Yes, but unless SCO are making the license increase retroactive, it shouldn't cost the existing licencee(s) any more than they already paid. So, this increase doesn't give Microsoft any reason to pump money to SCO, though I suppose they could claim they were increasing their installed base of Unix systems.
Of course, someone will point me to pencil and paper patents now...;-)
No, those have probably expired by now. If they were ever submitted... T'would be kinda funny to try submitting one for "a method for recording information using graphite encased in a wooden cylinder"... Be even funnier if the USPTO actually granted a patent on the basic pencil...
that will be the day that free speech is reduced to what an individual can mimeograph and hand distribute
Or transcribe it to a word-processor, perhaps? It's highly unlikely that any WP would be able to determine that you're simply typing in what Dubya's saying, rather than writing a letter to your mom, or a college paper, or a postdoc thesis. At some point, after it gets emailed to the world, or copied to a weblog, someone might notice you'd copied parts of Dubya's speech. By then the can is open and the worms are everywhere.
And anyway, you're not copying the video clip, just the words, and if anyone owns the copyright on those, it would be either the speaker, or the speechwriter.
OK, so it wouldn't have quite the same impact as the clip... By the way, if someone in the audience uses a tape recorder to get sounds bites, who would own the copyright on that?
Behold the power of outsourcing - if the technology isn't available to transcribe speech-to-text, hire 10,000 temps from India... Hand them a tape each and a cheap acsii terminal with a word processor. Heck, hire 100,000 if you need to...
there is a chance the employee never signed one considering he worked with Seagate for 17 years.
According to another poster, he is (was) some kind of executive in the read/write head division. That's probably not where he started 17 years ago, though. If he started as a techie and then switched to management, he could have been asked to sign a new contract that covered executive stuff. I'm thinking of stuff like extra vacation, parking space, stock options, or whatever. They could have tossed in a no-compete as well...
Nah, they'll be using it to assist in the launch - the heat generated by all those processors should provide a substantial updraft around the launching pad...
Walk around where I work after hours and after fun logging in as other people simply by reading the post-it notes stuck on their monitor.
Walk around where I work after hours and, while there may be postits with passwords on the monitors, the actual computers are taken home every night. This upgrade cycle, each beige-box desktop is being replaced by a laptop... OK, you could still find passwords to other systems, so it's not perfect, but helps.
therefore about two person-hours of employee time got lost never to be recovered
Personally, I can easily lose the best part of one working day when Password Change Day rolls around. That happens every 30-45 days, depending on the OS and associated policies. There's at least 10 of us doing that on about 250 systems, plus another 15 or so doing the same on a different set of 200+ systems.
I started work on a tool that would read my passwords from a database, decrypt them and ssh/telnet to the target system. With a timestamp on each password, I could automate setting my passwords, and they could actually be random strings. I'd have them encrypted in a database if I ever needed to know what they actually are...
OK, so there's probably some glaring holes in that plan, but the tool is nowhere near finished.
Already have that - cryptographic calculator with a pin number to access it. That allows me to VPN to one part of the company network. To get to the main part, it's a userid/password that hasn't changed in months. And then there to 200+ systems I'm supposed to be able to login to, some of which use SeOS to manage passwords, but the rest are all single systems. And they all insist on password changes every 30-45 days. Never mind that they're mostly all doing the same damn thing.
I think they're all over the "NIS/NIS+ is insecure" thing, but I've no idea why they haven't tried Kerberos or something similar. I'd like a usb-key or smart card or something that would interface with a process like ssh-agent, ask for a keyphrase once and handle everything for me behind the scenes.
Recently the company gave me a laptop, and one of the conditions of getting it was, "ya gotta take it home"... So not only would an attacker need to know my password, he'd have to find it too...
I've started keeping my CD rips in a lossless format. Next time (which will put me around 0.75TB) I will probably start keeping raw DVD rips.
But, of course, you've still got the original discs, right?? So you don't really need to be backing those up. Granted, it would be a PITA to re-rip them all, but you wouldn't have lost anything. And as a last resort, there's all those backups the MPAA/RIAA have so thoughtfully made and distributed around the country for you...
...given the Novell case, SCO doesn't even know what it owns and doesn't own with regard to Unix. They may not have rights to SVR4
That's a very good point. It would be really rather funny if someone like Novell or AT&T could prove they own SRV4, and then gave IBM a perpetual, irrevocable license to match their other one.
I think, unless they get to keep Baystar's money, SCO already can't afford to pay their legal department. Boies et al are on get-paid-win-or-lose terms, aren't they?
If SCO wins this... "This" being SCO vs IBM/AIX as opposed to SCO vs IBM/Linux, right?? I wouldn't make any large bets on the "you stole SVR4 for AIX" issue being resolved before IBM grinds SCO to dust over the "you stole RCU &c for Linux" issue.
Just as an aside, anyone care to estimate how many IBM patents are infringed by various SCO products?
Sounds to me as if Artifakt is simply stating the law - outside the 100 foot line you can question the process and procedures, try to convince potential voters that one candidate is better than another, or whatever. But once a person crosses that 100 foot line to vote, you can do NOTHING to impede them or to coerce them. I'd be surprised if there isn't more than enough case law and legal precedent to make it very unlikely you'd stay out of jail if the election officials call the cops on you.
Well, there's already been talk of postponing the election due to "possible terrorist activity".
Which reminds me, just how long could Bush remain in office past the election date if no election is held?? And what are the odds of someone pushing some kind of legislation through Senate/Congress that would extend Bush's presidency until an election could be "safely" conducted??
The answer to ALL of your concerns is to use independent auditors. Sure, they're expensive, but if you budget for it up front (ie: expect to randomly audit 1% of the precincts anyways) then it's not such a big deal.
The question of expense would be covered by NOT spending millions of dollars on the machines in the first place. Stick with pencil and paper and get some reliable auditors to check the counts in closely contested precints.
There is absolutely no verification whatsoever in today's non-electronic voting systems. So how is it a bad thing when electronic voting is no worse than the current system?
At least with paper ballots, there's the option of recounting, and if a box goes missing it's a lot more obvious. With electronic voting systems, "losing" a box of ballots is reduced to just a few keystrokes, and with a few more keystrokes, the cast votes can be reallocated to candidates for whom they were not cast. This came out of the leaked Diebold memos. And with electronic systems, the recount process is reduced to looking at the machine and reading off the same numbers.
OK, so a manual count is prone to mistakes by the counters, but if you enlist enough people, those risks can be minimised.
As for your "card falls behind a desk" scenario - you show your id, get your ballot, take it to a booth and make your choices, then fold it and drop it into a box in full sight of the election workers. A whole box could go missing, but a tally of the number of ballots given out should be close to equal to the number of ballots cast, whether valid or spoiled.
The company loads a standard build of WinXP/Office on all systems before handing them out. I was one of the last to get a laptop from this particular batch, a month or more after they were shipped from Dell, so I assume the PC installation group conditioned the battery for me. They certainly didn't give me any instructions about conditioning, nor even a manual for the laptop. Ah well, if it's fucked, it's fucked, and it'll get replaced on the company's dime...
Second that. Work gave me a widescreen M60 to replace my aging desktop some months ago. I haven't run the battery completely flat yet, but after several hours usage unplugged GKrell claims I'm down to 60% battery. Using Gentoo/KDE/802.11g. Not doing anything particularly cpu intensive, mostly just surfing the net.
Evan Brown asserts that the judge received election campaign funds from DSC/Alcatel. If true, never mind whether the contract is valid, the judge should recuse himself due to bias.
According to Evan Brown's website, that's already happened. He spent some time documenting his idea and handed it all to DSC/Alcatel. The "scientists" at DSC/Alcatel analysed it and decided that there wasn't enough information in the notes for them to make it work. The judge ordered Evan Brown to redo the work in conditions amounting to slavery - he had to work during office hours at the company premises, watched over by a security guard, for no pay.
he would likely have been able to win this court case.
Did you miss the part where he stated that the judge violated his Civil Rights several times, and also that the judge received re-election campaign funds from DSC/Alcatel?? Why would a little thing like dated lab notes have any effect when the judge feels able to ignore Constitutional Amendments??
With luck, the DoJ would come down hard on Microsoft if they get anywhere near succeeding. Then again, I'm not holding my breath waiting for the DoJ to do anything nice for us geeks...
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Yes, but unless SCO are making the license increase retroactive, it shouldn't cost the existing licencee(s) any more than they already paid. So, this increase doesn't give Microsoft any reason to pump money to SCO, though I suppose they could claim they were increasing their installed base of Unix systems.
No, those have probably expired by now. If they were ever submitted... T'would be kinda funny to try submitting one for "a method for recording information using graphite encased in a wooden cylinder"... Be even funnier if the USPTO actually granted a patent on the basic pencil...
Or transcribe it to a word-processor, perhaps? It's highly unlikely that any WP would be able to determine that you're simply typing in what Dubya's saying, rather than writing a letter to your mom, or a college paper, or a postdoc thesis. At some point, after it gets emailed to the world, or copied to a weblog, someone might notice you'd copied parts of Dubya's speech. By then the can is open and the worms are everywhere.
And anyway, you're not copying the video clip, just the words, and if anyone owns the copyright on those, it would be either the speaker, or the speechwriter.
OK, so it wouldn't have quite the same impact as the clip... By the way, if someone in the audience uses a tape recorder to get sounds bites, who would own the copyright on that?
Behold the power of outsourcing - if the technology isn't available to transcribe speech-to-text, hire 10,000 temps from India... Hand them a tape each and a cheap acsii terminal with a word processor. Heck, hire 100,000 if you need to...
According to another poster, he is (was) some kind of executive in the read/write head division. That's probably not where he started 17 years ago, though. If he started as a techie and then switched to management, he could have been asked to sign a new contract that covered executive stuff. I'm thinking of stuff like extra vacation, parking space, stock options, or whatever. They could have tossed in a no-compete as well...
Nah, they'll be using it to assist in the launch - the heat generated by all those processors should provide a substantial updraft around the launching pad...
Walk around where I work after hours and, while there may be postits with passwords on the monitors, the actual computers are taken home every night. This upgrade cycle, each beige-box desktop is being replaced by a laptop... OK, you could still find passwords to other systems, so it's not perfect, but helps.
Personally, I can easily lose the best part of one working day when Password Change Day rolls around. That happens every 30-45 days, depending on the OS and associated policies. There's at least 10 of us doing that on about 250 systems, plus another 15 or so doing the same on a different set of 200+ systems.
I started work on a tool that would read my passwords from a database, decrypt them and ssh/telnet to the target system. With a timestamp on each password, I could automate setting my passwords, and they could actually be random strings. I'd have them encrypted in a database if I ever needed to know what they actually are...
OK, so there's probably some glaring holes in that plan, but the tool is nowhere near finished.
I think they're all over the "NIS/NIS+ is insecure" thing, but I've no idea why they haven't tried Kerberos or something similar. I'd like a usb-key or smart card or something that would interface with a process like ssh-agent, ask for a keyphrase once and handle everything for me behind the scenes.
Recently the company gave me a laptop, and one of the conditions of getting it was, "ya gotta take it home"... So not only would an attacker need to know my password, he'd have to find it too...
But, of course, you've still got the original discs, right?? So you don't really need to be backing those up. Granted, it would be a PITA to re-rip them all, but you wouldn't have lost anything. And as a last resort, there's all those backups the MPAA/RIAA have so thoughtfully made and distributed around the country for you...
I think you may be mis-attributing that quote. At least 3 sources name Dr Andrew Tanenbaum...
Here
Here
and here
While it's possible he was quoting someone else, I suspect is wasn't Linus...
That's a very good point. It would be really rather funny if someone like Novell or AT&T could prove they own SRV4, and then gave IBM a perpetual, irrevocable license to match their other one.
I think, unless they get to keep Baystar's money, SCO already can't afford to pay their legal department. Boies et al are on get-paid-win-or-lose terms, aren't they?
Just as an aside, anyone care to estimate how many IBM patents are infringed by various SCO products?
Sounds to me as if Artifakt is simply stating the law - outside the 100 foot line you can question the process and procedures, try to convince potential voters that one candidate is better than another, or whatever. But once a person crosses that 100 foot line to vote, you can do NOTHING to impede them or to coerce them. I'd be surprised if there isn't more than enough case law and legal precedent to make it very unlikely you'd stay out of jail if the election officials call the cops on you.
Which reminds me, just how long could Bush remain in office past the election date if no election is held?? And what are the odds of someone pushing some kind of legislation through Senate/Congress that would extend Bush's presidency until an election could be "safely" conducted??
The question of expense would be covered by NOT spending millions of dollars on the machines in the first place. Stick with pencil and paper and get some reliable auditors to check the counts in closely contested precints.
At least with paper ballots, there's the option of recounting, and if a box goes missing it's a lot more obvious. With electronic voting systems, "losing" a box of ballots is reduced to just a few keystrokes, and with a few more keystrokes, the cast votes can be reallocated to candidates for whom they were not cast. This came out of the leaked Diebold memos. And with electronic systems, the recount process is reduced to looking at the machine and reading off the same numbers.
OK, so a manual count is prone to mistakes by the counters, but if you enlist enough people, those risks can be minimised.
As for your "card falls behind a desk" scenario - you show your id, get your ballot, take it to a booth and make your choices, then fold it and drop it into a box in full sight of the election workers. A whole box could go missing, but a tally of the number of ballots given out should be close to equal to the number of ballots cast, whether valid or spoiled.
The company loads a standard build of WinXP/Office on all systems before handing them out. I was one of the last to get a laptop from this particular batch, a month or more after they were shipped from Dell, so I assume the PC installation group conditioned the battery for me. They certainly didn't give me any instructions about conditioning, nor even a manual for the laptop. Ah well, if it's fucked, it's fucked, and it'll get replaced on the company's dime...
Second that. Work gave me a widescreen M60 to replace my aging desktop some months ago. I haven't run the battery completely flat yet, but after several hours usage unplugged GKrell claims I'm down to 60% battery. Using Gentoo/KDE/802.11g. Not doing anything particularly cpu intensive, mostly just surfing the net.
Evan Brown asserts that the judge received election campaign funds from DSC/Alcatel. If true, never mind whether the contract is valid, the judge should recuse himself due to bias.
According to Evan Brown's website, that's already happened. He spent some time documenting his idea and handed it all to DSC/Alcatel. The "scientists" at DSC/Alcatel analysed it and decided that there wasn't enough information in the notes for them to make it work. The judge ordered Evan Brown to redo the work in conditions amounting to slavery - he had to work during office hours at the company premises, watched over by a security guard, for no pay.
With luck, the DoJ would come down hard on Microsoft if they get anywhere near succeeding. Then again, I'm not holding my breath waiting for the DoJ to do anything nice for us geeks...