You're right. It really doesn't matter who installed it. The article makes it sound like he installed it himself and it is on the front dash, where the driver can see it. He also may not have a "king" or "crew" cab which would make it even worse.
While legally, installing it himself and hiring a shop to install it are the same for purposes of proving his disregard for human life, factually, it is a lot more convincing if he spent hours on end installing it himself. The Prosecutor will go through each step of the install process under cross-examination to show the guy's wanton disregard (assuming the guy testifies).
The question will be what was his men rea, which is a fancy legal latin term for guilty state of mind.
If you read the article, it sounds like this is a custom made installation the guy did himself. If that's the case, I think there is a better chance that the prosecution can provide the guy acted with wanton disregard for human life. That can justify a verdict of second degree murder. Otherwise, I still think the guy could go for manslaughter. Manslaughter is no laughing matter as it still results in a good bit of prison time.
This is all marketing. Where does having the fastest processor really matter? Gamers, maybe, but what gamers buy a Mac with an IBM chip to play games?
Next would be digital audio/photo/video, and that is all pretty much wrapped up by PowerMacs. You don't need to sell to those professionals and they generally have the money to fork out 4 or 5 grand for a dualie Mac every other year. Afterall, its how they earn their living!
99% of the people surf the web, check e-mail, pay their bills online, write letters and occassionally play a game more complicated than free cell. You can do all that with the slow-assed 733 mhz G4 I have (with no L3 cache to boot)!
These people must also feel the need to drive a Ferrari to the convenience store.
All a pirate has to do is pay the kid making minimum wage running the projector a couple hundred pounds to let the pirate sit in the booth and record from there!
While there may be a need to have Windows software run in Linux for now, at what point does it become counter-productive where such emulation efforts should be spent on providing all the features that programs like MS Office and Adobe Photoshop have in open source software like OO.org and The Gimp?
Is it perhaps one of the issues that is slowing down adoption of Linux on the desktop?
I have put OpenOffice on three machines in our office, but mostly for the ability to open and use Excel and PowerPoint files. I have used Writer in place of Word and it was pretty quick to learn and I wouldn't complain about some of the problems with it when it is free and very full featured.
But, in our field (legal), we need Word or Word Perfect. So, we've been buying copies of Works 2003 which contains Word XP/2002 at 40 bucks a pop on eBay. We just don't need Excel or PowerPoint to pony up for MS Office, and can use OO.org when we need those programs.
I would love to go to OpenOffice in its entirety, but the problem is that many popular and specialized programs in the legal field support Word or WordPerfect and will never support something like OO.org (heck, our scheduling program doesn't support the main file being on a Linux server, which would have saved us some money for getting additional licenses for WinNT).
Our scheduling program (Amicus Attorney) supports creating documents through its scheduler/address book only though Word or WordPerfect.
Until OO.org figures out a way to interact with specialized programs in specialized fields (legal, medicine, engineering, etc), I think it will be hard for many companies to make a switch.
Who makes a decision like that only to turn around a month later and say he would have done the exact opposite. If I were a shareholder, that wouldn't inspire confidence in my CEO... sheesh!
The only thing Mozilla has is its brand. If it doesn't protect the brand, it can't control the quality of the product. It doesn't want others claiming to represent Mozilla through the use of its brand, nor does it want consumers to go to others when there are problems with Mozilla. I believe trademarks are the most important aspect of an open source project. A lot of open source projects have great programmers, great quality, but if they don't have a strong brand, they will never get the following needed to keep the project going, let alone make it big (like Mozilla or Ximian). You have to known... and to be known in any business, you need a strong brand and some decent marketing.
Trademark law may be lumped in with intellectual property, but it less about monopolizing an idea (patents) or controlling access to creative works (copyright) and more about eliminating consumer confusion.
If somebody wants to take Mozilla code and make their own browser or mail client, they can do that... but they can't call it Mozilla.
I wonder how many slashdot readers would have a problem with Mozilla enforcing its trademark rights if it was Microsoft who was selling Mozilla merchandise or a Microsoft Mozilla web browser?
I used to work in the Trademark Division at the USPTO. One of the criticisms my friends on the Patent side had was that there were too many patent examiners who were engineers and not lawyers as well. They would issue patents even though there was caselaw to support not granting a patent in a particular case. My friends felt the Patet side needed more lawyers, who understand the legal theory behind the patent system and less engineers, who appeared to issue patents based purely on scientific theory.
I don't know if there are right or not. And I am certain there are some lousy lawyers as well as some lousy engineers issuing patents in the Patent Office. The question is, why should the Patent office be any different than any other Federal agency that requires an attorney to represent the interests of the public good?
iTunes has streaming music for free anyway. Frankly, 9.95 a month for songs I can't download and listen to when I want is about as good as listening to the local radio station.
IAAL, and this is certainly not my area of expertise, but requiring you to wear ear plugs for 4 hours a day under those conditions sounds like an OSHA violation.
You would more than likely be violating your service agreement with your ISP if you shared internet access for profit. I'd have to read my agreement (through Comcast) more closely, but I think technically I am not allowed to share it with others for no profit (and I technically shared my internet access with my wife).
So I guess you could do this, but you would receive a Cease & Desist letter from your ISP very quickly. I read recently (maybe on/.) where an apartment management company got nailed for offering Broadband internet access to their tenants by ordering individual service and using an over-the-counter router to share the access with all the tenants.
Let's see... a 400 unit apartment complex X $39.95 per month for n number of months = a whole lot of money.
I think people are confusing this case with an open-source v. open-source fight.
While I appreciate the "community-nature" of open-source and Linux, the average user does not have a right to see the infringing code just because he or she feels personally affronted by SCO. If you were personally named in the lawsuit, then you should be able to see the code.
Assuming SCO has any valid case, it is going to be determined in a Court of Law, not the Court of Slashdot. If SCO happens to win its case against IBM, et al., then the "proprietary code" in which it claims Linux infringed would no longer be "proprietary" if SCO released its source to every Joe Linux-User who asked for it. You can't expect a company to shoot itself in the foot just to prove a case in a Court of Law (though I guess Slashdotters might expect it from SCO).
Let IBM's goggle of lawyers fight this out. My sense is that they have half-a-clue as to what amounts to infringing code. Anyway, with IBM on its side, it's like having Daddy Sawbuck's pay the Open Source community's legal fees!
When I went from OS 9 to OS X, I knew that I was giving up a large amount of security to get a *nix base and loads of features never before seen in a Mac "OS". I think that was well worth it.
What else that has definitely made it worth the move is that Apple has been very fast, IMHO, in offering patches for security holes (note: the recent cookie vulnerability).
There are dozens, maybe hundreds of more holes in Windows and we all know that many of them will never be fixed.
At least Apple acknowledges security holes and makes effort to fix them.
Somehow I don't see droves of Mac users running to buy a copy of Longhorn (er, XP) because of the ridiculous ranting of an idiot.
Though I must admit it, I have seen more rabid Mac sites bashing Windows than I have ever seen the other way.
Why exactly did somebody bother to post this? It seems like an awful waste of bandwith. Of course, I guess the new wonder of "free speech" is you can waste as much net bandwith as you want whether you have something intelligent to say or not.
... that most everybody on Slashdot hates Microsoft (so it'll generate postings).
Look, it's really simple. Just about every temp, permanent, part, full, salaried and hourly employee in the United States is an "at will" employee. "At Will" means you can leave anytime you want and you can get fired, terminated, laid off or otherwise asked not to come into work anymore at anytime by your employer for just about anything that isn't considered discrimination by some legal standard.
Now, if this guy had some type of express or implied employment contract for a certain period of time (a year, five, life, whatever), that's a different story. MS would be responsible for paying him his salary for the remainder of the contract.
I can't speak for most states, but in Pennsylvania, there is a presumption under the law that your employment is "at will". Absent some type of written employment contract, it is really hard to prove that you are anything other than an "at will" employee (and NO, your employee handbook usually does not count as an employment contract!).
I feel bad for the guy, but it should be fairly obvious that if you post something negative about your employer that you may get canned.
I'll admit to still using MS Office for Mac, but I only have one license (and when you open the same license of Office on two machines on a network, the second to open quits by itself! %&%#&!). So I use X11 Open Office on the Mac when me and my office manager need Word at the same time. The fonts don't necessarily show up the same, but the documents (at least Word docs) hardly ever need fixing, and I just save as a Word 97/XP doc and it works just fine.
I still and probably will continue to use Macs as my desktop OS so I don't have problems sending people docs they can't open. If all else fails, I can "Save as PDF".
I can say that when an "aqua" version of OpenOffice is available in 2005 or so, I will not upgrade MS Office anymore and convert exclusively to OpenOffice. For me, it has not been an issue in terms of compatibility.
There is no question that the Linux server took some setting up, but frankly, I could've just as easily used the Red Hat GUI set-up assistants for NFS, SMB, Print Sharing, etc. So the posts I've seen that say Linux is too hard to set-up for somebody who wants to make money is a bunch of cr@p! Frankly, if you are a small business, you need to have enough computer skills to figure stuff out on your own and a distro like RH is practically idiot-proof for setting up network services.
Setting up a Linux server takes 10 minutes. Its more secure and it costs nothing. If they isn't the definition of making money, then I don't know what is!
I'm a solo practicing lawyer with one employee. I use two Macs for desktop stuff, but keep all my firm files on a Linux x86 Server I built and set-up myself. The Macs mount the shares via NFS. It also acts as a print server. I've never had a problem with it and would never be able to afford to have a dedicated server if I had to pay Microsoft licensing fees. I also figure I saved myself about a thousand bucks by using Linux instead of buying OS X server and another Mac capable of acting as a server.
It seems to me that unless your company signed some kind of waiver in case their monitoring did any damage, you have a case for negligence.
Even with a waiver, generally, you can't waive somebody's negligence. Their actions sound negligent in that they used excessive resources such that your servers crashed.
Additionally, it sounds like there may be some form of defamation claim when they complained to your customer base about you. Though defamation claims, especially slander (spoken defamation), are thorny claims that can be hard to prove, it sounds like you may have a number of incidents that may show intentional defamation (much better when seeking damages).
I think, at the very least, your general counsel should be asking for compensation for your downtime.
Of course, Novell could be thinking "if SCO wins the legal battle on whether the GPL can cause companies to 'open source' their products accidentally, we can start charging for (arguably) the most popular open source mail client out there!"
First off, it is not like the people who are a part of this class can never sue MS again. They just can't sue it as part of this particular Class. As I read it, if Microsoft injures a class member in the future, he or she can sue individually or part of another different class.
Second, the settlement is misquoted and actually says "Class Counsel will seek attorneys' fees in an amount not to exceed $48 million". Not to exceed $48 mil != $48 mil. But think about it: Putting a class action suit together involving potentially millions of class members, notifying all potential parties (by placing expensive newspaper ads, sending mailing and perhaps advertising on TV), meeting with class members, explaining their rights, dealing with tons of discovery material (from class members and MS), going to court, negotiating with MS, handling stonewalling from MS, taking the malpractice liability risk of a case of this magnitude against a company like MS... yeah, I bet the fees are going to be justifiably high!
Third, yeah, 12 bucks worth of vouchers sounds sucky... but how many of these class members used Windows for four years and now expect a full refund? Cut me a break! Talk about unjust enrichment!?! Really, what kind of individual recovery do you expect for software that is worth half the cost of what MS charges for it? Enough vouchers to buy a new G5!?!
Of the million or so class members in this suit, how many are "true" Opens Source users who the minute they bought a machine, completely deleted Windows and installed *nix. They deserve a full refund, but they are better recoving it on their own instead of a Class Action suit.
Slashdot Mirror
You're right. It really doesn't matter who installed it. The article makes it sound like he installed it himself and it is on the front dash, where the driver can see it. He also may not have a "king" or "crew" cab which would make it even worse.
While legally, installing it himself and hiring a shop to install it are the same for purposes of proving his disregard for human life, factually, it is a lot more convincing if he spent hours on end installing it himself. The Prosecutor will go through each step of the install process under cross-examination to show the guy's wanton disregard (assuming the guy testifies).
The question will be what was his men rea, which is a fancy legal latin term for guilty state of mind.
If you read the article, it sounds like this is a custom made installation the guy did himself. If that's the case, I think there is a better chance that the prosecution can provide the guy acted with wanton disregard for human life. That can justify a verdict of second degree murder. Otherwise, I still think the guy could go for manslaughter. Manslaughter is no laughing matter as it still results in a good bit of prison time.
Looks like their webserver is made of cardboard too...
This is all marketing. Where does having the fastest processor really matter? Gamers, maybe, but what gamers buy a Mac with an IBM chip to play games?
Next would be digital audio/photo/video, and that is all pretty much wrapped up by PowerMacs. You don't need to sell to those professionals and they generally have the money to fork out 4 or 5 grand for a dualie Mac every other year. Afterall, its how they earn their living!
99% of the people surf the web, check e-mail, pay their bills online, write letters and occassionally play a game more complicated than free cell. You can do all that with the slow-assed 733 mhz G4 I have (with no L3 cache to boot)!
These people must also feel the need to drive a Ferrari to the convenience store.
That seems like a waste of time.
All a pirate has to do is pay the kid making minimum wage running the projector a couple hundred pounds to let the pirate sit in the booth and record from there!
Is it perhaps one of the issues that is slowing down adoption of Linux on the desktop?
I have put OpenOffice on three machines in our office, but mostly for the ability to open and use Excel and PowerPoint files. I have used Writer in place of Word and it was pretty quick to learn and I wouldn't complain about some of the problems with it when it is free and very full featured.
But, in our field (legal), we need Word or Word Perfect. So, we've been buying copies of Works 2003 which contains Word XP/2002 at 40 bucks a pop on eBay. We just don't need Excel or PowerPoint to pony up for MS Office, and can use OO.org when we need those programs.
I would love to go to OpenOffice in its entirety, but the problem is that many popular and specialized programs in the legal field support Word or WordPerfect and will never support something like OO.org (heck, our scheduling program doesn't support the main file being on a Linux server, which would have saved us some money for getting additional licenses for WinNT).
Our scheduling program (Amicus Attorney) supports creating documents through its scheduler/address book only though Word or WordPerfect.
Until OO.org figures out a way to interact with specialized programs in specialized fields (legal, medicine, engineering, etc), I think it will be hard for many companies to make a switch.
Did they ask the people who have had their identity stolen and their credit ruined?
Bet they enjoyed that chocolate bar!
-A
Why right a book? Just right a (wo)man page... -A
why he is a CEO in the first place?
Who makes a decision like that only to turn around a month later and say he would have done the exact opposite. If I were a shareholder, that wouldn't inspire confidence in my CEO... sheesh!
-A
The only thing Mozilla has is its brand. If it doesn't protect the brand, it can't control the quality of the product. It doesn't want others claiming to represent Mozilla through the use of its brand, nor does it want consumers to go to others when there are problems with Mozilla. I believe trademarks are the most important aspect of an open source project. A lot of open source projects have great programmers, great quality, but if they don't have a strong brand, they will never get the following needed to keep the project going, let alone make it big (like Mozilla or Ximian). You have to known... and to be known in any business, you need a strong brand and some decent marketing.
Trademark law may be lumped in with intellectual property, but it less about monopolizing an idea (patents) or controlling access to creative works (copyright) and more about eliminating consumer confusion.
If somebody wants to take Mozilla code and make their own browser or mail client, they can do that... but they can't call it Mozilla.
I wonder how many slashdot readers would have a problem with Mozilla enforcing its trademark rights if it was Microsoft who was selling Mozilla merchandise or a Microsoft Mozilla web browser?
I used to work in the Trademark Division at the USPTO. One of the criticisms my friends on the Patent side had was that there were too many patent examiners who were engineers and not lawyers as well. They would issue patents even though there was caselaw to support not granting a patent in a particular case. My friends felt the Patet side needed more lawyers, who understand the legal theory behind the patent system and less engineers, who appeared to issue patents based purely on scientific theory.
I don't know if there are right or not. And I am certain there are some lousy lawyers as well as some lousy engineers issuing patents in the Patent Office. The question is, why should the Patent office be any different than any other Federal agency that requires an attorney to represent the interests of the public good?
iTunes has streaming music for free anyway. Frankly, 9.95 a month for songs I can't download and listen to when I want is about as good as listening to the local radio station.
-A
to send the school a licensing agreement now that they've been on /.?
-A
IAAL, and this is certainly not my area of expertise, but requiring you to wear ear plugs for 4 hours a day under those conditions sounds like an OSHA violation.
-A
You would more than likely be violating your service agreement with your ISP if you shared internet access for profit. I'd have to read my agreement (through Comcast) more closely, but I think technically I am not allowed to share it with others for no profit (and I technically shared my internet access with my wife).
/.) where an apartment management company got nailed for offering Broadband internet access to their tenants by ordering individual service and using an over-the-counter router to share the access with all the tenants.
So I guess you could do this, but you would receive a Cease & Desist letter from your ISP very quickly. I read recently (maybe on
Let's see... a 400 unit apartment complex X $39.95 per month for n number of months = a whole lot of money.
I think people are confusing this case with an open-source v. open-source fight.
While I appreciate the "community-nature" of open-source and Linux, the average user does not have a right to see the infringing code just because he or she feels personally affronted by SCO. If you were personally named in the lawsuit, then you should be able to see the code.
Assuming SCO has any valid case, it is going to be determined in a Court of Law, not the Court of Slashdot. If SCO happens to win its case against IBM, et al., then the "proprietary code" in which it claims Linux infringed would no longer be "proprietary" if SCO released its source to every Joe Linux-User who asked for it. You can't expect a company to shoot itself in the foot just to prove a case in a Court of Law (though I guess Slashdotters might expect it from SCO).
Let IBM's goggle of lawyers fight this out. My sense is that they have half-a-clue as to what amounts to infringing code. Anyway, with IBM on its side, it's like having Daddy Sawbuck's pay the Open Source community's legal fees!
-A
When I went from OS 9 to OS X, I knew that I was giving up a large amount of security to get a *nix base and loads of features never before seen in a Mac "OS". I think that was well worth it.
What else that has definitely made it worth the move is that Apple has been very fast, IMHO, in offering patches for security holes (note: the recent cookie vulnerability).
There are dozens, maybe hundreds of more holes in Windows and we all know that many of them will never be fixed.
At least Apple acknowledges security holes and makes effort to fix them.
-A
Somehow I don't see droves of Mac users running to buy a copy of Longhorn (er, XP) because of the ridiculous ranting of an idiot.
Though I must admit it, I have seen more rabid Mac sites bashing Windows than I have ever seen the other way.
Why exactly did somebody bother to post this? It seems like an awful waste of bandwith. Of course, I guess the new wonder of "free speech" is you can waste as much net bandwith as you want whether you have something intelligent to say or not.
-A
... that most everybody on Slashdot hates Microsoft (so it'll generate postings).
Look, it's really simple. Just about every temp, permanent, part, full, salaried and hourly employee in the United States is an "at will" employee. "At Will" means you can leave anytime you want and you can get fired, terminated, laid off or otherwise asked not to come into work anymore at anytime by your employer for just about anything that isn't considered discrimination by some legal standard.
Now, if this guy had some type of express or implied employment contract for a certain period of time (a year, five, life, whatever), that's a different story. MS would be responsible for paying him his salary for the remainder of the contract.
I can't speak for most states, but in Pennsylvania, there is a presumption under the law that your employment is "at will". Absent some type of written employment contract, it is really hard to prove that you are anything other than an "at will" employee (and NO, your employee handbook usually does not count as an employment contract!).
I feel bad for the guy, but it should be fairly obvious that if you post something negative about your employer that you may get canned.
-A
I'll admit to still using MS Office for Mac, but I only have one license (and when you open the same license of Office on two machines on a network, the second to open quits by itself! %&%#&!). So I use X11 Open Office on the Mac when me and my office manager need Word at the same time. The fonts don't necessarily show up the same, but the documents (at least Word docs) hardly ever need fixing, and I just save as a Word 97/XP doc and it works just fine.
I still and probably will continue to use Macs as my desktop OS so I don't have problems sending people docs they can't open. If all else fails, I can "Save as PDF".
I can say that when an "aqua" version of OpenOffice is available in 2005 or so, I will not upgrade MS Office anymore and convert exclusively to OpenOffice. For me, it has not been an issue in terms of compatibility.
There is no question that the Linux server took some setting up, but frankly, I could've just as easily used the Red Hat GUI set-up assistants for NFS, SMB, Print Sharing, etc. So the posts I've seen that say Linux is too hard to set-up for somebody who wants to make money is a bunch of cr@p! Frankly, if you are a small business, you need to have enough computer skills to figure stuff out on your own and a distro like RH is practically idiot-proof for setting up network services.
Setting up a Linux server takes 10 minutes. Its more secure and it costs nothing. If they isn't the definition of making money, then I don't know what is!
-A
-A
It seems to me that unless your company signed some kind of waiver in case their monitoring did any damage, you have a case for negligence.
Even with a waiver, generally, you can't waive somebody's negligence. Their actions sound negligent in that they used excessive resources such that your servers crashed.
Additionally, it sounds like there may be some form of defamation claim when they complained to your customer base about you. Though defamation claims, especially slander (spoken defamation), are thorny claims that can be hard to prove, it sounds like you may have a number of incidents that may show intentional defamation (much better when seeking damages).
I think, at the very least, your general counsel should be asking for compensation for your downtime.
-A
Of course, Novell could be thinking "if SCO wins the legal battle on whether the GPL can cause companies to 'open source' their products accidentally, we can start charging for (arguably) the most popular open source mail client out there!"
-A
First off, it is not like the people who are a part of this class can never sue MS again. They just can't sue it as part of this particular Class. As I read it, if Microsoft injures a class member in the future, he or she can sue individually or part of another different class.
Second, the settlement is misquoted and actually says "Class Counsel will seek attorneys' fees in an amount not to exceed $48 million". Not to exceed $48 mil != $48 mil. But think about it: Putting a class action suit together involving potentially millions of class members, notifying all potential parties (by placing expensive newspaper ads, sending mailing and perhaps advertising on TV), meeting with class members, explaining their rights, dealing with tons of discovery material (from class members and MS), going to court, negotiating with MS, handling stonewalling from MS, taking the malpractice liability risk of a case of this magnitude against a company like MS... yeah, I bet the fees are going to be justifiably high!
Third, yeah, 12 bucks worth of vouchers sounds sucky... but how many of these class members used Windows for four years and now expect a full refund? Cut me a break! Talk about unjust enrichment!?! Really, what kind of individual recovery do you expect for software that is worth half the cost of what MS charges for it? Enough vouchers to buy a new G5!?!
Of the million or so class members in this suit, how many are "true" Opens Source users who the minute they bought a machine, completely deleted Windows and installed *nix. They deserve a full refund, but they are better recoving it on their own instead of a Class Action suit.