The most recent posting on the Groklaw blog states the US Copyright Office claims that SCO cannot go after statutory damages or attorney fees for any copyright infringement based on the most recent filing. They can only go after actual damages, which are very hard to prove in court.
What are SCO's actual damages from someone using Linux who would never have bought any SCO product in the first place?
Required for Infringement Suit. Generally speaking, unless the copyrighted work has been registered (or the Copyright Office has refused registration although the required deposit, application and fee were properly filed), a court action for infringement of the copyright will be dismissed.
Required for Statutory Damages. If registration is made within three months after the first publication of the work or prior to infringement, certain damages and attorneys' fees provided by law will be available, in addition to actual damages and lost profits.
Now, you can go to the Library of Congress Copyright site (www.copyright.gov) and search for the newly awarded SCO copyright: TX-5-705-356.
Notice that the SCO copyright lists publication date as 27Jun91, but registration date of 30Jun03. Combine that with "If registration is made within three months after the first publication of the work or prior to infringement, certain damages and attorneys' fees provided by law will be available, in addition to actual damages and lost profits." from above and it does seem like SCO will have a tough case to make in any litigation relating to copyright.
Presumption of Validity. In any judicial proceeding, a certificate of registration issued within five years of the first publication of the work confers a legal presumption that the copyright is valid and that all facts stated in the copyright registration certificate are true.
Also note that the 5 year presumption of validity time limit has expired.
Protection Against Importation of Infringing Copies. A copyright owner can record the registration with the U.S. Customs Service for protection against the importation of infringing works.
Wonder how much of the alleged infringing work was done overseas? Wasn't some of it supposed to have been done by a German Caldera employee? Wonder if SCO has taken this step yet?
Actually, I think you are the one who didn't read.
The MS Technet article you link to has this to say about affected systems:
Affected Software:
Microsoft Windows NT® 4.0 Microsoft Windows NT 4.0 Terminal Services Edition Microsoft Windows 2000 Microsoft Windows XP Microsoft Windows Server(TM) 2003
Not Affected Software:
Microsoft Windows Millennium Edition
And here is the list of available patches:
Patch availability Download locations for this patch Windows NT 4.0 Server Windows NT 4.0 Terminal Server Edition Windows 2000 Windows XP 32 bit Edition Windows XP 64 bit Edition Windows Server 2003 32 bit Edition Windows Server 2003 64 bit Edition
Note the lack of a link for an actual PATCH instead of simply a notation in the TechNet article that NT 4 is affected. I think you are correct that the parent did not read the TechNet article, because if they had, they would probably have taken the time to clear up this confusion. I think that you did read it because you caught what you thought was a mistaken post by the parent. I just think that you didn't read it closely enough.
Now, it may actually be that MS has an NT 4 client patch, but they don't list/link to it from their Technet article. It may be that the NT 4 server patch works on NT 4 client, but I do not see anything in the TechNet article that indicates that.
In fact, the TechNet article specifically does not list a link for NT 4 Client. Now, it may be that the NT 4 Server patch works on a client machine. I have no idea.
Microsoft Windows NT® 4.0 Microsoft Windows NT 4.0 Terminal Services Edition Microsoft Windows 2000 Microsoft Windows XP Microsoft Windows Server(TM) 2003
Not Affected Software:
Microsoft Windows Millennium Edition
And here is the list of available patches:
Patch availability Download locations for this patch Windows NT 4.0 Server Windows NT 4.0 Terminal Server Edition Windows 2000 Windows XP 32 bit Edition Windows XP 64 bit Edition Windows Server 2003 32 bit Edition Windows Server 2003 64 bit Edition
It may be that MS has an NT 4 client patch. It may be that the NT 4 server patch works on NT 4 client, but I do not see anything in the TechNet article that indicates a patch for NT 4 client.
I know this is slashdot, but please read the article that you kindly provided a link for. Support will be provided for NT4 up to December 31, 2004.
NT 4 Server, not NT 4 client. NT 4 client support, according to MS, was supposed to disappear at the end of June. If you look at the MS Technet article for this problem, you see that they mention NT 4 as being affected but in the patches section they list the following:
Download locations for this patch
* Windows NT 4.0 Server
* Windows NT 4.0 Terminal Server Edition
* Windows 2000
* Windows XP 32 bit Edition
* Windows XP 64 bit Edition
* Windows Server 2003 32 bit Edition
* Windows Server 2003 64 bit Edition
Don't know if the NT 4 server patch will work on an NT 4 client machine.
But under US law as amended in 1989, you can fail to register, have someone violoate it, register and then sue.
So, yes, you still have to register to have any hope of collecting damages, but you can do that after the damages. This was changed in 1989 and, I think, a possible reason for the decline in registrations.
I know that renewals are an option. But on March 1, 1989, there were some changes enacted to bring US copyright in line with international standards. One of those changes according to this bitlaw article was that you were no longer required to make an explicit statement of copyright to preserve your copyright.
I was working in a university at the time and I thought I recalled that the requirements for registration no longer applied. It appears however, that registration never applied, but that after 1989, failing to register did not cause you to lose as many rights as you did beforehand.
It is still the case that you must register before initiating a lawsuit over copyright.
I still think that this 1989 change could be a factor in the 1991 drop-off of copyright registrations.
Perhaps most fascinating is the strong 40-year upward trend in registrations which is sharply broken in 1991 with a precipitous decline.
Isn't that about the time that the US copyright law changed so that you no longer had to register to claim copyright? I thught it was some time around the late 80's.
Hmm. I'll be damned. It does in fact say third party in section 3b. Thanks!
HEY!!!
Dude, this is Slashdot you're posting on. You do understand that you are not supposed to admit you were wrong in a rant? Particularly not so quickly and pleasantly.
Heck, next thing you know people will start reading the articles. What is the world coming to?
very few personal boxen get hacked, cracked, etc, from the outside. it is the servers they are after, and then, their not going to hack into someone's little web or battlenet server
Actually, it is the small, personal machines that are the main targets because they are easy picking and because the hacks are likely never to be noticed. The statement above implies a hacker is going after a server for the notoriety and/or data stored there. However, this is not the only (primary?) reason for hacking boxes.
Someone going after a big target is going to want to obfuscate the source of the attack. They will go through multiple hacked machines to make that big strike. Someone going for a DDOS on CNN or Slashdot is going to need a lot of end user zombie machines.
There have been recent articles regarding the new trojans that create open proxies on end user machines and speculating that since these are then later used to route spam that perhaps these trojans/hacks are actually perpetrated by the spammers.
Small machines can be used as storage locations for material that is used in other hacks. (FTP your files off of some poor Verizon DSL slob instead of the hacker's machine.)
I know that when I have bothered to reverse DNS the IPs attacking my firewall, the bulk of them appear to be cable users or DSL--with a good percentage of dial-ups. This is not because all of these people are attempting attacks, but because unbeknownst to them their machines are already compromised and are being used as the source of further attacks.
Convea's GPL Summary seems off
on
Opengroupware
·
· Score: 1
Convea summarizes the GPL as follows on their download page (emphasis mine):
You need to purchase commercial non-GPL Convea licenses if:
--you distribute Convea Software with
your non open source software
--you intend to directly profit from the
provision of Convea software or services
--you want warranty from Convea Ltd for
the Convea software
--you want to support Convea development
I think that item 2 isn't quite consistent with the GPL. In fact, it seems pretty antithetical to the actual wording of the GPL as well as to the spirit of it.
There is an enormous difference between an expert programmer sitting down with a pile of textbooks and disjointed segments of code to write out an operating system from scratch, and that same programmer downloading the operating system intact from a public network.
SCO Investors like rats leaving sinking ship
on
USL vs BSDI Documents
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Major investors are going to sell 305,274 shares of Common Stock. Some of them are obvious VC firms dumping all of their shares. (Besides Canopy, the largest single holding listed to be sold are two different firms selling 36,266 shares, which amounts to all of their holdings.)
The Canopy Group itself will be unloading 174,340 of 5,492,834 shares.
There are 13,334,886 total shares of common stock outstanding.
I use PopFile. What I like about it is that it easily lets me use multiple personalities in Eudora, Outlook or any other mail client. Nice web based interface and a very active development community.
You can run it locally on Windows or Linux. But, you can also set it up on a server and then use it to filter e-mail from multiple client machines. That's what I like about it. I have a home machine in my basement office but also upstairs in the TV room. Unlike plug-ins that only work locally, I can have my reclassification decisions apply to multiple client machines.
Right now, they do not have multiple user capabilities so that my wife and I can both use the same instance and not have our classifications interfere with each other. However, you can set up multiple instances bound to different ports. The developers list multi-user capability as a priority.
The nasa page the parent points to seems to be describing red sprites, first photographic evidence in 1988/1989. This looks to be something different.
From the article:
Other types of high-altitude lightning events also have been documented in the past decade using high-flying planes and cameras carried aboard the space shuttle fleet. One, called blue jets, also streams upward but does not rise as high or spread over as wide an area as the giant jets in the new study.
Red sprites, another form of high-altitude lightning, travel downward toward clouds but appear to stop short of reaching the top of thunderclouds.
Su noted that while the other types of jets seem to occur over most parts of the world, the six gigantic optical jets observed so far have all been connected to thunderstorms over the open sea.
Scientists had found plenty of evidence of sprites in the 1990s, but the larger, upward streaming lightning jets had escaped detection -- possibly because they may only occur over oceans, Inan said.
In the March trade, notice section 2. The issuer is listed as Caldera, but notice the trading symbol is SCOX. That's the same trading symbol as the Friday filing in section 2, even though the Friday one lists the issuer as The SCO Group.
So, I'm comparing oranges and oranges. (Or maybe rotten apples to rotten apples.) Also, if you look at a 5 day intraday trading chart for SCOX, you'll notice that there were some really large volume trades on Friday and Monday. Some approaching 100K in a single transaction. This for a stock that normally averages around 200K/day total. I believe that last Friday's total was 2.4M changing hands. A lot of people unloaded a lot of SCOX stock on Friday and Monday.
The fact that SCO has published their code has absolutely nothing to do with this case.
Actually, if the code involved in the IBM lawsuit has been published, specifically published by someone other than IBM, then it would be rather devastating to the current set of charges from SCO. SCO is suing IBM for violation of trade secrets. Trade secrets don't have patent or copyright protection in and of themselves. In fact, if they become public, they are no longer secret and thus the public availability of a trade secret is a defense against violating trade secrets.
However, this isn't the point being missed with this code. As other posters have pointed out. This code relates to older versions of Unix (specifically code for a PDP-11, I believe). This code does not contain the specific items that SCO has recently mentioned as being infringing: NUMA, RCU, . . ..
I still think SCO is full of it, but this revelation probably doesn't have much to do with the case, which is what you were saying but just not quite for the reasons you mentioned.
McBride purchased 7003 shares at.001 dollars per share. That's right. He paid $7 for for stock worth around $70,000 at the current overvaluation.
The more interesting thing to note is section 15. It shows that after purchasing these 7003 shares, he owned 15003 shares. That implies that he only had 8000 shares before the purchase. However, if you look at some earlier forms 4 for him, you'll notice that in March of this year, he acquired 200,000 shares of stock.
This means that there must still be some forms 4 in the system that have not made it into EDGAR online yet. Unless, I'm reading this wrong, sometime between March and now, McBride dumped over 200K shares of stock. I'd love to see an SEC investigation of all of this.
The MPAA couldn't care less about the quality of a movie once you paid for the ticket.
Which is why I said to put them in the theaters they use for sneak previews. I went to a few in college. The big studios will do a sneak preview and then hand out surveys afterwards. They sometimes change the movie based on this feedback.
Should put these in movie theaters
on
The Buttocks Have It
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
The MPAA should put these in theaters that are used for sneak previews.
Had a friend who rated movies by the butt scale. Basically it was how long it took until he noticed his but was hurting from sitting in an uncomfortable theater seat. For a good, engaging film, he never noticed. When his wife dragged him to a chick flick, it was about 20 minutes.
Seems like the movie studios could tell a lot about the success of a movie by using these in previews.
In fact, I may have heard [hemp] is the single fastest growing biomass plant in the world, though you may want to check me on that.
Having seen what Kudzu can do in the South East US, I'd have to question this. Not sure that Kudzu is the fastest, but as a vine, it can grow in many different directions and not really reach a stopping point during the growing season. Hemp just goes up and even well fertilized, I would imagine does reach some type of stopping point eventually.
Slashdot Mirror
The most recent posting on the Groklaw blog states the US Copyright Office claims that SCO cannot go after statutory damages or attorney fees for any copyright infringement based on the most recent filing. They can only go after actual damages, which are very hard to prove in court.
What are SCO's actual damages from someone using Linux who would never have bought any SCO product in the first place?
Doing some more copyright law searching.
Found these points at Bromberg and Sunstein LLP
Benefits of Federal Copyright Registration
Required for Infringement Suit. Generally speaking, unless the copyrighted work has been registered (or the Copyright Office has refused registration although the required deposit, application and fee were properly filed), a court action for infringement of the copyright will be dismissed.
Required for Statutory Damages. If registration is made within three months after the first publication of the work or prior to infringement, certain damages and attorneys' fees provided by law will be available, in addition to actual damages and lost profits.
Now, you can go to the Library of Congress Copyright site (www.copyright.gov) and search for the newly awarded SCO copyright: TX-5-705-356.
Notice that the SCO copyright lists publication date as 27Jun91, but registration date of 30Jun03. Combine that with "If registration is made within three months after the first publication of the work or prior to infringement, certain damages and attorneys' fees provided by law will be available, in addition to actual damages and lost profits." from above and it does seem like SCO will have a tough case to make in any litigation relating to copyright.
Presumption of Validity. In any judicial proceeding, a certificate of registration issued within five years of the first publication of the work confers a legal presumption that the copyright is valid and that all facts stated in the copyright registration certificate are true.
Also note that the 5 year presumption of validity time limit has expired.
Protection Against Importation of Infringing Copies. A copyright owner can record the registration with the U.S. Customs Service for protection against the importation of infringing works.
Wonder how much of the alleged infringing work was done overseas? Wasn't some of it supposed to have been done by a German Caldera employee? Wonder if SCO has taken this step yet?
They certainly don't make it easy to find do they?
Does this mean that all NT 4 Server patches will work on client and that the Client support really extends through the end of next year?
Why do that?
Posting without reading yeah?
e chnet/security/bulletin/MS03-026.asp.
Its here http://www.microsoft.com/technet/treeview/?url=/t
Actually, I think you are the one who didn't read.
The MS Technet article you link to has this to say about affected systems:
Affected Software:
Microsoft Windows NT® 4.0
Microsoft Windows NT 4.0 Terminal Services Edition
Microsoft Windows 2000
Microsoft Windows XP
Microsoft Windows Server(TM) 2003
Not Affected Software:
Microsoft Windows Millennium Edition
And here is the list of available patches:
Patch availability
Download locations for this patch
Windows NT 4.0 Server
Windows NT 4.0 Terminal Server Edition
Windows 2000
Windows XP 32 bit Edition
Windows XP 64 bit Edition
Windows Server 2003 32 bit Edition
Windows Server 2003 64 bit Edition
Note the lack of a link for an actual PATCH instead of simply a notation in the TechNet article that NT 4 is affected. I think you are correct that the parent did not read the TechNet article, because if they had, they would probably have taken the time to clear up this confusion. I think that you did read it because you caught what you thought was a mistaken post by the parent. I just think that you didn't read it closely enough.
Now, it may actually be that MS has an NT 4 client patch, but they don't list/link to it from their Technet article. It may be that the NT 4 server patch works on NT 4 client, but I do not see anything in the TechNet article that indicates that.
The MS TechNet Article lists the patch URL you provide above as being for NT 4 Server.
In fact, the TechNet article specifically does not list a link for NT 4 Client. Now, it may be that the NT 4 Server patch works on a client machine. I have no idea.
Figleaf wrote: Have you looked at the technet article for this patch?
Patches are available for NT Server as well as NT workstation.
I don't know if you can download an NT 4 client patch, but from the technet article linked in my first post, here are the systems affected:
Affected Software:
Microsoft Windows NT® 4.0
Microsoft Windows NT 4.0 Terminal Services Edition
Microsoft Windows 2000
Microsoft Windows XP
Microsoft Windows Server(TM) 2003
Not Affected Software:
Microsoft Windows Millennium Edition
And here is the list of available patches:
Patch availability
Download locations for this patch
Windows NT 4.0 Server
Windows NT 4.0 Terminal Server Edition
Windows 2000
Windows XP 32 bit Edition
Windows XP 64 bit Edition
Windows Server 2003 32 bit Edition
Windows Server 2003 64 bit Edition
It may be that MS has an NT 4 client patch. It may be that the NT 4 server patch works on NT 4 client, but I do not see anything in the TechNet article that indicates a patch for NT 4 client.
I know this is slashdot, but please read the article that you kindly provided a link for. Support will be provided for NT4 up to December 31, 2004.
NT 4 Server, not NT 4 client. NT 4 client support, according to MS, was supposed to disappear at the end of June. If you look at the MS Technet article for this problem, you see that they mention NT 4 as being affected but in the patches section they list the following:
Download locations for this patch
* Windows NT 4.0 Server
* Windows NT 4.0 Terminal Server Edition
* Windows 2000
* Windows XP 32 bit Edition
* Windows XP 64 bit Edition
* Windows Server 2003 32 bit Edition
* Windows Server 2003 64 bit Edition
Don't know if the NT 4 server patch will work on an NT 4 client machine.
But under US law as amended in 1989, you can fail to register, have someone violoate it, register and then sue.
So, yes, you still have to register to have any hope of collecting damages, but you can do that after the damages. This was changed in 1989 and, I think, a possible reason for the decline in registrations.
I know that renewals are an option. But on March 1, 1989, there were some changes enacted to bring US copyright in line with international standards. One of those changes according to this bitlaw article was that you were no longer required to make an explicit statement of copyright to preserve your copyright.
I was working in a university at the time and I thought I recalled that the requirements for registration no longer applied. It appears however, that registration never applied, but that after 1989, failing to register did not cause you to lose as many rights as you did beforehand.
It is still the case that you must register before initiating a lawsuit over copyright.
I still think that this 1989 change could be a factor in the 1991 drop-off of copyright registrations.
Perhaps most fascinating is the strong 40-year upward trend in registrations which is sharply broken in 1991 with a precipitous decline.
Isn't that about the time that the US copyright law changed so that you no longer had to register to claim copyright? I thught it was some time around the late 80's.
Hmm. I'll be damned. It does in fact say third party in section 3b. Thanks!
HEY!!!
Dude, this is Slashdot you're posting on. You do understand that you are not supposed to admit you were wrong in a rant? Particularly not so quickly and pleasantly.
Heck, next thing you know people will start reading the articles. What is the world coming to?
very few personal boxen get hacked, cracked, etc, from the outside. it is the servers they are after, and then, their not going to hack into someone's little web or battlenet server
Actually, it is the small, personal machines that are the main targets because they are easy picking and because the hacks are likely never to be noticed. The statement above implies a hacker is going after a server for the notoriety and/or data stored there. However, this is not the only (primary?) reason for hacking boxes.
Someone going after a big target is going to want to obfuscate the source of the attack. They will go through multiple hacked machines to make that big strike. Someone going for a DDOS on CNN or Slashdot is going to need a lot of end user zombie machines.
There have been recent articles regarding the new trojans that create open proxies on end user machines and speculating that since these are then later used to route spam that perhaps these trojans/hacks are actually perpetrated by the spammers.
Small machines can be used as storage locations for material that is used in other hacks. (FTP your files off of some poor Verizon DSL slob instead of the hacker's machine.)
I know that when I have bothered to reverse DNS the IPs attacking my firewall, the bulk of them appear to be cable users or DSL--with a good percentage of dial-ups. This is not because all of these people are attempting attacks, but because unbeknownst to them their machines are already compromised and are being used as the source of further attacks.
Convea summarizes the GPL as follows on their download page (emphasis mine):
You need to purchase commercial non-GPL Convea licenses if:
--you distribute Convea Software with
your non open source software
--you intend to directly profit from the
provision of Convea software or services
--you want warranty from Convea Ltd for
the Convea software
--you want to support Convea development
I think that item 2 isn't quite consistent with the GPL. In fact, it seems pretty antithetical to the actual wording of the GPL as well as to the spirit of it.
Am I missing something?
is the following. Very prescient.
There is an enormous difference between an expert programmer sitting down with a pile of textbooks and disjointed segments of code to write out an operating system from scratch, and that same programmer downloading the operating system intact from a public network.
According to the S-3 filing at SEC
Major investors are going to sell 305,274 shares of Common Stock. Some of them are obvious VC firms dumping all of their shares. (Besides Canopy, the largest single holding listed to be sold are two different firms selling 36,266 shares, which amounts to all of their holdings.)
The Canopy Group itself will be unloading 174,340 of 5,492,834 shares.
There are 13,334,886 total shares of common stock outstanding.
Do a web search on Asperger's Syndrome. There was a Slashdot article on it recently as well as a Wired story from a few years back.
Check out this Hubble picture
The moderation on the parent is "overrated" and "redundant."
If you look at the text of the post, shouldn't it be TROLL?
I use PopFile. What I like about it is that it easily lets me use multiple personalities in Eudora, Outlook or any other mail client. Nice web based interface and a very active development community.
You can run it locally on Windows or Linux. But, you can also set it up on a server and then use it to filter e-mail from multiple client machines. That's what I like about it. I have a home machine in my basement office but also upstairs in the TV room. Unlike plug-ins that only work locally, I can have my reclassification decisions apply to multiple client machines.
Right now, they do not have multiple user capabilities so that my wife and I can both use the same instance and not have our classifications interfere with each other. However, you can set up multiple instances bound to different ports. The developers list multi-user capability as a priority.
Worth checking out along with the other choices.
The nasa page the parent points to seems to be describing red sprites, first photographic evidence in 1988/1989. This looks to be something different.
From the article:
Other types of high-altitude lightning events also have been documented in the past decade using high-flying planes and cameras carried aboard the space shuttle fleet. One, called blue jets, also streams upward but does not rise as high or spread over as wide an area as the giant jets in the new study.
Red sprites, another form of high-altitude lightning, travel downward toward clouds but appear to stop short of reaching the top of thunderclouds.
Su noted that while the other types of jets seem to occur over most parts of the world, the six gigantic optical jets observed so far have all been connected to thunderstorms over the open sea.
Also, from the Wired article:
Scientists had found plenty of evidence of sprites in the 1990s, but the larger, upward streaming lightning jets had escaped detection -- possibly because they may only occur over oceans, Inan said.
In the March trade, notice section 2. The issuer is listed as Caldera, but notice the trading symbol is SCOX. That's the same trading symbol as the Friday filing in section 2, even though the Friday one lists the issuer as The SCO Group.
So, I'm comparing oranges and oranges. (Or maybe rotten apples to rotten apples.) Also, if you look at a 5 day intraday trading chart for SCOX, you'll notice that there were some really large volume trades on Friday and Monday. Some approaching 100K in a single transaction. This for a stock that normally averages around 200K/day total. I believe that last Friday's total was 2.4M changing hands. A lot of people unloaded a lot of SCOX stock on Friday and Monday.
The fact that SCO has published their code has absolutely nothing to do with this case.
.
Actually, if the code involved in the IBM lawsuit has been published, specifically published by someone other than IBM, then it would be rather devastating to the current set of charges from SCO. SCO is suing IBM for violation of trade secrets. Trade secrets don't have patent or copyright protection in and of themselves. In fact, if they become public, they are no longer secret and thus the public availability of a trade secret is a defense against violating trade secrets.
However, this isn't the point being missed with this code. As other posters have pointed out. This code relates to older versions of Unix (specifically code for a PDP-11, I believe). This code does not contain the specific items that SCO has recently mentioned as being infringing: NUMA, RCU, . . .
I still think SCO is full of it, but this revelation probably doesn't have much to do with the case, which is what you were saying but just not quite for the reasons you mentioned.
McBride purchased 7003 shares at .001 dollars per share. That's right. He paid $7 for for stock worth around $70,000 at the current overvaluation.
The more interesting thing to note is section 15. It shows that after purchasing these 7003 shares, he owned 15003 shares. That implies that he only had 8000 shares before the purchase. However, if you look at some earlier forms 4 for him, you'll notice that in March of this year, he acquired 200,000 shares of stock.
This means that there must still be some forms 4 in the system that have not made it into EDGAR online yet. Unless, I'm reading this wrong, sometime between March and now, McBride dumped over 200K shares of stock. I'd love to see an SEC investigation of all of this.
Here's a link for SCO related SEC filings.
The MPAA couldn't care less about the quality of a movie once you paid for the ticket.
Which is why I said to put them in the theaters they use for sneak previews. I went to a few in college. The big studios will do a sneak preview and then hand out surveys afterwards. They sometimes change the movie based on this feedback.
The MPAA should put these in theaters that are used for sneak previews.
Had a friend who rated movies by the butt scale. Basically it was how long it took until he noticed his but was hurting from sitting in an uncomfortable theater seat. For a good, engaging film, he never noticed. When his wife dragged him to a chick flick, it was about 20 minutes.
Seems like the movie studios could tell a lot about the success of a movie by using these in previews.
In fact, I may have heard [hemp] is the single fastest growing biomass plant in the world, though you may want to check me on that.
Having seen what Kudzu can do in the South East US, I'd have to question this. Not sure that Kudzu is the fastest, but as a vine, it can grow in many different directions and not really reach a stopping point during the growing season. Hemp just goes up and even well fertilized, I would imagine does reach some type of stopping point eventually.