I don't quite get what they are trying to say... If the ice is "sucking down" the carbon dioxide, where is it going? It's not a black whole to get rid of carbon dioxide. Is it putting it down through the ice into the ocean? Is it storing it in the ice itself? Is the ice absorbing oxygen and nitrogen as well?
If passing the CO2 down to the ocean, I think it would be beneficial to have less ice to allow more plankton in the open water to convert CO2 to O2.
If absorbing in the ice, are there huge bubbles? What is the capacity? Has the ice not reached it's capacity over the last several thousand years? If not, then when would it reach it's storage capacity anyway?
What is the mechanism for the transmission of CO2 through solid ice?
How did the earth get rid of CO2 before man started generating it by burning fossil fuels?
You guys are missing the point. If you look in the movie, superman somehow slows down her descent, then starts going back up. Look at the building go by in the background. Maybe he got up far enough and then started flying back down to match speed with her. When he caught her he then gently started trying to fly upwards, which slows their descent then starts to make them ascend.
The force from the impact of Lois with Superman wouldn't have to do with their differing accellerations, but with their different speeds at the point of impact and their weights. You could calculate by her change in speed and how quickly it happened by the force of the collision and you could represent that in units of accelleration, but the only relation of the force of the impact to their accelleration before the impact is in that the acceleration affected their speeds at the point of impact.
Think of it this way. Compare dropping an egg onto a concrete surface from 6 cm and from 6 meters. In both cases the accelleration of the egg would be 9.8m/s^2 and the ground would be 0m/s^2. Obviously the egg from 6 meters up would be hitting the pavement with much more force, changing it's velocity from 10.78 m/s to 0 m/s in a very short time. The egg at 6 cm would only be going 1.05 m/s, but the accelleration would be the same.
Likewise, there isn't an instantaneous change in direction, it could happen over a minute amount of time though and produce huge acceleration in Lois, possibly killing her. But if you look at the film, superman "catches her" and they continue to move downwards for a second or two as superman slows their descent gently so she won't be harmed. They don't really show the point where superman stops moving upwards and starts moving downwards, it zooms into a closeup right when he catches her. However from seeing how fast he can fly and move, I would say it wouldn't be a problem for him to decelerate and change directions in a fraction of a second.
IANAL but I do read Groklaw, and from what I understand copyright restricts the act of copying (duplicating). You can study someone's implimentation of something as much as you like, then go impliment something similiar yourself. As long as you do not copy the code verbatim you are not in violation of copyright law.
Copyright law not only gives you a monopoly on controlling the distribution of your works, but also on controlling the creation of derivative works. Facts, ideas, and methods cannot be copyrighted, as well as something that is an industry standard or if there are only very few ways of doing it. Ideas and methods can be patented, but that is a more difficult process and the protection doesn't last nearly as long as copyright.
Copyright protects expression, which isn't all that well defined as to how it applies to software. There are different levels to determine if something violates copyright if someone has seen another person's source code or if they haven't. If someone hasn't seen the other person's source code, you pretty much have to prove outright copying to sustain a copyright infringement claim. Things that could be used to do that are errors that are in both versions, having code with identicle variable names, etc. If you have had direct access to the source code however, the original author only has to prove that your code is substantively similar, which is a lower standard.
Yes, JFS is in no way a "derivative work" of UNIX. A derivative work is something "based on" another work. SCO has quite a liberal view of what that means, seeing as JFS was originally developed for OS/2 and ported to AIX. A derivative work includes preexisting material from another work and work from a new author.
A movie based on a book is a derivative work because it contains the same basic story (expression). It is told in another medium with moving pictures and sound. The new author owns the copyright on the movie because they created the pictures and sound. They cannot distribute the movie without a license from the book author however because the movie contains preexisting material from the book (story, maybe dialog, etc.). If the producers had the movie and decided to put a song in it, that would be part of the combined work. That song would not be considered a derivative work of the book. The person that wrote the song would have the copyright and be able to distribute it however they wished without going to the book author for another license because it doesn't contain the preexisting material from the book and is therefore not a derivative work.
Ideas and methods specifically cannot be copyrighted. Maybe IBM broke their contract by disclosing proprietary methods of UNIX, but I doubt it. By the time IBM contributed JFS and the other code to Linux, BSD and Linux had been around for about ten years. In effect, whatever methods are in BSD and Linux are not IBM's responsibility to maintain in confidence anymore, per section 7.06a of their software licensing agreement:
[part requiring IBM to hold UNIX methods and concepts in confidence]... If information relating to a SOFTWARE PRODUCT subject to this Agreement at any time becomes available without restriction to the general public by acts not attributable to LICENSEE or its employees, LICENSEE's obligations under this section shall not apply to such information after such time
Re:Maybe time to drop this "securitier than thou"
on
Remotely Crash OpenBSD
·
· Score: 1
Yeah, you're not going to see a worm that infects Linux hosts, patches their kernels, recompiles, and executes these commands against OpenBSD.org...
You have to get on it immediately, you only have so often after you receive your bill if you try and get your money back through your credit card company.
Try Microsoft again, call them and also write them a letter. When you call them, don't be abusive, but be a pain in the ass and don't get off the phone until you get the refund or talk to the Supervisor, then HIS manager. The supervisor may say that the manager isn't working right now, then just keep the supervisor busy as long as you can. Ask them to provide a list of every time you've accessed the service. Ask them to provide you with the agreement to have the recurring charges take place. Ask them to send you the document you signed to authorize this. Ask them to send you any proof they actually sent the notification email as you have never received it. Automatically recurring fees every year without giving you the option to opt-out are ridiculous. It's just too easy to forget to cancel... I think companies count on that, I wonder how many recurring payments are people that just forgot to cancel...
I work for a cell phone company and we had quite a problem with credit card fraud. We would have hundreds of fraudulent refills over the automated phone system each month. We would get a notice from VISA with information on the dispute, and they'd take $15 from our account. We then had two weeks to send VISA a document the cardholder signed authorizing the charges. Since they refilled over the phone, we didn't have one of course. Since we couldn't provide one, they'd take the money out of our account to give back to the cardholder along with another $15 fee.
If Microsoft won't give you you're money back, call your credit card company and dispute the charge. What I would do is say that I never authorized the charge and never received any service (you didn't if you haven't played on X-BOX live again), ask them to prove that you did. If Microsoft doesn't have a signed piece of paper they can send in, they won't win. Don't mention that you signed up for the service that renews each year, concentrate on the single charge that is in dispute.
That's not really fair. If you read the article carefully, they "renewed" his account on November 15th, but didn't actually apply the charge to his credit card until December 26th. Given that could have been the first day of his billing cycle, the company may not have mailed out his statement until January 26th, which he may have just gotten this week. At the beginning of the article he says "recently" as in maybe he stewed over this for a week or two and decided to post on/.
If you've got control of the software and/or hardware, it's pretty clear there are easier solutions for that.
Not if your computer reboots and you need to get into the BIOS screen remotely. We're looking for some solutions ourselves for just that reason. For just recording the VGA output, there are better solutions for that too if you are in control of the hardware/software (Fraps for movies on the PC for instance). For DOS base systems you could write a TSR that polls the text screen buffer. I'm sure you could hack the Linux kernel to do something similar, or write your own program for a Windows system (start out with VNC source code). If you want to write a program to automatically do these things without changing the computer that is doing the output at all, I think zulux's idea would work.
Here's the problem: if you create a company, with this guidelines you can use any patent in the VPL that you want until 2009, until after that if you become a friendly company. This is fine if you want to basically give licenses to use your patents away for free as you have promised in writing not to sue companies that use your patents unless they have sued other companies.
First men in space: Russia (implies better ICBMs) An astronaut made it into space just 3 weeks after Yuri. I'm still waiting to see Russian footprints on the moon.
First working long-term space stations: Russia (also used for spying)
When you have spy satellites that can tell what change someone is given at a hot dog stand, you don't really need two cosmonauts looking out a window. Eventually Russia lets astronauts into their space station and they see what a dump it is. Later the US decides to let Russia help with the new International space station, but they can't complete what they are supposed to, leading to cost overruns.
First undedectable stealth fighter dedected and shot down by: Russian technology in Yugoslavia (nice done, guys!)
Are we talking about 60's and 70's? Wasn't this in 1999? Shouldn't it be 70's and 80's anyway as that is what the article talked about? In any case, the fighter in yugoslavia was shot down with AA fire, not exactly cutting edge technology. I guess if you fill enough of the sky with flak you will eventually hit something.
World's most powerfull rocket: Russia (Energija), implies that they could launch a BIG amount of plutonium for a BIG shot.
Wouldn't upping the amount of deuterium be better than plutonium? And don't forget, Russia got their nuclear technology from spying on the USA. They probably would have been a decade behind if not for that espionage. Here's a quote about Energia:
The research and development for the Energia Buran began in the mid-1970s. The prime organization for this was NPO Energia headed by Valetin Glushko fresh from his triumph over the N-1 Moon Rocket. His Designer-in-Chief was Boris Gubanov who directly headed the program.
Is that the same N-1 "triumph" that resulted in all four launches ending rather abruptly less than two minutes after takeoff? Reliable rocket technology indeed... Did the Russians develop the Tomahawk cruise missile that can hit a target with high accuracy from hundreds of miles away?
First figher plane with look-and-lock systems (you look at your enemy and the rockets automatically lock onto that target): Russia (IMHO the MIG25)
Wow, cool! Now if a single F14 hadn't just locked onto 6 incoming migs from outside of visual range (40+ miles away) and fired a self-guided missile that can pull over 30gs (impossible to outmaneuver) at each of them...
There was also a big fuss about that the USSR stole the space shuttle technology for their Buran shuttle. Actually, the Buran uses a more modern design, has a much higher capacity, better aerodynamics and even can fly completly on automatic (whereas the US shuttle must be landed per joystick).
And it was only flown once...
Well, sure, USA has a great deal of hightech gadgets lying around, but the Soviets are the guys that actually made them working.
I find it interesting that they would come looking for technology from the west and then have to steal it when it wouldn't be sold to them. Did the west come looking the the USSR for technology?
The real loser here is the US Government. If each Indian programmer that was hired had to have medical, dental, disability, social security, state, and federal taxes taken out of their salaries they wouldn't be making nearly as much, not to mention that you can double most of those as the company pays about the same. For outsourced programming positions, that is a lot of money that Uncle Sam never sees.
The person that released this virus would have done it if SCO was around or not. I'm personally glad that they decided to attack SCO instead of a website that I frequent, but the extra internet traffic will hurt everyone. The news stories make this out to be an attack by a Linux user on SCO, what evidence do they have? It could just as easily be an angry investor that bought their stock at $20 and lost 1/4 their life's savings. They must have Windows computers to figure out how to write the worm and test it, so why must the author be a "Linux Hacker"?
True, I was just saying even if they could prove it was copied verbatim, they still wouldn't have a case. In copyright law, there are two standards for determining if something is copied. If there are very many differences, they have to prove the person had access to the code that was copied. If the files are almost identical, they don't have to prove that and I'm not sure it even matters if it was copied or not. There was a case where the one screen of one program looked similar enough to another program's screen that it was ruled to violate copyright, even though the code was completely different and the code was definitely not copied.
If the header files are public domain, we have no problem. Software copyright depends on instructions and their sequence. Copyright is for protecting expressions, not ideas. Ideas can only be protected with patents or trade secrets. The files are certainly not trade secrets as they have been distributed so widely. #defines are not instructions, they are values. Hence they are not expressions of how a programmer might do something, they don't even equate to code getting generated. Macros might be copyrightable, but I doubt it as they have very few instructions. How complicated the code is has to be taken into consideration as well, if there aren't many different ways to do the same thing, it's not copyrightable. There are not that many ways to say if a character is lower case or not (_tolower()). Sincle macros are almost definitely not copyrightable for that reason. Also Linus showed how and why he did it, with errors early on that almost surely were not in UNIX.
Of course they don't have a problem with customers "currently buying" Unix from them, that's the only source of their small revenue as no one is buying Linux licenses. I think they are going after past licensees that are still paying however. What do they care, they have to give 100% of that money to Novell (and they get back a 5% administrative fee). Wouldn't it be great to get those guys that they don't make money off of to switch to a Linux license that they don't have to give the money back to Novell for? Sounds like breach of contract to me...
I doubt it will fork. In the past SCO has made comments about 2.4 being the start of the problems, but these letters have nothing to do with 2.4. I think 2.4 is where they think IBM started contributing massive amounts of code. They don't mention this code because there is an unresolved lawsuit with IBM about it. What they mention in their letters now is the Linux ABI code (header files). These letters are claiming that the header files are copyrighted and can't be distributed, so anything compiled with them, the Linux kernel for instance, is a derivative work. If the ABI files are found to not be infringing, they will probably come up with some other code they say is infringing, probably one file at a time to keep from showing all their evidence and drag it out.
Read my main post to see why the ABI files are probably public domain, and were definitely released by Caldera under a BSD-Style license after they acquired the Unix rights from old SCO.
I got their phone number, 801-765-4999 from their web page. I use Linux at home and our company may be looking at it in the future. A woman answered the phone and I politely stated as much and she had to put me on hold to find someone to answer my questions.
Another woman (Cindy) came on the line and was helpful. I explained that I currently use Linux at home and that my company was looking at potentially using Linux. She asked how big the company was and I said it was we were a small consulting firm with about five people. I told her I was worried about potential liablity for using Linux and I was worried about getting sued. She said that I had nothing to worry about at home. She also said that my company really had nothing to worry about as they are just targetting larger companies right now. I explained that it didn't make me feel much better. Since my company currently doesn't use Linux and are looking at using it in the future, I was worried about potential liablity down the road. She said we really had nothing to worry about, but we should send a letter to Ryan Tibbits stating what I told her and how we were going to use Linux. They would then keep that letter "on file". I said that didn't make me feel much better that they would have my name and address should they decide to go after small businesses in the future. She made it sound like the letter would be some kind of indemnification, like if we contacted them requesting licenses and they didn't give them to us but had our letter on file that we would be ok in the future too. I thanked her and said I would do that.
After hanging up I realized that since we are a consulting firm and we provide services and install software for clients that they may be liable as well. I called her back and explained that we provide services for a larger company and are looking to expand into more companies in the near future as well and that I was worried about their potential liablity. She gave me the name and phone number of a sales rep to talk about licensing.
If we cannot use Linux without paying SCO a license, we will definitely not go that route. Our system currently runs on Windows and one of primary reasons to switch to Linux would be cost if we start distributing our application and providing services to many more companies, expecially small ones. I got the voicemail of the sales rep, when he calls back I will ask to get a letter saying it is ok to use Linux for free for our purposes. If he can't give me that I'll ask that he give me evidence that they have code in Linux. If there's affringing code there, I could probably replace it with something from BSD or Unix V32 that Caldera released under a free license. Failing that, I will ask if alternatives such as BSD would be ok to use by themselves. Failing that, I will contact my state attorney general.
Well, since Linux stands for Linux Is Not UniX, I don't think this holds much merit:) They could be talking about authorized derivatives by Unix licensees. Read my other post however on why the header files are probably public domain and that Caldera released them under a BSD-Style license after aquiring the Unix rights from old SCO.
In the BSD court case, the judge ruled against an injunction AT&T was requesting because of evidence presented by Berkley. Apparently the ABI code cannot be trade secrets, and in all likelyhood is in the public domain. Since it was widely circulated prior to 1978 and published without a copyright it likely resides in the public domain. Here's a quote (more about trade secrets):
After reviewing the affidavits of Plaintiff's and
Defendants, experts, a great deal of uncertainty remains as to what
trade secrets Net2 might contain. One fact does seem clear: the
header files, filenames, and function names used by Defendants are
not trade secrets. Defendants could have printed these off of any
of the thousands of unrestricted copies of Plaintiff's binary
object code. (Kashtan Aff. at 9-11.) Moreover, the nonfunctional
elements of the code, such as comments, cannot be trade secrets
because these elements are minimal and confer no competitive
advantage on Defendants. The copied elements that contain
instructions, such as BREAD and CPIO, might perhaps be trade
secrets, but Defendants' experts have argued persuasively that
these instructions are either in the public domain or otherwise
exempt. As Defendants have repeatedly emphasized, much of 32V
seems to be publicly available.
The whole document is a long read, but I found it quite interesting. Net2 had grown much larger and more functional than the Unix of AT&T at that time and code was in all likelyhood copied into Unix from Berkley without copyright attribution. That's what led to the settlement that made the code available under the BSD license legally. The BSD license is not incompatible with the GPL, so if the header files (what SCO calls the ABI) are the same as available in BSD or modified from that, they would be legal.
The point is moot anyway because Caldera, having acquired the rights to UNIX from old SCO, released Unix V32 under a BSD-Style license. This includes the ABI of course, download it yourself and see. The most SCO could require is that their copyright be recognized in the header files and that mention be made that they fall under a different license and not the GPL. Here's the signature on the email about it:
Dion L. Johnson II - dionj_at_caldera.com
Product Manager and one of many open source enthusiasts in Caldera Intl.
How did Caldera go from "open source enthusiasts" to decrying open source as communist? In your next letter to SCO I would politely offer to change the copyright attribution to Caldera and make note of the license if they would point to the files in question and the author listed in those files in Linux couldn't be contacted to dispute their claims.
Most languages have guidelines to show you how to capitalize identifiers. It is much easier for me to read code that way than if anyone could capitalize differently than the libraries were defined.
Being case-sensitive AND following capitalization guidelines makes code much easier to read. I don't see any reason to allow the same characters with different capitalization to refer to different variables, but I definitely think any references to a variable or function should be capitalized the same way it is defined and that all keywords should be capitalized consistently.
Slashdot Mirror
If passing the CO2 down to the ocean, I think it would be beneficial to have less ice to allow more plankton in the open water to convert CO2 to O2.
If absorbing in the ice, are there huge bubbles? What is the capacity? Has the ice not reached it's capacity over the last several thousand years? If not, then when would it reach it's storage capacity anyway?
What is the mechanism for the transmission of CO2 through solid ice?
How did the earth get rid of CO2 before man started generating it by burning fossil fuels?
The force from the impact of Lois with Superman wouldn't have to do with their differing accellerations, but with their different speeds at the point of impact and their weights. You could calculate by her change in speed and how quickly it happened by the force of the collision and you could represent that in units of accelleration, but the only relation of the force of the impact to their accelleration before the impact is in that the acceleration affected their speeds at the point of impact.
Think of it this way. Compare dropping an egg onto a concrete surface from 6 cm and from 6 meters. In both cases the accelleration of the egg would be 9.8m/s^2 and the ground would be 0m/s^2. Obviously the egg from 6 meters up would be hitting the pavement with much more force, changing it's velocity from 10.78 m/s to 0 m/s in a very short time. The egg at 6 cm would only be going 1.05 m/s, but the accelleration would be the same.
Likewise, there isn't an instantaneous change in direction, it could happen over a minute amount of time though and produce huge acceleration in Lois, possibly killing her. But if you look at the film, superman "catches her" and they continue to move downwards for a second or two as superman slows their descent gently so she won't be harmed. They don't really show the point where superman stops moving upwards and starts moving downwards, it zooms into a closeup right when he catches her. However from seeing how fast he can fly and move, I would say it wouldn't be a problem for him to decelerate and change directions in a fraction of a second.
Copyright protects expression, which isn't all that well defined as to how it applies to software. There are different levels to determine if something violates copyright if someone has seen another person's source code or if they haven't. If someone hasn't seen the other person's source code, you pretty much have to prove outright copying to sustain a copyright infringement claim. Things that could be used to do that are errors that are in both versions, having code with identicle variable names, etc. If you have had direct access to the source code however, the original author only has to prove that your code is substantively similar, which is a lower standard.
LOL, wish my mod points hadn't expired :)
A movie based on a book is a derivative work because it contains the same basic story (expression). It is told in another medium with moving pictures and sound. The new author owns the copyright on the movie because they created the pictures and sound. They cannot distribute the movie without a license from the book author however because the movie contains preexisting material from the book (story, maybe dialog, etc.). If the producers had the movie and decided to put a song in it, that would be part of the combined work. That song would not be considered a derivative work of the book. The person that wrote the song would have the copyright and be able to distribute it however they wished without going to the book author for another license because it doesn't contain the preexisting material from the book and is therefore not a derivative work.
Ideas and methods specifically cannot be copyrighted. Maybe IBM broke their contract by disclosing proprietary methods of UNIX, but I doubt it. By the time IBM contributed JFS and the other code to Linux, BSD and Linux had been around for about ten years. In effect, whatever methods are in BSD and Linux are not IBM's responsibility to maintain in confidence anymore, per section 7.06a of their software licensing agreement:
Yeah, you're not going to see a worm that infects Linux hosts, patches their kernels, recompiles, and executes these commands against OpenBSD.org...
Try Microsoft again, call them and also write them a letter. When you call them, don't be abusive, but be a pain in the ass and don't get off the phone until you get the refund or talk to the Supervisor, then HIS manager. The supervisor may say that the manager isn't working right now, then just keep the supervisor busy as long as you can. Ask them to provide a list of every time you've accessed the service. Ask them to provide you with the agreement to have the recurring charges take place. Ask them to send you the document you signed to authorize this. Ask them to send you any proof they actually sent the notification email as you have never received it. Automatically recurring fees every year without giving you the option to opt-out are ridiculous. It's just too easy to forget to cancel... I think companies count on that, I wonder how many recurring payments are people that just forgot to cancel...
I work for a cell phone company and we had quite a problem with credit card fraud. We would have hundreds of fraudulent refills over the automated phone system each month. We would get a notice from VISA with information on the dispute, and they'd take $15 from our account. We then had two weeks to send VISA a document the cardholder signed authorizing the charges. Since they refilled over the phone, we didn't have one of course. Since we couldn't provide one, they'd take the money out of our account to give back to the cardholder along with another $15 fee.
If Microsoft won't give you you're money back, call your credit card company and dispute the charge. What I would do is say that I never authorized the charge and never received any service (you didn't if you haven't played on X-BOX live again), ask them to prove that you did. If Microsoft doesn't have a signed piece of paper they can send in, they won't win. Don't mention that you signed up for the service that renews each year, concentrate on the single charge that is in dispute.
That's not really fair. If you read the article carefully, they "renewed" his account on November 15th, but didn't actually apply the charge to his credit card until December 26th. Given that could have been the first day of his billing cycle, the company may not have mailed out his statement until January 26th, which he may have just gotten this week. At the beginning of the article he says "recently" as in maybe he stewed over this for a week or two and decided to post on /.
Not if your computer reboots and you need to get into the BIOS screen remotely. We're looking for some solutions ourselves for just that reason. For just recording the VGA output, there are better solutions for that too if you are in control of the hardware/software (Fraps for movies on the PC for instance). For DOS base systems you could write a TSR that polls the text screen buffer. I'm sure you could hack the Linux kernel to do something similar, or write your own program for a Windows system (start out with VNC source code). If you want to write a program to automatically do these things without changing the computer that is doing the output at all, I think zulux's idea would work.
Here's the problem: if you create a company, with this guidelines you can use any patent in the VPL that you want until 2009, until after that if you become a friendly company. This is fine if you want to basically give licenses to use your patents away for free as you have promised in writing not to sue companies that use your patents unless they have sued other companies.
An astronaut made it into space just 3 weeks after Yuri. I'm still waiting to see Russian footprints on the moon.
First working long-term space stations: Russia (also used for spying)
When you have spy satellites that can tell what change someone is given at a hot dog stand, you don't really need two cosmonauts looking out a window. Eventually Russia lets astronauts into their space station and they see what a dump it is. Later the US decides to let Russia help with the new International space station, but they can't complete what they are supposed to, leading to cost overruns.
First undedectable stealth fighter dedected and shot down by: Russian technology in Yugoslavia (nice done, guys!)
Are we talking about 60's and 70's? Wasn't this in 1999? Shouldn't it be 70's and 80's anyway as that is what the article talked about? In any case, the fighter in yugoslavia was shot down with AA fire, not exactly cutting edge technology. I guess if you fill enough of the sky with flak you will eventually hit something.
World's most powerfull rocket: Russia (Energija), implies that they could launch a BIG amount of plutonium for a BIG shot.
Wouldn't upping the amount of deuterium be better than plutonium? And don't forget, Russia got their nuclear technology from spying on the USA. They probably would have been a decade behind if not for that espionage. Here's a quote about Energia:
The research and development for the Energia Buran began in the mid-1970s. The prime organization for this was NPO Energia headed by Valetin Glushko fresh from his triumph over the N-1 Moon Rocket. His Designer-in-Chief was Boris Gubanov who directly headed the program.
Is that the same N-1 "triumph" that resulted in all four launches ending rather abruptly less than two minutes after takeoff? Reliable rocket technology indeed... Did the Russians develop the Tomahawk cruise missile that can hit a target with high accuracy from hundreds of miles away?
First figher plane with look-and-lock systems (you look at your enemy and the rockets automatically lock onto that target): Russia (IMHO the MIG25)
Wow, cool! Now if a single F14 hadn't just locked onto 6 incoming migs from outside of visual range (40+ miles away) and fired a self-guided missile that can pull over 30gs (impossible to outmaneuver) at each of them...
There was also a big fuss about that the USSR stole the space shuttle technology for their Buran shuttle. Actually, the Buran uses a more modern design, has a much higher capacity, better aerodynamics and even can fly completly on automatic (whereas the US shuttle must be landed per joystick).
And it was only flown once...
Well, sure, USA has a great deal of hightech gadgets lying around, but the Soviets are the guys that actually made them working.
I find it interesting that they would come looking for technology from the west and then have to steal it when it wouldn't be sold to them. Did the west come looking the the USSR for technology?
Who are they? Do you mean "The SCO Group"? I don't think the letters S C O stand for anything anymore.
That is good... Although the katana broke, at least they can still claim it was sharp :)
The real loser here is the US Government. If each Indian programmer that was hired had to have medical, dental, disability, social security, state, and federal taxes taken out of their salaries they wouldn't be making nearly as much, not to mention that you can double most of those as the company pays about the same. For outsourced programming positions, that is a lot of money that Uncle Sam never sees.
We crossed the point where posts from Slashdot are news themselves! Pretty soon cnn will be nothing but a filter on Slashdot stories.
I take offense to the term DDOS (Distributed Denial Of Service). I don't know how you could describe SCO as providing any kind of Service.
The person that released this virus would have done it if SCO was around or not. I'm personally glad that they decided to attack SCO instead of a website that I frequent, but the extra internet traffic will hurt everyone. The news stories make this out to be an attack by a Linux user on SCO, what evidence do they have? It could just as easily be an angry investor that bought their stock at $20 and lost 1/4 their life's savings. They must have Windows computers to figure out how to write the worm and test it, so why must the author be a "Linux Hacker"?
If the header files are public domain, we have no problem. Software copyright depends on instructions and their sequence. Copyright is for protecting expressions, not ideas. Ideas can only be protected with patents or trade secrets. The files are certainly not trade secrets as they have been distributed so widely. #defines are not instructions, they are values. Hence they are not expressions of how a programmer might do something, they don't even equate to code getting generated. Macros might be copyrightable, but I doubt it as they have very few instructions. How complicated the code is has to be taken into consideration as well, if there aren't many different ways to do the same thing, it's not copyrightable. There are not that many ways to say if a character is lower case or not (_tolower()). Sincle macros are almost definitely not copyrightable for that reason. Also Linus showed how and why he did it, with errors early on that almost surely were not in UNIX.
Cool, now I know (and knowing is 1/2 the battle).
Of course they don't have a problem with customers "currently buying" Unix from them, that's the only source of their small revenue as no one is buying Linux licenses. I think they are going after past licensees that are still paying however. What do they care, they have to give 100% of that money to Novell (and they get back a 5% administrative fee). Wouldn't it be great to get those guys that they don't make money off of to switch to a Linux license that they don't have to give the money back to Novell for? Sounds like breach of contract to me...
Read my main post to see why the ABI files are probably public domain, and were definitely released by Caldera under a BSD-Style license after they acquired the Unix rights from old SCO.
Another woman (Cindy) came on the line and was helpful. I explained that I currently use Linux at home and that my company was looking at potentially using Linux. She asked how big the company was and I said it was we were a small consulting firm with about five people. I told her I was worried about potential liablity for using Linux and I was worried about getting sued. She said that I had nothing to worry about at home. She also said that my company really had nothing to worry about as they are just targetting larger companies right now. I explained that it didn't make me feel much better. Since my company currently doesn't use Linux and are looking at using it in the future, I was worried about potential liablity down the road. She said we really had nothing to worry about, but we should send a letter to Ryan Tibbits stating what I told her and how we were going to use Linux. They would then keep that letter "on file". I said that didn't make me feel much better that they would have my name and address should they decide to go after small businesses in the future. She made it sound like the letter would be some kind of indemnification, like if we contacted them requesting licenses and they didn't give them to us but had our letter on file that we would be ok in the future too. I thanked her and said I would do that.
After hanging up I realized that since we are a consulting firm and we provide services and install software for clients that they may be liable as well. I called her back and explained that we provide services for a larger company and are looking to expand into more companies in the near future as well and that I was worried about their potential liablity. She gave me the name and phone number of a sales rep to talk about licensing.
If we cannot use Linux without paying SCO a license, we will definitely not go that route. Our system currently runs on Windows and one of primary reasons to switch to Linux would be cost if we start distributing our application and providing services to many more companies, expecially small ones. I got the voicemail of the sales rep, when he calls back I will ask to get a letter saying it is ok to use Linux for free for our purposes. If he can't give me that I'll ask that he give me evidence that they have code in Linux. If there's affringing code there, I could probably replace it with something from BSD or Unix V32 that Caldera released under a free license. Failing that, I will ask if alternatives such as BSD would be ok to use by themselves. Failing that, I will contact my state attorney general.
Well, since Linux stands for Linux Is Not UniX, I don't think this holds much merit :) They could be talking about authorized derivatives by Unix licensees. Read my other post however on why the header files are probably public domain and that Caldera released them under a BSD-Style license after aquiring the Unix rights from old SCO.
The point is moot anyway because Caldera, having acquired the rights to UNIX from old SCO, released Unix V32 under a BSD-Style license. This includes the ABI of course, download it yourself and see. The most SCO could require is that their copyright be recognized in the header files and that mention be made that they fall under a different license and not the GPL. Here's the signature on the email about it:
How did Caldera go from "open source enthusiasts" to decrying open source as communist? In your next letter to SCO I would politely offer to change the copyright attribution to Caldera and make note of the license if they would point to the files in question and the author listed in those files in Linux couldn't be contacted to dispute their claims.Being case-sensitive AND following capitalization guidelines makes code much easier to read. I don't see any reason to allow the same characters with different capitalization to refer to different variables, but I definitely think any references to a variable or function should be capitalized the same way it is defined and that all keywords should be capitalized consistently.