They aren't being pursued by any US government authority for it. Why? SCO makes money by charging licenses to companies who use linux on the condition that:
1. Linux is owned by SCO because they own Unix and Linux contains Unix code(this hasn't been proven yet).
2. Paying the license fee will protect a company from being sued by SCO for not paying for said linux licenses and therefore violating the unproven Intellectual Property claim above (refer to number 1)
This seems to be a clear cut case of extortion. At the very least the SEC should be investigating for stock fraud.
This is blantently criminal activity that is going unpunished (no case from the government has been filed against SCO yet) and rewarded(SCO's stock prices continue to climb).
The Voodoo Envy laptop makes such promises as "3 + hours of battery life(when running real world apps like MS Office and the internet)". It also weighs in at 8 pounds.
No thanks, I'll pass on that.
My idea of a laptop is a good mix of power to get things done and portability. I doubt users will be carrying around their 8 pound Voodoo Envy for long.
Add that to the $3500 price tag and you have an expensive and unusable "laptop".
Serious legal issues arise when creating "voice fonts" made from singing material previously released by artists. I doubt the RIAA or the artists themselves will like this new techonlogy at all. If this technology is a success then I forsee a push by the RIAA/artists themselves to get their voices copyrighted.
As an example, Harley Davidson (the motorcycle company), tried to get it's unique motorcycle engine sound copyrighted and failed. Will this change the copyright office's stance?
I'd love to switch from the full Mozilla suite which is slow, to two fast programs for e-mail and web browsing, like Camino/Thunderbird. But...I have thousands of messages and dozens of mail rules connected to folders in my Mozilla Mail setup. Until Thunderbird can import these I won't be switching.
Yep. I can see phone companies playing both sides of the street like they do with telemarketers now. The phone companies will sell means of blocking cell phones from being tracked to their customers, while at the same time selling ways for tracking companies to go around these same "protections" offered previously to phone customers.
"NetWare will continue to exist with a large customer base, and we will continue to maintain it as long as customers want it," said Chris Stone, vice chairman at Novell. Stone said he thought NetWare support would continue for the foreseeable future, even if development does not. "There are still people using (the) VMS (operating system) and minicomputers. Just because development stops, doesn't mean people stop using it."
It's nice to see a company that admits it will have to continue to support an old product and will continue to do so. However, it's yet to be seen how long this attitude will last.
But at least they have decided not to follow Microsoft's precedent for dumping all support for old products when new ones roll around.
Am I missing something here? Seems like a simple IM Client is all that's called for here. They'd be some company policy issues to work out on who the employees are allowed to talk to but it seems to me MSN or AOL IM clients are the only things required.
I still use it and wouldn't count it out yet. If you check their project page there was news about updates as recent as last week. And they still have nightly builds. Stick with it, seems to me they are still working on it.
Word Perfect was an awesome product. I still use it sometimes too. Any hope of open source type port of Word Perfect? I'm guessing probably not. But you can always hope.
But how are they going to stop international users?
This "problem" has already been solved. The whole point of the DMCA was to bring US copyright stands up to par with WIPO standards. After the DMCA the US was able to sign on with WIPO and work with it to enforce international IP law with all the member nations. This allows companies/government to persue users in other countries.
The RIAA has also done this recently as well. If I remember correctly they helped bring down a CD-R piracy group outside of the US (I think it was either Mexico or Russia, but am not sure).
AFAIK: The USPTO uses databases of inventions both patented and non patented to determine "Prior Art". Things are considered prior art only if the USPTO knows about them.
However, prior art and business method patents have come under question and the USPTO is seeking comment on the issue.
> If you are trying to copy BK, give it up. We'll simply follow in the
> footsteps of every other company faced with this sort of thing and change
> the protocol every 6 months. Since you would be chasing us you can never
> catch up. If you managed to stay close then we'd put digital signatures
> into the protocol to prevent your clone from interoperating with BK.
I think it would be appropriate at this point to write a free client that talks with Bitkeeper, and for Linux developers to start switching to that from Bitkeeper. At that point, McVoy will face a hard choice: if he carries out these threats, he risks alienating the community that he hopes will market Bitkeeper for him.
IANAL and am not sure of the law here, but wouldn't there be some legal questions about this since the MacGIMP group had to be working on this before the patent was expired?
To: All University of Utah Students, Faculty, and Staff
From: Stephen Hess
Associate Academic Vice President for Information Technology
Stayner Landward
Dean of Students
Date: March 14, 2003
Subject: Illegal Sharing of Copyrighted Materials
The purpose of this memo is to officially notify all students, faculty, and staff, that it is a violation of federal law and University policy to share and/or distribute copyrighted materials without the permission of the copyright holder. Violators may be subject to civil and criminal prosecution under the provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), as well as personal sanctions specified in University policy.
The University has received a significant increase in complaints from representatives of the motion picture, music recording, and software industries. The majority of the complaints are directly related to the use of file-sharing software, such as KaZaA, Gnutella, and similar programs.
File sharing software is most commonly used to download music and other media. Many do not realize that this software may turn your personal computer into a server, or upload site, even if that was not your intent. Files on your network connected PC may then be illegally shared with every other person connected to the World Wide Web. It is imperative that the file sharing capability of these systems be disabled. If you do not know how to disable this function, please contact the Help Desk at 581-4000.
Industry representatives aggressively monitor the Internet to discover incidents of illegal file sharing. When violations are discovered, they contact the network owner and/or the Internet Service Provider and demand that the offending device be disconnected from the network. To protect the user and the University from further culpability under the DMCA or University policy, the University will disable network access for any machine for which a DMCA complaint has been received.
To restore network service, the user must contact the Help Desk and arrange to sign a document stating that the user has disabled the file sharing function of their software and has agreed to discontinue all illegal file sharing activity. If the user is named in additional complaints, they will be referred to the appropriate University committee for further review and action.
Action taken by the University to remedy a violation does not preclude the copyright holder from seeking civil and/or criminal prosecution. The law specifies civil liability of not less than $200 or more than $2,500 per act, and criminal penalties up to $500,000, and/or imprisonment for up to 5 years for the first offense.
After the move to Exodus West can the slashdot readership get an update on what hardware slashdot is running on? The description in the FAQ is dated and I expect the tech to change slightly if not largely with the move to Exodus West.
I'm sure that I am not the only/. reader interested in a hardware update.
4. Plug Fridge into power outlet somewhere near work area, keep stocked with Bawls.
That's it, you can choose when to start your shipments, how often to send shipments, etc. Everything will work as long as you keep you shipping and billing info current.
Why are we building the International Space Station? The only reasons I can see are political. NASA, although it was started for political reasons (JFK could have cared less about the moon, he just wanted to be the russians), is an agency based on the advancement of science. Scientific gain should be the determining factor of whether or not a project goes forward. The ISS appears to have no scientific gain for the US or the rest of the world.
What new information about space and Earth can we learn through ISS that we haven't already learned on Mir and Skylab and continue to learn using new and old satellites?
ISS is a huge project. For what purpose of discovery? None. The Space Shuttles are having problems, projects to create new vehicles to replace the space shuttles have been cancelled.
In short, every year NASA is asked by Congress to do less and less science and more and more ISS. ISS costs tons of money but even though Congress insists that it be built they continue with huge cuts to NASA's budget every year.
It's time to start giving NASA the funding they need and let them work on science not politics.
To learn a little bit more about Biodiesel try HempCar.org, the hemp car (as the title may suggest) is a car developed to run on hemp as a Biodiesel. They are currently driving it across Canada. Sure, not a commercial solution and probably not legal in the US. but it gives you an example of one Biodiesel solution.
The NYTimes reg generator doesn't appear to work anymore. Just go sign up, leave the cookie on your computer and just get over reg. If your paranoid just make crap up.
Why would direct mail companies choose to use automated programs like this?
Let's look at what these programs give you:
1. A ton of results.
2. 80%(and probably a whole lot more, I'm just being conservative) of those results are probably false due to all those AOL member pages that haven't been updated in years, people who put up fake info, info that is out of date, etc.
Wouldn't this be bad for the direct mail companies? Clients that hire them want to reach as many real people as possible. The direct mail companies that use the methods mentioned in this story can never provide their clients with what they want, the ability to reach real consumers.
The Direct mail companies probably know this and either, are planning on changing it or don't care and are just interested in spamming as many people, real or not, as possible.
Direct mail companies interested in doing what they promise should think about the way they collect information in order to provide better service if they are a real company not just looking to spam everyone alive, or dead in this case.
Slashdot Mirror
They aren't being pursued by any US government authority for it. Why? SCO makes money by charging licenses to companies who use linux on the condition that:
1. Linux is owned by SCO because they own Unix and Linux contains Unix code(this hasn't been proven yet).
2. Paying the license fee will protect a company from being sued by SCO for not paying for said linux licenses and therefore violating the unproven Intellectual Property claim above (refer to number 1)
This seems to be a clear cut case of extortion. At the very least the SEC should be investigating for stock fraud.
This is blantently criminal activity that is going unpunished (no case from the government has been filed against SCO yet) and rewarded(SCO's stock prices continue to climb).
The Voodoo Envy laptop makes such promises as "3 + hours of battery life(when running real world apps like MS Office and the internet)". It also weighs in at 8 pounds.
No thanks, I'll pass on that.
My idea of a laptop is a good mix of power to get things done and portability. I doubt users will be carrying around their 8 pound Voodoo Envy for long.
Add that to the $3500 price tag and you have an expensive and unusable "laptop".
Serious legal issues arise when creating "voice fonts" made from singing material previously released by artists. I doubt the RIAA or the artists themselves will like this new techonlogy at all. If this technology is a success then I forsee a push by the RIAA/artists themselves to get their voices copyrighted.
As an example, Harley Davidson (the motorcycle company), tried to get it's unique motorcycle engine sound copyrighted and failed. Will this change the copyright office's stance?
I'm sure I'll be modded down, but I'd like to point this bug. Having comments not work at level 2 is quite frustrating.
I'd love to switch from the full Mozilla suite which is slow, to two fast programs for e-mail and web browsing, like Camino/Thunderbird. But...I have thousands of messages and dozens of mail rules connected to folders in my Mozilla Mail setup. Until Thunderbird can import these I won't be switching.
That would be called insider trading.
Um, I think we already know what was destined to happen after the Challenger accident.....Way to go /. editors!
Yep. I can see phone companies playing both sides of the street like they do with telemarketers now. The phone companies will sell means of blocking cell phones from being tracked to their customers, while at the same time selling ways for tracking companies to go around these same "protections" offered previously to phone customers.
From the article:
"NetWare will continue to exist with a large customer base, and we will continue to maintain it as long as customers want it," said Chris Stone, vice chairman at Novell. Stone said he thought NetWare support would continue for the foreseeable future, even if development does not. "There are still people using (the) VMS (operating system) and minicomputers. Just because development stops, doesn't mean people stop using it."
It's nice to see a company that admits it will have to continue to support an old product and will continue to do so. However, it's yet to be seen how long this attitude will last.
But at least they have decided not to follow Microsoft's precedent for dumping all support for old products when new ones roll around.
Good news, at least for now.
Am I missing something here? Seems like a simple IM Client is all that's called for here. They'd be some company policy issues to work out on who the employees are allowed to talk to but it seems to me MSN or AOL IM clients are the only things required.
Does camino have a future?
I still use it and wouldn't count it out yet. If you check their project page there was news about updates as recent as last week. And they still have nightly builds. Stick with it, seems to me they are still working on it.
Word Perfect was an awesome product. I still use it sometimes too. Any hope of open source type port of Word Perfect? I'm guessing probably not. But you can always hope.
Why is the university wasting time and money on this project? Does this really add anything to the AI/Robotics field?
Dancing is a very personal, human activity. Could a robot ever replicate it> Let alone be "smart" about it?
Seems like a waste of resources to me.
But how are they going to stop international users?
This "problem" has already been solved. The whole point of the DMCA was to bring US copyright stands up to par with WIPO standards. After the DMCA the US was able to sign on with WIPO and work with it to enforce international IP law with all the member nations. This allows companies/government to persue users in other countries. The RIAA has also done this recently as well. If I remember correctly they helped bring down a CD-R piracy group outside of the US (I think it was either Mexico or Russia, but am not sure).
First, IANAL.
AFAIK: The USPTO uses databases of inventions both patented and non patented to determine "Prior Art". Things are considered prior art only if the USPTO knows about them. However, prior art and business method patents have come under question and the USPTO is seeking comment on the issue.
Comment info here And here
Just in case it gets slashdotted:
> If you are trying to copy BK, give it up. We'll simply follow in the
> footsteps of every other company faced with this sort of thing and change
> the protocol every 6 months. Since you would be chasing us you can never
> catch up. If you managed to stay close then we'd put digital signatures
> into the protocol to prevent your clone from interoperating with BK.
I think it would be appropriate at this point to write a free client
that talks with Bitkeeper, and for Linux developers to start switching
to that from Bitkeeper. At that point, McVoy will face a hard choice:
if he carries out these threats, he risks alienating the community
that he hopes will market Bitkeeper for him.
IANAL and am not sure of the law here, but wouldn't there be some legal questions about this since the MacGIMP group had to be working on this before the patent was expired?
To: All University of Utah Students, Faculty, and Staff
From: Stephen Hess
Associate Academic Vice President for Information Technology
Stayner Landward
Dean of Students
Date: March 14, 2003
Subject: Illegal Sharing of Copyrighted Materials
The purpose of this memo is to officially notify all students, faculty,
and staff, that it is a violation of federal law and University policy
to share and/or distribute copyrighted materials without the permission
of the copyright holder. Violators may be subject to civil and criminal
prosecution under the provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act
(DMCA), as well as personal sanctions specified in University policy.
The University has received a significant increase in complaints from
representatives of the motion picture, music recording, and software
industries. The majority of the complaints are directly related to the
use of file-sharing software, such as KaZaA, Gnutella, and similar
programs.
File sharing software is most commonly used to download music and other
media. Many do not realize that this software may turn your personal
computer into a server, or upload site, even if that was not your
intent. Files on your network connected PC may then be illegally shared
with every other person connected to the World Wide Web. It is
imperative that the file sharing capability of these systems be
disabled. If you do not know how to disable this function, please
contact the Help Desk at 581-4000.
Industry representatives aggressively monitor the Internet to discover
incidents of illegal file sharing. When violations are discovered, they
contact the network owner and/or the Internet Service Provider and
demand that the offending device be disconnected from the network. To
protect the user and the University from further culpability under the
DMCA or University policy, the University will disable network access
for any machine for which a DMCA complaint has been received.
To restore network service, the user must contact the Help Desk and
arrange to sign a document stating that the user has disabled the file
sharing function of their software and has agreed to discontinue all
illegal file sharing activity. If the user is named in additional
complaints, they will be referred to the appropriate University
committee for further review and action.
Action taken by the University to remedy a violation does not preclude
the copyright holder from seeking civil and/or criminal prosecution.
The law specifies civil liability of not less than $200 or more than
$2,500 per act, and criminal penalties up to $500,000, and/or
imprisonment for up to 5 years for the first offense.
Thank you for taking this notification seriously.
After the move to Exodus West can the slashdot readership get an update on what hardware slashdot is running on? The description in the FAQ is dated and I expect the tech to change slightly if not largely with the move to Exodus West.
/. reader interested in a hardware update.
I'm sure that I am not the only
For those that didn't read the article, the 2 guys site is here
I agree. I don't think any true geek needs a special drink or sticker or t-shirt or anything to prove that he or she is a geek.
But if you want drinks like Bawls here's what you need to do:
1. Buy a large fridge
2. Buy Bawls online at thinkgeek
3. Set up repeat shipments using Scheduled Delivery
4. Plug Fridge into power outlet somewhere near work area, keep stocked with Bawls.
That's it, you can choose when to start your shipments, how often to send shipments, etc. Everything will work as long as you keep you shipping and billing info current.
Why are we building the International Space Station? The only reasons I can see are political. NASA, although it was started for political reasons (JFK could have cared less about the moon, he just wanted to be the russians), is an agency based on the advancement of science. Scientific gain should be the determining factor of whether or not a project goes forward. The ISS appears to have no scientific gain for the US or the rest of the world.
What new information about space and Earth can we learn through ISS that we haven't already learned on Mir and Skylab and continue to learn using new and old satellites?
ISS is a huge project. For what purpose of discovery? None. The Space Shuttles are having problems, projects to create new vehicles to replace the space shuttles have been cancelled.
In short, every year NASA is asked by Congress to do less and less science and more and more ISS. ISS costs tons of money but even though Congress insists that it be built they continue with huge cuts to NASA's budget every year.
It's time to start giving NASA the funding they need and let them work on science not politics.
To learn a little bit more about Biodiesel try HempCar.org, the hemp car (as the title may suggest) is a car developed to run on hemp as a Biodiesel. They are currently driving it across Canada. Sure, not a commercial solution and probably not legal in the US. but it gives you an example of one Biodiesel solution.
The NYTimes reg generator doesn't appear to work anymore. Just go sign up, leave the cookie on your computer and just get over reg. If your paranoid just make crap up.
Why would direct mail companies choose to use automated programs like this?
Let's look at what these programs give you:
1. A ton of results.
2. 80%(and probably a whole lot more, I'm just being conservative) of those results are probably false due to all those AOL member pages that haven't been updated in years, people who put up fake info, info that is out of date, etc.
Wouldn't this be bad for the direct mail companies? Clients that hire them want to reach as many real people as possible. The direct mail companies that use the methods mentioned in this story can never provide their clients with what they want, the ability to reach real consumers.
The Direct mail companies probably know this and either, are planning on changing it or don't care and are just interested in spamming as many people, real or not, as possible.
Direct mail companies interested in doing what they promise should think about the way they collect information in order to provide better service if they are a real company not just looking to spam everyone alive, or dead in this case.