sucked into things like word and office.
Since we now have the productivity tools we need we should try to get them out there in common use.
While I agree with many of your thoughts I do not agree that computers are out of reach for poor folks.
Here in Calgary I can and have bought several machines for under $200 Canadian - that is under 100 quid. As for them being underpowered? no... my desktop is an upgraded 1998 celeron 433 and it now runs at 1.3gHz (Note: tualatin core celeron's are faster and better than coppermine pentium III's in all respects ) and it has 384 MB ECC memory and I don't think you can even get ECC on P4's anymore.
This means that newer computers do not even measure up to the MINIMUM standard I use.
Note that a 1.3gHz Tualatin will run about 85-95% of the speed of a 1.8gHz P4. This is because of longer pipelines and a detuned core which imposes many additional cycles in order to get the same job done. Remember, Intel had to find some way to puff the numbers. [Besides - I'm not CPU bound anyways so my machine will NEVER run faster than now regardless of how many cycles per second I buy]
The cost of my upgrade? Under $100 bux Canadian. So a poor person should be able to put themselves into a 1.3 gHz machine with the upgrade for less than $200 quid - easily - and still have money in that budget to pay an enterprising smart student out of high school or uni.
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IMHO, most poor people have enuf money for their boose and smokes. It isn't a question of cost - its a question of priorities.
ghost the disk. Get a copy of VMware. Load in Linux. Load the ghosted disk into a virtual disk - which will compress it anyway so all those zeros are meaningless. Probably strip out 90% of the crap from the virtual machine.
Fire up XP in the virtual machine and run it as a background process with output directed to either/dev/nul or to an X-window that isn't displayed.
End of issue. If the virtual machine becomes a nuisance it can be killed any time.
If you still need XP then you can use XP has the host OS and run the crippled copy in the virtual machine anyway - or you can run a clean copy of XP in a virtual machine while the spyware version remains separate.
Keep a copy of the original malware version in a separate file and periodically replace the one that is going to get poluted.
Also - run the whole thing behind a firewall (openbsd and you can d/l it from here: www.bsdwall.org for free) and close off any bloody ports their malware tries to use.
Then if they bitch simply shrug your shoulders and proclaim that they have no right to ask you to run without a firewall and you ain't giving them root access to the firewall either.
By all means - order up a machine - it is free of course.
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If you need it for a server - life is about the same. Set up your server with XP running in VMare - and remove the keyboard, mouse and display screen because you don't need them anyways.
Probably have a cron deamon kill and reboot Xp every hour or so - restart from a fresh copy of course. Tell them you find you have to re-install XP frequently.
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Note the machine is probably a really bare bones critter with onboard video so it'll never make a game box anyways.
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Order up about 5 for me ok? Send me an email and I'll send my address since I'm not in the UK. Set them up properly and get one for your mother, grandmother, cousins and so forth. Show them the power of Linux.
All this is going to hinge on the development of a hyperspeed engine. Without same - nothing much happens. Of course there are projects underway that are making progress.
One of the issues one runs into is this. If one slows the air stream before initiating ignition then we have a situation where we lose fuel energy both through the compression and the reaccleration phases. In addition we are limited to what velocity the hot gasses can be ejected at. Of course - this happens in a jet engine as well because the turbine has to provide the power for the compressor and the blades have to be able to withstand the temperatures.
If we do not compress the air stream then we have very little time to burn the fuel. For example, lets take the projected 3 km/sec = 3000 m/sec. Since the craft is 25 m long we have about 1/120 seconds to burn the fuel before it is passed out the rear end. That corresponds to 8.3 milliseconds. If it takes this long to burn the fuel we'll probably get zero efficency since it will be out the rear end before any work can be done.
We can contrast this to an internal combustion engine. Since the burn is only useful on the down stroke, a burn time of 8.3 ms is equal to a time of 16.67 ms for a complete revolution. 16.67 ms per revolution = 1/16.67 revolution per ms x 1000 = 60 revolutions per second x 60 = 3600 rpm.
But this assumes the combustion section of the hyperspeed plane is 25 meters long which clearly is absurd. Suppose the combustion chamber is say 5 meters long - then we have 5/25 the burn time so this is equivalent to 5x the rpm and 3600 x 5 = 18,000 rpm.
By doing calculations like this one can see that high speed really imposes serious issues because you need to build a really long engine.
As for flying into space... the orbital velocity is about 27000 kph at 100 miles so we can see that our hyperspeed engine looks as if it has to be able to perform at probably 3x the speed contemplated.
I have a number of versions of windows (all legal). Since I'm a developer I tended to collect some of them. Also a few years ago I was a dealer and sold some machines and had to take back at my expense certain OS copies because the customers simply could not use them.
My son uses win2k and I have a machine with NT 4.0 on it. I presently have a machine that runs 95 too - but it is an old P90 and it is turned on only once in a blue moon.
What I've found is that my son has had a great deal if difficulties with win2K. He has re-installed more than 5 times. The OS loses its network printers regularly. He whines about it of course and threatens to get a copy of XP.
I don't think his machine will run XP very well so if he does that he may as well throw out the present machine. Talk about crap eh?
Meanhile I've pretty much abandoned my NT machine and am now using the Debian Linux machine virtually 99% of the time. I may even install VMware and if I do this - I may be able to go back to only one machine. It will save me a bit of electricity.
So an effect that I presonally predicted several years ago is happening - that effect is that old copies of microsoft software are competing directly with newer versions. Given this - I am surprised to see that Microsoft revenues are holding up... or are they?
If the revenues don't materialize, Microsoft shares could erode in value at an unprecedented rate. This would be due to the fact that the number of shares Microsoft has issued is mind boggling.
I personally do not see Microsoft as a growth company at all. While I will not short them, there is no way I'd invest in them either.
The idea is a good one but there are problems associated with it.
First off the barrel of the gun will have to be a vacuum. This is acheivable of course - but we are left with the problem of doors that must be opened very quickly and must obviously remain closed until the very last moment or we lose the vacuum.
Next the ship will hit the atmosphere like a brick hitting a solid wall. The rocket motor can be lit by this time of course but it will still be a rough experiance traveling virtually instantly from a zone with zero frictional loss to atmospheric pressure.
The best way to minimize this is to build it up the center of Mount Everest. If we do this we can put in an elevator and a restaurant at the time and it probably would be quite a popular spot - especially with the climbers.
This leaves the next problem... that of an effective heat sheild. Even from the top of Everest the frictional losses will be pretty horendous. Remember that the shuttle burned up at an elevation almost 6 times higher than everest.
One way to solve this problem is if we could somehow build a motor that could inhale the atmosphere as it enters the throat of the ship. This if course is the rub because we can't yet build engines that work at hyperspeeds. Of course - we are making progress in this area.
Perhaps another way to solve the problem is to use a large CO2 laser system to punch a hole in the atmosphere ahead of the ship. In order to get a meaningful density reduction the temperatures will turn that portion of the atmoshpere into a plasma - which might be just fine because then a very strong magnetic field generated by the rocket could potentially be used to pull the gasses into the guts of the rocket where they can be accelerated even more thus providing part of the lift.
However you cut it there are serious problems that have to be overcome.
We need to build 3 great ships. In the first ship go all the adminstrators and managers and lawyers and politicians. Into the second ship will go all the engineers and technicians and other people who are not actively employed in building ships. Into the third ship will go all the construction workers since they will be required until the thrid great ship has been completed.
Of course - after the first ship has left we'll cancel plans for the second and third unless the species of administrators and managers and lawyers adn politicians happen to repopulate.
The USPTO is granting invalid patents left right and center on obvious techniques and on techniques that in some cases are actually part of standards. Clearly they are not in a position to be able to determine prior art much less the requirment that in order for something to be patentable it must be non-obvious to practitioners of the art.
A couple years ago the Australian PTO granted a patent for a wheel. (I believe I saw this in the ignoble awards) The applicant had actually drawn a cart illustrating the role of the wheel. Clearly the USPTO is not alone in its level of incompetance.
Under law as I understand it, these beauracrates have a responsibility to follow the legislation. Clearly due to their collective incompetance and possibly several other factors they are not doing this.
So is there any way to challenge them and if not can a lobby be put together so that before a patent is granted there is a peer review of its validity? Why should software developers for instance face invalid patent after invalid patent which creates unnecessary litigation at terrible costs when a simple peer review process done in conjunction with the patent office could avert the problem. Please note that the court system is already overloaded and that it is a serious drain on the taxpayers of the nation. As such it would seem that a peer review process might be in the best interests of everyone.
Perhaps the patent office would even go along with such a process because it might save them considerable embarrasment as well as offloading some of the workload of their examiners. Is there anything in the law that prohibits something like this?
Please note that at least IMHO I see invalid patents as the greatest threat there is for the opensource community. We need to address this as soon as possible in an effective manner.
Did the NYT even report what option contracts these people bought? How cum we get so little information.
It would seem to me that if they bought a put option that they probably didn't need to pay all that much and as a result those who made these trades didn't necessarily lose much money.
In fact, if they don't sell the put options then they may actually make money from them if the stock actually does drop.
Well I disagree. Since Darl invented this hair brained scheme, his stock has jumped to the $17 bux range, and he has managed to get $17,000,000 investment from SUN and M$ plus the royal bank of canada and another investment group (I forget the name) has invested something like $50,000,000
This is not bad for a company that was gasping for air as it slowly sank below the radar of relevancy.
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Of course - I don't think they have a snow balls chance in hell of surviving this. As has been pointed out numerous times, any offending code will be pulled (if there actually is any). With IBM's financial strength, were it to turn out that IBM was actually liable (which I doubt very very much) then we would have the situation where IBM would probably do a hostile takeover - whatever the price.
SCO will not survive this. But they have gained a little breathing space for themselves.
This ruling IMHO has been a wonderful xmas present for Darl and his band of wanna be extortionists.
January 4 is going to come up really fast. I predict that within a couple weeks of that date - say by the 20th or so - anything that they have put forth will have been discredited. If so, this will give leave for a large number of open source authors to sue SCO on the grounds of SCO's copyright infringments.
One way to do this would probably be by way of a class action for the $3 billion SCO claimed against IBM.
The real issue here is what code the paladium based machines will be allowed to run. Clearly M$ will not want the opensource software (like openoffice) to run. Viruses of course are fine... viruses do not compete with M$ but openoffice does.
The way opensource software can be restricted is through a costly certification process. Only those programmers M$ likes and only those applications M$ likes will be certified. Everyone else will face one roadblock after another. Some of these road blocks will be subtle but they will still be there.
I anticipate that it will cost several $1000 bux for a professional programmer to gain the coveted certification. Furthermore programmers will be forced to use only compliers and interpreters that M$ deems acceptable. This may spell the end of compilers like Borland C++ professional builder.
The implementation of controls like this are far more draconian than most people realise. Somehow we have to nip this in the bud.
The reason I say this is because if a program has ring zero access then it can do anything it wants to with the hardware. Operating Systems cannot monitor ring zero code. In fact operating systems in general cannot monitor applications code.... they in fact branch into it and it takes over and the cpu runs the instuctions in the application's code segments until something intervenes... like a timer interupt for instance.
What this means is that we might have a CD and it might have the smarts to recognize that someone popped in some protected music. The operating system can be advised and accordingly the operating system may decide a certain application shall not be loaded or it may decide that a certain device driver will report a read failure to said application. Even if there is a digital certification scheme of some sort, we are still left with the fact that any device driver will at some time place the protected material into memory in a fully decoded state. Any ring 0 program can sniff it at this point. Thus digital rights managment on a machine that can be programmed is impossible. Any programmer familiar with a debugger should be able to realise this.
If it is possible for a programmer to write an alternate device driver and load it into the operating system then the protection goes away completely. For this reason, in order to make DRM work, Microsoft has to prevent programmers from writing device drivers. If they can do this they can prevent programmers from writing other code as well. Clearly this is what it is all about.
Note that the PC became popular because it was so promiscous and would run any code people loaded into it. When it loses this feature it will also lose its popularity. Nevertheless I do expect Microsoft to try this because they will make a bundle on taxing programmers for the right to write code.
The real issue here is what code the palladium based machines will be allowed to rub. Clearly M$ will not want the opensource software (like openoffice) to run. Viruses of course are fine... viruses do not compete with M$ but openoffice does.
The way opensource software can be restricted is through a costly certification process. Only those programmers M$ likes and only those application M$ likes will be certified. Everyone else will face one roadblock after another.
I anticipate that it will cost several $1000 bux for a professional programmer to gain the coveted certification. Furthermore programmers will be forced to use only compliers and interpreters that M$ deems acceptable. This may spell the end of compilers like Borland C++ professional builder.
The implementation of controls like this are far more draconian than mot people realise. Somehow we have to nip this in the bud.
First off - I did not pay any attention to this when it was in the news. I am not a beatle fan nor a Chiffon fan. So probably I'm impartial.
To summarize the summary, the judge in the case held that Harrison may have "subconciously" copied the notes. Personally I think the judge had a grudge. I see so little similarity between these songs that noone will convince me there is plagerism here.
Music is a combination of structure, rhythm and lyrics and in this case, there are differences in all three areas.
So the case basically illustrates the nature of an artist being permanently tainted by something he inavertantly hears. The question that must be asked is if a programmer can be permanently tainted by what he sees.
If as is claimed, many of the programmers who worked on Linux also worked on unix then one might be able to argue that some of their ideas were a subconcious memory of the code they saw before and that hense, the new work is really derived.
This would mean that any programmer who takes a job jeopardises his freedom to write programs for as long as he lives. This would mean that any writer who reads might somehow jeopardise his freedom to write since his new works might somehow bear some obscure resemblance to something he might inadvertantly have read perhaps years before.
This issue here is that the programmer has a much harder problem to contend with because not only must he NOT write the same code as he might have seen before, that code must in fact work in a similar or identical fashion as the code that came before.
On the other hand, this hypothesis brings into question the issue of whether SCO's System V code is in fact plagerizm free. Clearly as ESR has demonstrated large portions of System V were derived from BSD and not only this, AT&T blatently removed the attributions from a lot of BSD code and ignored the BSD copyrights when they included it into System V. Effectivly AT&T tried to steal other people's Intellectual Property.
So what SCO has to understand is that it cuts both ways. If SCO has any claim on Linux then it will be perfectly clear that the developers of UNIX who did not work for AT&T have the same claim on SCO's claimed Intellectual Property.
This means that SCO should be vulnerable to law suits where they claim IP in derived works of others and these claims should be enforcable even though the code was released under the BSD license.
If you go to ESR's website and read the analysis of the example code that SCO released, then you can see very clearly that as ESR says, the code in System V was derived from a common ancestor. Since this is the case SCO cannot control it. Authors have the right to control the character of the derived works as well as what it is used for. This right prevents people from perverting the intended purpose of the original work. An example of a pervertion might be to turn Mickey Mouse into a porn star.
Clearly SCO is trying to pervert the intent of the BSD licening with this law suit. The free nature of the software the original Unix developers created is part of their intellectual property. That SCO is attempting to do now what AT&T tried to do years ago is blatently apparent.
Part of the reason AT&T lost is because they tried to steal other people's work and present it as their own (through the removal of the attributions). Not only this, AT&T then tried to prevent the original authors from being able to use their own work. How is this any different here? If any significant amount of the code SCO lays claim to is in fact derived from other people's work, then SCO lays themselves wide open. Perhaps this is why they won't release any "evidence".
The comments I read were really lame. This is an important step forward folks.
A practical walking machine should probably have 6 legs and be able to trott like a horse. Imagine how useful such a machine would be for mineral exploration. When such a machine can scale a scree slope then this means that mankind will not have to hike in 20 miles in order to check out a claim.
A machine that can walk over windfalls would be more fun than a bike.
I think the OpenSource community can program one. But I've not heard of any takers. If we could even simulate a walking machine we'd be well on the way because actually building the actuators is not going to be very difficult... what is difficult is writing the code to control them.
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This is a really good idea - but not at $15 bux...
Lets just bide our time. Within a year SCO should be down to about 15 cents. That will be a market cap of 3.5 million and yes - each of us should toss in our 15 cents worth at that time.
Having purchased a share each - we should frame it because it never will be worth anything and meanwhile place all the copyrights into the public domain.
The SCO shareholders have no case. Any who held SCO shares have seen a 10x increase since this shit started. They have had MONTHS to bail out at a tidy profit.
Any who bought in after the suit was filed clearly are speculating and deserve whatever medicine gets passed around.
Sorry folks - no case here.
You hit the nail on the head here.
Nuclear weapons have proven to be usless. The world has been held at randsom for 5 decades. If anyone cares to chat with Russian people for instance they will find that Russia was terrified of being attacked by the west.
During WWII most Russian families lost at least one loved one. Having suffered greatly defending their country from Hitler - they were next threatened by Patton.
A few months later the USA announced its crown and glory of horror weapons with the destruction of Nagaski and Hiroshima.
I am sure Russia saw no alternative but to build its own weapons to counter a very real threat. Thus the Cold war ensued.
But while Americans wrapped themselves in the flag and proclaimed their love for peace... what really happened?
Well - we had Joseph McCarthy condeming communists, we had white supremists condeming blacks, we had the criminalization of plants that yeilded fibers for clothing and outright lies and disinformation spewing in the media.
Meanwhile nuclear power was condemned as being unsafe in yet another example of massive dissinformation and lies.
This brings us up to the 60's where the USA decided to get involved in an illegal war in Asia.
Thank god for the 60's & the 70's because by this time young adults were finally starting to smell the coffee (if that is what it was because it sure was brown). So what did we get? The shooting of unarmed protestors at Kent State?
Still, enough pressure was finally applied to the military industrial war machine and the USA finally pulled out of Vietnam. Now, just a few years later we can actually visit Vietnam and see what a beautiful country it really is. And what did the war accomplish? Well, a lot of young boys now face life with missing limbs and terrible wounds. Perhaps they were the lucky ones - many others died horrible deaths. As a father with a 20 Y/O son - I can not imagine him facing Napam dropped for "political reasons" so that other governments will "respect" our power.
Meanwhile the war machine marched on developing even better weapons which they got to test in the Middle East. The issue? Freeing Iraqii oil of course... but you won't hear that in the press.
The truth is that if the gift of nuclear energy were used for peaceful purposes instead of being portrayed as a deamon who's only benefit to mankind lies in its ability to kill people with an efficiency never before even dreamed of by the psychopaths who somehow worm their way into positions of power... If nuclear technology were intelligently and peacefully developed for energy production... then today in the year 2003 the USA could be totally self sufficient from an energy standpoint.
Instead, the dream of prosperity for all peoples on the planet has been perverted in the name of building more efficient killing machines.
Perhaps some of this disinformation came about when wealthy oil barrons in the USA realised their oil would not be worth much in a world powered by nuclear energy. So instead of an important chemical feedstock being saved for our children, it got burnt up about as fast as our wasteful society could extract it from the ground - and all in the name of efficiency and conservation and economic growth and viability.
So tell me, as the average American in the NE looks at his heating bills - just how economically viable is the improperly insulated house he has put up with and paid through the nose to heat?
Yes, there has been a lot of disinformation and manipulation in the interest of certain power factions. And perhaps not much has changed because now we see the attacks on programmers by laws such as the DMCA. We're just at the beginning of this battle probably... As Microsoft attempts to roll out DRM we will no doubt see our rights to use and to program our computers to be further erroded, meanwhile we'll be facing a barrage of patent lawsuits each designed to wear us down.
So the vested interests carry on with their deception and manipulation.
Perhaps if we look at the antics of McCarthy and others over the last 50 years we can gain some appreciation of what we collectively face.
You are correct - you are not a nuclear physicist.
You do need to appreciate that the 1st atomic bombs were built in the 1940's and that the first H-Bomb was envisioned and for the most part also built in the 1940's.
After learning that a bomb _could_ be built it only took the Russians a couple years to actually build them (both nuclear and thermonuclear).
I personally would not have considered the USA or Russia to have been particularly advanced in the 1940's.
It really bothers me that people wrap themselves in a flag and refer to Kyoto and how CO2 is destroying the environment when they know DICK ALL about it and have not even done the most basic research.
If you read chapter 7 of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) The Scientific Basis you will find that water vapour is typically ignored in most models. Yet it is ove 100 times more significant than CO2 is.
I quote: These aspects have been explored only to a limited extent in climate models. No studies deal with true intensity of rainfall... ...Accordingly, it is important that much more attention should be devoted to precipitation rates and frequency, and the physical processes which govern these quantities.
In fact a change of about 1% (or less) in average water vapour on the planet will have more impact on global warming than all the CO2 put together. Meanwhile we have massive irrigation projects and aquifer mining projects going on all over the planet - and these UNDOUBTABLY have had a significant impact on increasing atmospheric H2O.
One of the arguments against H2O's impact is the idea that H2O is short lived in the atmosphere. That may well be the case but at the same time the introduction of additional H2O is very constant.
So this is like saying my humidifier won't work because its effect is short lived. That may be true but I can refill it often and personal experiance tells me it actually does work.
We have similar bad science going on in the nuclear industry. ITER is decades away. In the mean time mankind is going to have to re-vitalize Nuclear Energy. So we hear disinformation all over the place about how fusion will be so safe and fission is dirty.
Fusion is a neutron source and it is these neutrons we are looking for to burn Uranium and Plutonium. Clearly the ITER core will be irradiated and clearly it will create high level wastes. But the most important fact is that we cannot count on it being available any time soon.
We will need a new energy source about as fast as we can bloody well build it and that is even if we fast track it. North American Gas prices are at a high and Oil is also high; meanwhile it was only a few short months ago the USA petroleum stocks were reported at a 27 year low.
The BP Statistical Review of World Energy shows North American gas production peaked in 2001 and that the North Sea feilds peaked in 1999. In fact it shows Saudi Arabian output is down since 2001 as well - but this might not be supply side. Long before new power plants are built there will likely be very serious blackouts and industrial shutdowns. The North AMerican Nitrogen fertilizer industry is the first of many examples to follow.
So lets start doing some real research and start checking facts instead of parotting the disinformation and bad science that is constantly spewed around in the media.
If SCO actually does have a court order to block IBM from disclosing their claimed infringement (which I seriously doubt BTW) then we can still get around it.
IBM simply needs to remove any files that SCO has identified and issue a distro. A diff against the latest release will clearly show what SCO is claiming.
It is totally perposterous for SCO to take this position. The code has already been released. It already IS published.
So how can IBM be barred from publishing everything EXCEPT what SCO claims infringes? No doubt SCO will try though. The silly fools.
In any event - a distro devoid of the claimed infringing code will allow every developer in the world who has worked on Linux to note the absence of their code and they can then come forth with the evidence that IBM needs.
This ploy will go nowhere IMHO
They have been available here for over a year. Presnt price I was quoted is $175 CDN and that includes 128mb ram and a 10 GB Hdd w/ cd, fdd, KB amd Mouse. Monitor is extra.
Not the student version. VMWare has a good offer to students.
Actually I do already have VMware... but I did ask about an opensource equivalent. VMware is very good and I will recommend it to everyone.
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As for offering assistance. There is a group of us here in Calgary that are working on getting desktop linux into the public. We will offer ISO's and CD's. The most advanced presently seems to be MAXOS and it can be found here: MAXOS
Its based on Debian (which I use BTW) with additions from Knoppix. Cleaver people can find my email address - just ask and we'll send a CD out. We'll ask for S&H since we might get innudanted (/dotted?).
Debian is great for developers. For the masses - we need to hold some hands. Those IBM PC's being offered in the UK will be a really great place to start. I personally say we should offer a package but at the same time I say that we should not try to undermine the spirit of the offer. Each and every developer or hacker knows how to defeat anything. If we help the masses - then we need to leave it to the masses to figure out for themselves how to rid themselves of those bloody ads.
It'll give them an incentive to learn something. Moreover - we'll find more than one grandma who solves the puzzle.
So lets work with the offer instead of trying to crash it ok?
I do agree with both of your points. Like you - I also make my time available pro-bono. What I find is that often people who proclaim they can't afford things also are unwilling to use free versions of what they claim they cannot afford.
What I find here is that many people who are straight out of uni and high school and who do have the skills are unwilling to take a chance and try to set up a business for themselves. Instead they look for a job and usually end up pumping gas or parking cars or waiting tables.
Meanwhile, I know some grade 10 high school kids who were doing professional level website development and consulting (as it turns out on my servers - since I said the servers are there for you to use - free of charge). They set up an extremely popular website called Musclecanada.com and did this before they were out of grade 10.
A couple years later I showed it to a friend who shapes and she found a book in there that she told me later was a first class accomplishment on par with anything any of her trainers used. This was done by 15-17 year olds.
Those same kids are now in 3rd year business management. They set up a company straight out out grade 12 and mass marketed with $60,000 advertising budgets which they financed on over 20 visa cards and successfully set up and ran a business with over 20,000 customers - in that first year.
These kids know dick all about computers. It is unfortunate that those who do often tend to be too afraid to get out and try something.
Perhaps this says something about poor folks as well because I find that if I offer to set them up in a machine with a free copy of Linux for instance and openoffice and webbrowsing via mozilla and email services and the gimp and so forth - they tend to not want it. Instead I get asked to install a pirate version of winders. When I refuse they often shrug their shoulders and decline.
The issues here are so bad that a friend of mine was asked by the school his kids attend to try to circumvent piracy measures and when he pointed this out to them he found those doing the asking looked to other people to help them break the law.
Attitude is still a really big part of this equation. So while I agree that poor people need access to computers I also say that we have a big educational hurdle to overcome as well. I am doing my part here.
I did give my daughter a computer. It runs Linux. She can install her own NT 4.0 (legal - I gave her a copy of it too, and a disk to put it on. She can do anything wishes with it). She's starting to find that linux works pretty well for her. At work she uses XP.
Here in Calgary we are trying to deploy linux based systems - specifically into low cost housing projects where people do not have access to machines... these are group access installations.
Hopefully they accept what we can offer. If not - they are on their own I guess.
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As far as these IBM machines are conserned... I really think we need to get some and get openoffice and every other useful package these people need installed and set up a website where they can find out what they need to know in order to take advantage of the offer. We can give them a download ISO for free. If we do not do this, many will try to pirate software and others will probably spend far too much of their money getting sucked into things like word and office.
Since we now have the productivity tools we need we should try to get them out there in common use.
While I agree with many of your thoughts I do not agree that computers are out of reach for poor folks.
Here in Calgary I can and have bought several machines for under $200 Canadian - that is under 100 quid. As for them being underpowered? no... my desktop is an upgraded 1998 celeron 433 and it now runs at 1.3gHz (Note: tualatin core celeron's are faster and better than coppermine pentium III's in all respects ) and it has 384 MB ECC memory and I don't think you can even get ECC on P4's anymore.
This means that newer computers do not even measure up to the MINIMUM standard I use.
Note that a 1.3gHz Tualatin will run about 85-95% of the speed of a 1.8gHz P4. This is because of longer pipelines and a detuned core which imposes many additional cycles in order to get the same job done. Remember, Intel had to find some way to puff the numbers. [Besides - I'm not CPU bound anyways so my machine will NEVER run faster than now regardless of how many cycles per second I buy]
The cost of my upgrade? Under $100 bux Canadian. So a poor person should be able to put themselves into a 1.3 gHz machine with the upgrade for less than $200 quid - easily - and still have money in that budget to pay an enterprising smart student out of high school or uni.
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IMHO, most poor people have enuf money for their boose and smokes. It isn't a question of cost - its a question of priorities.
ghost the disk. Get a copy of VMware. Load in Linux. Load the ghosted disk into a virtual disk - which will compress it anyway so all those zeros are meaningless. Probably strip out 90% of the crap from the virtual machine.
/dev/nul or to an X-window that isn't displayed.
Fire up XP in the virtual machine and run it as a background process with output directed to either
End of issue. If the virtual machine becomes a nuisance it can be killed any time.
If you still need XP then you can use XP has the host OS and run the crippled copy in the virtual machine anyway - or you can run a clean copy of XP in a virtual machine while the spyware version remains separate.
Keep a copy of the original malware version in a separate file and periodically replace the one that is going to get poluted.
Also - run the whole thing behind a firewall (openbsd and you can d/l it from here: www.bsdwall.org for free) and close off any bloody ports their malware tries to use.
Then if they bitch simply shrug your shoulders and proclaim that they have no right to ask you to run without a firewall and you ain't giving them root access to the firewall either.
By all means - order up a machine - it is free of course.
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If you need it for a server - life is about the same. Set up your server with XP running in VMare - and remove the keyboard, mouse and display screen because you don't need them anyways.
Probably have a cron deamon kill and reboot Xp every hour or so - restart from a fresh copy of course. Tell them you find you have to re-install XP frequently.
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Note the machine is probably a really bare bones critter with onboard video so it'll never make a game box anyways.
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Order up about 5 for me ok? Send me an email and I'll send my address since I'm not in the UK. Set them up properly and get one for your mother, grandmother, cousins and so forth. Show them the power of Linux.
Do we have opensource VM yet?
All this is going to hinge on the development of a hyperspeed engine. Without same - nothing much happens. Of course there are projects underway that are making progress.
One of the issues one runs into is this. If one slows the air stream before initiating ignition then we have a situation where we lose fuel energy both through the compression and the reaccleration phases. In addition we are limited to what velocity the hot gasses can be ejected at. Of course - this happens in a jet engine as well because the turbine has to provide the power for the compressor and the blades have to be able to withstand the temperatures.
If we do not compress the air stream then we have very little time to burn the fuel. For example, lets take the projected 3 km/sec = 3000 m/sec. Since the craft is 25 m long we have about 1/120 seconds to burn the fuel before it is passed out the rear end. That corresponds to 8.3 milliseconds. If it takes this long to burn the fuel we'll probably get zero efficency since it will be out the rear end before any work can be done.
We can contrast this to an internal combustion engine. Since the burn is only useful on the down stroke, a burn time of 8.3 ms is equal to a time of 16.67 ms for a complete revolution. 16.67 ms per revolution = 1/16.67 revolution per ms x 1000 = 60 revolutions per second x 60 = 3600 rpm.
But this assumes the combustion section of the hyperspeed plane is 25 meters long which clearly is absurd. Suppose the combustion chamber is say 5 meters long - then we have 5/25 the burn time so this is equivalent to 5x the rpm and 3600 x 5 = 18,000 rpm.
By doing calculations like this one can see that high speed really imposes serious issues because you need to build a really long engine.
As for flying into space... the orbital velocity is about 27000 kph at 100 miles so we can see that our hyperspeed engine looks as if it has to be able to perform at probably 3x the speed contemplated.
I have a number of versions of windows (all legal). Since I'm a developer I tended to collect some of them. Also a few years ago I was a dealer and sold some machines and had to take back at my expense certain OS copies because the customers simply could not use them.
My son uses win2k and I have a machine with NT 4.0 on it. I presently have a machine that runs 95 too - but it is an old P90 and it is turned on only once in a blue moon.
What I've found is that my son has had a great deal if difficulties with win2K. He has re-installed more than 5 times. The OS loses its network printers regularly. He whines about it of course and threatens to get a copy of XP.
I don't think his machine will run XP very well so if he does that he may as well throw out the present machine. Talk about crap eh?
Meanhile I've pretty much abandoned my NT machine and am now using the Debian Linux machine virtually 99% of the time. I may even install VMware and if I do this - I may be able to go back to only one machine. It will save me a bit of electricity.
So an effect that I presonally predicted several years ago is happening - that effect is that old copies of microsoft software are competing directly with newer versions. Given this - I am surprised to see that Microsoft revenues are holding up... or are they?
If the revenues don't materialize, Microsoft shares could erode in value at an unprecedented rate. This would be due to the fact that the number of shares Microsoft has issued is mind boggling.
I personally do not see Microsoft as a growth company at all. While I will not short them, there is no way I'd invest in them either.
The idea is a good one but there are problems associated with it.
First off the barrel of the gun will have to be a vacuum. This is acheivable of course - but we are left with the problem of doors that must be opened very quickly and must obviously remain closed until the very last moment or we lose the vacuum.
Next the ship will hit the atmosphere like a brick hitting a solid wall. The rocket motor can be lit by this time of course but it will still be a rough experiance traveling virtually instantly from a zone with zero frictional loss to atmospheric pressure.
The best way to minimize this is to build it up the center of Mount Everest. If we do this we can put in an elevator and a restaurant at the time and it probably would be quite a popular spot - especially with the climbers.
This leaves the next problem... that of an effective heat sheild. Even from the top of Everest the frictional losses will be pretty horendous. Remember that the shuttle burned up at an elevation almost 6 times higher than everest.
One way to solve this problem is if we could somehow build a motor that could inhale the atmosphere as it enters the throat of the ship. This if course is the rub because we can't yet build engines that work at hyperspeeds. Of course - we are making progress in this area.
Perhaps another way to solve the problem is to use a large CO2 laser system to punch a hole in the atmosphere ahead of the ship. In order to get a meaningful density reduction the temperatures will turn that portion of the atmoshpere into a plasma - which might be just fine because then a very strong magnetic field generated by the rocket could potentially be used to pull the gasses into the guts of the rocket where they can be accelerated even more thus providing part of the lift.
However you cut it there are serious problems that have to be overcome.
We need to build 3 great ships. In the first ship go all the adminstrators and managers and lawyers and politicians. Into the second ship will go all the engineers and technicians and other people who are not actively employed in building ships. Into the third ship will go all the construction workers since they will be required until the thrid great ship has been completed.
Of course - after the first ship has left we'll cancel plans for the second and third unless the species of administrators and managers and lawyers adn politicians happen to repopulate.
The USPTO is granting invalid patents left right and center on obvious techniques and on techniques that in some cases are actually part of standards. Clearly they are not in a position to be able to determine prior art much less the requirment that in order for something to be patentable it must be non-obvious to practitioners of the art.
A couple years ago the Australian PTO granted a patent for a wheel. (I believe I saw this in the ignoble awards) The applicant had actually drawn a cart illustrating the role of the wheel. Clearly the USPTO is not alone in its level of incompetance.
Under law as I understand it, these beauracrates have a responsibility to follow the legislation. Clearly due to their collective incompetance and possibly several other factors they are not doing this.
So is there any way to challenge them and if not can a lobby be put together so that before a patent is granted there is a peer review of its validity? Why should software developers for instance face invalid patent after invalid patent which creates unnecessary litigation at terrible costs when a simple peer review process done in conjunction with the patent office could avert the problem. Please note that the court system is already overloaded and that it is a serious drain on the taxpayers of the nation. As such it would seem that a peer review process might be in the best interests of everyone.
Perhaps the patent office would even go along with such a process because it might save them considerable embarrasment as well as offloading some of the workload of their examiners. Is there anything in the law that prohibits something like this?
Please note that at least IMHO I see invalid patents as the greatest threat there is for the opensource community. We need to address this as soon as possible in an effective manner.
This is why Bell held the patent for the telephone.
Did the NYT even report what option contracts these people bought? How cum we get so little information.
It would seem to me that if they bought a put option that they probably didn't need to pay all that much and as a result those who made these trades didn't necessarily lose much money.
In fact, if they don't sell the put options then they may actually make money from them if the stock actually does drop.
Well I disagree. Since Darl invented this hair brained scheme, his stock has jumped to the $17 bux range, and he has managed to get $17,000,000 investment from SUN and M$ plus the royal bank of canada and another investment group (I forget the name) has invested something like $50,000,000
This is not bad for a company that was gasping for air as it slowly sank below the radar of relevancy.
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Of course - I don't think they have a snow balls chance in hell of surviving this. As has been pointed out numerous times, any offending code will be pulled (if there actually is any). With IBM's financial strength, were it to turn out that IBM was actually liable (which I doubt very very much) then we would have the situation where IBM would probably do a hostile takeover - whatever the price.
SCO will not survive this. But they have gained a little breathing space for themselves.
This ruling IMHO has been a wonderful xmas present for Darl and his band of wanna be extortionists.
January 4 is going to come up really fast. I predict that within a couple weeks of that date - say by the 20th or so - anything that they have put forth will have been discredited. If so, this will give leave for a large number of open source authors to sue SCO on the grounds of SCO's copyright infringments.
One way to do this would probably be by way of a class action for the $3 billion SCO claimed against IBM.
One of the 1st things ISP's need to do is clamp down on forged headers.
The real issue here is what code the paladium based machines will be allowed to run. Clearly M$ will not want the opensource software (like openoffice) to run. Viruses of course are fine... viruses do not compete with M$ but openoffice does.
The way opensource software can be restricted is through a costly certification process. Only those programmers M$ likes and only those applications M$ likes will be certified. Everyone else will face one roadblock after another. Some of these road blocks will be subtle but they will still be there.
I anticipate that it will cost several $1000 bux for a professional programmer to gain the coveted certification. Furthermore programmers will be forced to use only compliers and interpreters that M$ deems acceptable. This may spell the end of compilers like Borland C++ professional builder.
The implementation of controls like this are far more draconian than most people realise. Somehow we have to nip this in the bud.
The reason I say this is because if a program has ring zero access then it can do anything it wants to with the hardware. Operating Systems cannot monitor ring zero code. In fact operating systems in general cannot monitor applications code.... they in fact branch into it and it takes over and the cpu runs the instuctions in the application's code segments until something intervenes... like a timer interupt for instance.
What this means is that we might have a CD and it might have the smarts to recognize that someone popped in some protected music. The operating system can be advised and accordingly the operating system may decide a certain application shall not be loaded or it may decide that a certain device driver will report a read failure to said application. Even if there is a digital certification scheme of some sort, we are still left with the fact that any device driver will at some time place the protected material into memory in a fully decoded state. Any ring 0 program can sniff it at this point. Thus digital rights managment on a machine that can be programmed is impossible. Any programmer familiar with a debugger should be able to realise this.
If it is possible for a programmer to write an alternate device driver and load it into the operating system then the protection goes away completely. For this reason, in order to make DRM work, Microsoft has to prevent programmers from writing device drivers. If they can do this they can prevent programmers from writing other code as well. Clearly this is what it is all about.
Note that the PC became popular because it was so promiscous and would run any code people loaded into it. When it loses this feature it will also lose its popularity. Nevertheless I do expect Microsoft to try this because they will make a bundle on taxing programmers for the right to write code.
The real issue here is what code the palladium based machines will be allowed to rub. Clearly M$ will not want the opensource software (like openoffice) to run. Viruses of course are fine... viruses do not compete with M$ but openoffice does.
The way opensource software can be restricted is through a costly certification process. Only those programmers M$ likes and only those application M$ likes will be certified. Everyone else will face one roadblock after another.
I anticipate that it will cost several $1000 bux for a professional programmer to gain the coveted certification. Furthermore programmers will be forced to use only compliers and interpreters that M$ deems acceptable. This may spell the end of compilers like Borland C++ professional builder.
The implementation of controls like this are far more draconian than mot people realise. Somehow we have to nip this in the bud.
IMHO anyone interested in this case should read the George Harrison vs the Chiffon's copyright judgment over the song My Sweet Lord and He's so fine
You can find it here THE "MY SWEET LORD"/"HE'S SO FINE" PLAGIARISM SUIT
First off - I did not pay any attention to this when it was in the news. I am not a beatle fan nor a Chiffon fan. So probably I'm impartial.
To summarize the summary, the judge in the case held that Harrison may have "subconciously" copied the notes. Personally I think the judge had a grudge. I see so little similarity between these songs that noone will convince me there is plagerism here.
Music is a combination of structure, rhythm and lyrics and in this case, there are differences in all three areas.
So the case basically illustrates the nature of an artist being permanently tainted by something he inavertantly hears. The question that must be asked is if a programmer can be permanently tainted by what he sees.
If as is claimed, many of the programmers who worked on Linux also worked on unix then one might be able to argue that some of their ideas were a subconcious memory of the code they saw before and that hense, the new work is really derived.
This would mean that any programmer who takes a job jeopardises his freedom to write programs for as long as he lives. This would mean that any writer who reads might somehow jeopardise his freedom to write since his new works might somehow bear some obscure resemblance to something he might inadvertantly have read perhaps years before.
This issue here is that the programmer has a much harder problem to contend with because not only must he NOT write the same code as he might have seen before, that code must in fact work in a similar or identical fashion as the code that came before.
On the other hand, this hypothesis brings into question the issue of whether SCO's System V code is in fact plagerizm free. Clearly as ESR has demonstrated large portions of System V were derived from BSD and not only this, AT&T blatently removed the attributions from a lot of BSD code and ignored the BSD copyrights when they included it into System V. Effectivly AT&T tried to steal other people's Intellectual Property.
So what SCO has to understand is that it cuts both ways. If SCO has any claim on Linux then it will be perfectly clear that the developers of UNIX who did not work for AT&T have the same claim on SCO's claimed Intellectual Property.
This means that SCO should be vulnerable to law suits where they claim IP in derived works of others and these claims should be enforcable even though the code was released under the BSD license.
If you go to ESR's website and read the analysis of the example code that SCO released, then you can see very clearly that as ESR says, the code in System V was derived from a common ancestor. Since this is the case SCO cannot control it. Authors have the right to control the character of the derived works as well as what it is used for. This right prevents people from perverting the intended purpose of the original work. An example of a pervertion might be to turn Mickey Mouse into a porn star.
Clearly SCO is trying to pervert the intent of the BSD licening with this law suit. The free nature of the software the original Unix developers created is part of their intellectual property. That SCO is attempting to do now what AT&T tried to do years ago is blatently apparent.
Part of the reason AT&T lost is because they tried to steal other people's work and present it as their own (through the removal of the attributions). Not only this, AT&T then tried to prevent the original authors from being able to use their own work. How is this any different here? If any significant amount of the code SCO lays claim to is in fact derived from other people's work, then SCO lays themselves wide open. Perhaps this is why they won't release any "evidence".
The comments I read were really lame. This is an important step forward folks.
A practical walking machine should probably have 6 legs and be able to trott like a horse. Imagine how useful such a machine would be for mineral exploration. When such a machine can scale a scree slope then this means that mankind will not have to hike in 20 miles in order to check out a claim.
A machine that can walk over windfalls would be more fun than a bike.
I think the OpenSource community can program one. But I've not heard of any takers. If we could even simulate a walking machine we'd be well on the way because actually building the actuators is not going to be very difficult... what is difficult is writing the code to control them.
this is very well said. Too bad you are anonymous 'cause I would have modded you up except I wanted to be a participant rather than a judge. :-)
See if you can find Colonies in Space. It was written years ago and its a really good read.