It's just as much a problem with Proprietary projects 'accidently' including GPL code as it is GPL code accidently including proprietary code. The unique advantage that GPL code has (and also it's achiles heel) is that there's no hope of keeping the illicit code secret. This means that people are less likely to try to sneak something in.
This also provides a probable protection against a wilfull violation accusation. If the donor honestly believed that (s)he had the right to donate and the recipient project accepted that belief (and corrected the error as quickly as feasible once made aware), this would probably be a much different case than what we've seen of people sneaking other people's (GPL) code into their proprietary project and then trying to obfuscate it after being confronted.
Yeah, the people who hoped that SCO would pull off a last-inning upset seem to have finally realized that the light at the end of the tunnel is a train. SCO's stock has dropped almost precisely 50% in tha last two days.
If I was one of the fools who still had some SCO stock left to sell, I'd probably wait a week or so for the current selling frenzy to end, and let the SCO stock painters to get back in action. I'd hope they'd be able to get the stock back up near the $2.00 range again, then I'd sell what I had left.
Not being stupid enough to hold SCO stock, however, I'm just waiting for it to s(t)ink below $0.50 for long enough to get delisted.
Nobody who has stock is willing to sell (well, lend) it to a shorter -- If the stock drops, they'll lose money, and I doubt that many people are willing to do that. Most of the people 'selling' SCO stock these days are probably involved in painting it.
As somebody else pointed out, the large natural stone blocks work better as foundations, while concrete would work better for the higher reaches and the sidings. This seems to be the theorized case with the pyramids.
Asphalt may work nicely as continuous strips in places like Texas where it's continuously reasonably warm, but in places like Edmonton, where it drops down to -40 most winters, cracks in asphalt are pretty common once the snow melts. As the environment gets warmer, the cracks seem to ge rarer.
In the arguments, it was pointed out that there are already SCOTUS decisions that indicate that there is more to sustaining a patent than just proving that it is novel*. The problem is that the federal (patent) circuit hasn't been paying attention to these rulings -- part of the fight is whether or not it would be distruptive to simply force the courts and patent examiners to pay attention to the existing SCOTUS authorities that they've been studiously ignoring for the last 20 years.
* (( in my mind, the current test, is really just a reformulation of the 'novel' test, because if you can prove that it isn't novel (new), then it won't pass the current 'obvious' test, and if you can prove it doesn't pass the 'obvious' test, then you've just proved that it's not 'novel'.))
This means that the best time to change from Microsoft to OO would be when changes in MS's products would require a heavy investment in training and support for a new product, in any event... such as.... 2007.
Can anybody get some estimates of the cost of training and support for a recent majour MS Office update? I figure that that should be somewhere near the cost of a switch...
The EFF is only representing Frankel in the suit. If Barney tries to stomp on another web site, the EFF should have no problem representing any future harassee as well.
Unless the EFF agreed not to involve themselves in future litigation, Lyons will always have to face the risk that the EFF will sue.
Think about it: at 35 transactions per second, it would take them all of 30 seconds to sell out of $100 X-Boxes -- and given that they had enough traffic to bring down the site, I'm sure that they were running X-Box transactions about as fast as the deadlock-resolution code could handle.
Now, why whould they do this?
If they got a couple million people on their site as a result of this insanity, they only need to get about $0.10 per customer to make up for what they lost on the promotion. Well worth the money.
First of all, there's the Lexmark decision that the DMCA can't be used to simply prevent you from USING software. Then ther's the Decision referenced in the article about the people attacking the GPL by claiming that it violates copyright. That decision points out that you can only use copyright protections to protect copyright rights, not contractual rights -- and preventing you from unlocking your cellphone is a contractual issue -- not a copyright one, so you shouldn't be able to use the DMCA circumvention clause (which claims to only protect copyright rights) to preserve incredibly tenuous contract rights (( presuming that people have even agreed to any such purported contract )).
Not necessarily. The voter attitude this election was just way too anti-republican. It's quite possible that the people who control the crooked process decided that -- especially with things like the HBO documentary -- this vote would be too 'hot' to crib to the point where the Republicans would win a commanding majority. Far better to just limit the damage, and save the big guns for the next (full-term) election.
Besides, what better way to silence the forces of democracy than to allow the other side to win the occasional mid-term election?
Another thing to consider, as well, is that the people who control the process aren't necessarily the Republicans. This is a power process. One way to keep the Republicans 'in line' is to teach them the occasional lesson by allowing the Democrats to win the occasional election.
Besides -- the issue is structural democracy, not Republican vs Democrat. The process is no less subverted if it's Democrats who have the ability to shift the vote in certain races.
That works because the OCR forms function as the voter-verified paper trail that many e-vote groups are asking for. When you have a pure electronic system with no voter verified tickets, there's no way to figure out that the computer has messed up the vote other than the total vote count being different than the number of people who voted -- and if you can't keep a simple sum balanced on a computer system, then you're too stupid to get paid for your vote-rigging.
It doesn't catch problems with the individual precincts' scanners, but some random percentage of those are hand-count audited after each election to check up there.
AT&T had a computerized phone back in the mid '80s. The computer did all functions and connected to the phone system (usually T1). You did, however, have a normal handset for most users -- although I'm sure that you could use alternat user interfaces (e.g. a headset) for sound I/O.
As I remember it, the AT&T system did all sorts of neat things like allowing you to transfer to someone by name -- and then you could let the system know where you were, and calls transferred to you would follow you to wherever you were registered at the moment.
This would work kinda nice with RFID locators... Star-Trek like capability to simply call 'The Captain' and only the phones nearest The Captain would be (automagically) activated.
I'm one of the people who decries MS's need to maintain backwards compatibility -- but it's not the backwards compatibility that I decry, but rather the fact that they need to maintian compatibility with a horribly mis-designed single-user system that is rife with land-mines originally meant to trip up their competition.
It looks to me like this is potentially an attempt by someone to potentially infect thousands of Slashdot users' boxes. The site (blacbox1) is anonymously registered, the front page is a generic 'oops' page, and about the only things that it seems to have in common with blackboxvoting is that they both appear to be hosted by rackspace (but on different subnets).
I'd only open these files on a sandboxed/honeypot box.
Er, um, Yes. ~99% of the votes in the Soviet Union were done publicly, and for the ~1% that were done 'secretly', you can reasonably conclude how the dissenters are 'secretly' voting.
Most people who buy wifi don't know that they need to secure their networks... This is more like blaming a 3 year old girl for walking around naked when she gets abused by a pediophile. She doesn't know enough to put her knickers on, and the pediophile is presumed to know enough to ignore the 3-year old.
Yes, I realize that sometimes people will accidently end up on an unsecured network that's not theirs -- but that's more like shooting the 4 year old who ends up playing 'doctor' with the 3 year old... He should get a firm talking-to, but throwing the 4-year old in jail for statutory rape is just a stupid as telling the 3 year old that it's all her fault.
All that we really know is that the votes have not been counted properly. At least nine people say that they voted for him. If all nine votes were assigned to one of the opponents tied for first, then the other might win without a recount. Worse yet, it may be that more than nine have voted for him. It looks like there were a total of 36 votes cast, so if the stolen votes were distribute evenly, it would take 12 votes (only 3 more than have acknowled voting for him) for him to make it into a 3-way
Now one thing that should be noted at this point is that, in a town of only 80 people, there may be a good number of people who have voted for him and are unwilling to acknowledge it for fear of personal retribution (this is why we have secret votes). If everybody who voted for him had to acknowledge their vote before the box got opened, then we'd be degraded to a soviet style voting system where every vote is done in public, the implicit threat of a political officer quietly taking note of everybody who votes 'incorrectly'.
Worse yet, some countries allow them to own money given them and own what they've bought with that money. They don't even require them to wait until their men are dead before they can own the things that they have bought with their own money.
What's going to come of the world if they're allowed to own their own homes? They might even leave if we beat them. God help the average psychopath!
That's like blaming every rape victim that doesn't wear a chastity belt.. Lots of people who buy wifi don't know that they're opening up their network to anybody within range. If WIFI sets were setup as secure by default, then I'd be more willing to say that any 'open' wifi was an invitation. Instead, I'd say that it's the network user who is responsible for obtaining permission (either explicit or implicit) before using a network.
I think that is pretty much a free invite to join in
That having been said, 3 years and $10K for using part of the bandwidth of a network connection that costs $20/month is more than a little bit overboard. Stuff like this should be little more than a minor misdemeanor.
Pearl Harbout was a sneak attack at the start of the war that really turned out to be far more flash than substance (among other things, it was about the only majour battle that was fought over the heads of a decent American civilian population).
The server campaign has been a long and hard fought campaign. MS was far from blindsided. This is a fair and honorable victory. For a long time, it seemed like they were winning, now it finally looks clear that the tide has turned. This 'win' will provide an important bridgehead for the next stage in the war, but the war is definitely still on.
This is not going to be a short war.
"I'll Be Home For Christmas" and "I'm Dreaming of a White Christmas" are two songs that were sung in the European and Pacific theatres for many a year before the soldiers finally made it home.
Slashdot Mirror
- They already have an advantage by using OO. (most of their competition are probably still paying for MS Office).
- Being known as a contributor to the OO community will make it easier to hire quality coders.
- They will get thousands of free testers
- They will get free support for their new code
- they won't have to re-patch OO every time there's a new version
- Free developers -- other people will improve the code that your company releases
- possible compatibility with the outside world (as their approach becomes a standard).
- not having to support this code internally will allow them to work on more productive improvements.
- This is how OO got created. If they like what they got then they should continue the process.
As an absolutely worst case (and even in addition to contributing the code), you should encourage them to make payments to the OO group.- It's way more fun to stomp SCO into the ground.
and dance around the smoking crater.
- Denying the FLOSS community the satisfaction of (1) would alienate people
- SCO's stock is likely going down from where it is.
- Buying SCO would invite other nuisance suits against IBM
- SCO has poison-pill provisions.
- Most of the heavy lifting is already done. The rest of the suit could quite possibly cost IBM much less than 10M.
- IBM could recover money from their counter-suits (From SCO itself, and possibly also executives, directors and even the lawyers).
- SCO is now very unlikely to get any money from IBM.
So, yes IBM could buy SCO with their petty cash reserve, but it would be a silly thing to do.This also provides a probable protection against a wilfull violation accusation. If the donor honestly believed that (s)he had the right to donate and the recipient project accepted that belief (and corrected the error as quickly as feasible once made aware), this would probably be a much different case than what we've seen of people sneaking other people's (GPL) code into their proprietary project and then trying to obfuscate it after being confronted.
If I was one of the fools who still had some SCO stock left to sell, I'd probably wait a week or so for the current selling frenzy to end, and let the SCO stock painters to get back in action. I'd hope they'd be able to get the stock back up near the $2.00 range again, then I'd sell what I had left.
Not being stupid enough to hold SCO stock, however, I'm just waiting for it to s(t)ink below $0.50 for long enough to get delisted.
Nobody who has stock is willing to sell (well, lend) it to a shorter -- If the stock drops, they'll lose money, and I doubt that many people are willing to do that. Most of the people 'selling' SCO stock these days are probably involved in painting it.
As somebody else pointed out, the large natural stone blocks work better as foundations, while concrete would work better for the higher reaches and the sidings. This seems to be the theorized case with the pyramids.
Asphalt may work nicely as continuous strips in places like Texas where it's continuously reasonably warm, but in places like Edmonton, where it drops down to -40 most winters, cracks in asphalt are pretty common once the snow melts. As the environment gets warmer, the cracks seem to ge rarer.
Besides: The VISTA betas have been available for free, so you don't need to shell out $money to get a copy to test your cracking skills on.
* (( in my mind, the current test, is really just a reformulation of the 'novel' test, because if you can prove that it isn't novel (new), then it won't pass the current 'obvious' test, and if you can prove it doesn't pass the 'obvious' test, then you've just proved that it's not 'novel'.))
Can anybody get some estimates of the cost of training and support for a recent majour MS Office update? I figure that that should be somewhere near the cost of a switch...
FOI request anybody?
Now, why whould they do this?
If they got a couple million people on their site as a result of this insanity, they only need to get about $0.10 per customer to make up for what they lost on the promotion. Well worth the money.
(IANAL, but I love playing with this stuff).
Besides, what better way to silence the forces of democracy than to allow the other side to win the occasional mid-term election?
Another thing to consider, as well, is that the people who control the process aren't necessarily the Republicans. This is a power process. One way to keep the Republicans 'in line' is to teach them the occasional lesson by allowing the Democrats to win the occasional election.
Besides -- the issue is structural democracy, not Republican vs Democrat. The process is no less subverted if it's Democrats who have the ability to shift the vote in certain races.
As I remember it, the AT&T system did all sorts of neat things like allowing you to transfer to someone by name -- and then you could let the system know where you were, and calls transferred to you would follow you to wherever you were registered at the moment.
This would work kinda nice with RFID locators... Star-Trek like capability to simply call 'The Captain' and only the phones nearest The Captain would be (automagically) activated.
I'm one of the people who decries MS's need to maintain backwards compatibility -- but it's not the backwards compatibility that I decry, but rather the fact that they need to maintian compatibility with a horribly mis-designed single-user system that is rife with land-mines originally meant to trip up their competition.
You've just slashdotted the entire World Wide Web!
I'd only open these files on a sandboxed/honeypot box.
Er, um, Yes. ~99% of the votes in the Soviet Union were done publicly, and for the ~1% that were done 'secretly', you can reasonably conclude how the dissenters are 'secretly' voting.
Yes, I realize that sometimes people will accidently end up on an unsecured network that's not theirs -- but that's more like shooting the 4 year old who ends up playing 'doctor' with the 3 year old... He should get a firm talking-to, but throwing the 4-year old in jail for statutory rape is just a stupid as telling the 3 year old that it's all her fault.
Now one thing that should be noted at this point is that, in a town of only 80 people, there may be a good number of people who have voted for him and are unwilling to acknowledge it for fear of personal retribution (this is why we have secret votes). If everybody who voted for him had to acknowledge their vote before the box got opened, then we'd be degraded to a soviet style voting system where every vote is done in public, the implicit threat of a political officer quietly taking note of everybody who votes 'incorrectly'.
What's going to come of the world if they're allowed to own their own homes? They might even leave if we beat them. God help the average psychopath!
That having been said, 3 years and $10K for using part of the bandwidth of a network connection that costs $20/month is more than a little bit overboard. Stuff like this should be little more than a minor misdemeanor.
The server campaign has been a long and hard fought campaign. MS was far from blindsided. This is a fair and honorable victory. For a long time, it seemed like they were winning, now it finally looks clear that the tide has turned. This 'win' will provide an important bridgehead for the next stage in the war, but the war is definitely still on.
This is not going to be a short war. "I'll Be Home For Christmas" and "I'm Dreaming of a White Christmas" are two songs that were sung in the European and Pacific theatres for many a year before the soldiers finally made it home.