Where then does this "short interest" come from?
on
More on Recent SCOings On
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· Score: 2, Interesting
All the time i thought that this was an indication that SCO-stock was massively sold short and that those sellers needed 2.4 million shares (as of Feb. 13) to cover their sales.
So you prefer to buy the toys a little cheaper, and don't mind that the low price can only be achieved by producing in countries without proper regulations to protect employees from being exploited (and often enough it's not even the customer benefiting from the low production costs, it's some shareholders.
At the same time you probably lament that your rights are eroded more and more "so we can compete with those chinese guys" and still you have to fear losing your job.
"It isn't that horrible in the greater scheme of things", Well, that makes me wonder how big you think. I think the future of Linux, especially as an exemplary case for the future of OSS and the philosophy behind that is pretty big. And EV1 paying up to SCO and giving SCOs case some imaginary "legitimacy", let alone more money to pay more lawyers to drag this out even longer is an important piece in this puzzle.
Yeah, maybe it is hard to find a good webhost, and a lot of trouble it is too. But it's a lot less trouble to write them an e-mail telling them what you think about their decision. Aparently EV1 cares about their customers, so maybe you should help them at least to get the complete picture of what you, their customer, is thinking. They can probably piece it together themselves, and maybe refrain from prolonging that licence or letting their name be abused in more SCO FUD.
Whoa, wait a moment here, it's now accepted and good behavior of corporations to lie to get at your money. They lie about their products to get money from their customers, they lie about their business perspectives (as much as they are allowed to) to get money from shareholders, and they lie, bitch and whine to politicians (e.g. lobbying) to get laws bend their way and be subsidized. Aparently everyone has accepted that, at least i didn't hear outcries of public rage about it, the people even expect to be lied to and think it's good business style.
I don't like it either but that's how things are now, and unless you think that a few honest scientists can fundamentally change the way the population is thinking you might go a little easier on them. The result of being honest with the future perspective of their research would probably be that funding goes to other projects headed by someone whithout any qualms to tell bold lies. Of course the system is bad and tends to bring the biggest assholes to the top (see politics where the process has worked for a longer time to see the results). I can live with a scientist that doesn't tell the whole truth (maybe by omitting the point that all those fancy products are to be expected at least 20 years from now), it's better than someone blatantly lying and just presenting works of his imagination as experimental results (yeah, that happened, everyone thought the guy was just great unless someone found the same diagram explaining totally different facts, until then there were only a few puzzled scientists who couldn't reproduce any of his research).
We need that basic science and we have to look farther into the future than the next business quarter or even the next two years. It's fine to have industrial funding, but you'll only get that for technologies that go into a marketable product in the next 3 years. We'd never have gotten semiconductor-technology if science were only dependant on such industrial funding, we'd be building better and better relay switches by now and computers would be prohibitively expensive, let alone digital watches.
It's the job of our politicians to secure our future by funding such basic science now, but those politicians fail to see anything that's beyond their term of office (see education systems worldwide). At least it's not politicians who decide which project gets funding and which doesn't, it's usually other scientists who assign parts of the total "science budget" to specific projects. Thos other scientists have quite a good grasp how long this project will take to yield any marketable results, but they know as well, that it'll probably be worth it (you never can say for sure, maybe we all get hit by a huge asteroid and should have put everything into an effort to get a foothold on mars, who can say).
I think these new materials give us a great chance for better understanding of high-temperature superconducting materials, and, hell, they found a totally new form of matter, we don't even know what we could use it for.
... might be to point out to congress how much SCO themselves have profited from the GPL and Open-Source-Software in the past, and how much value it adds to their products even now. The best example is probably gcc and other development tools for UnixWare, even SCO admits that gcc is the compiler of choice if you want portability.
If some world-wide company answered their extortion-letters with something along the lines of: "Please contact our german office about that, they're handling all software our company licenses."
I also wonder why it's aparently impossible to get a similar injunction in the US. I mean there should be a way to say "put up or shut up" in legalese in the US of A too.
So the only thing that is "validated" here is, that SCO might (threaten to) sue you if you use Linux. We know that already, nothing new there. It's in IBMs (and other Linux-Distributors) best interest to put up a good defense in the first SCO vs. Linux-end-user case since the outcome of such a case will have high publicity value.
SCO might be a bubble, but with the attention it draws, it also has a very solid chance of not being a bubble.
Huh, what kind of argument is that? If they're loud there's a good chance that they're right? Note that IBM simply ignored them at first, only when SCO went so far they couldn't be ignored any longer IBM went into action. Most pro SCO output comes from SCO and a few select analysts (most notably Laura DiDio who probably has some interest in the scheme).
Maybe you "pull EVERY source" but that doesn't mean you really get the picture. Some articles in Forbes make it quite clear that most investment types think that techies and nerds shouldn't meddle in their business. Only those techies know a lot about what's really going on, and it will be techies and nerds who have to answer the question which code went from where to where. It'll also be techies who will take part in the decision-making which OSes will be used.
The larger investors will know first when to dump because it's their dumping that makes the course drop and they talk to each other. So yeah, they know a lot about stocks and they get the information first. Only in the case of SCO that won't help them much. Look what happens when someone pushes 10-20,000 shares into the market: the price drops.5 to 1$, about 5%. So in this case they won't be able to sell it all before the price drops, and once it starts falling and bad news keeps coming because they lose their case it'll go down fast.
Aparently all those fancy investment bankers don't even look too closely on the money side of this either. SCO can give out a huge chunk of new shares to their management for dirt cheap watering down the price.
The GPL has never been tested in court...
So you're betting on the small chance that the GPL will be declared invalid and all GPLd code will fall into public domain. And even then SCO won't win, because then Linux would effectively be dead with all key developers stopping to work at it (or do you think they want to work for greedy SCO?).
SCO would even hurt their own UnixWare because they rely heavily on the gcc-compiler, which is also GPLd. And SCO has nothing to win even if their Linux-Competition goes away. There's tons of better and cheaper alternatives out there, Sun will probably win most and IBM will simply sell AIX instead of Linux.
The case that SCO is granted the right to collect license fees for infringing code that they refuse to identify is also very unlikely. And also in that case they'd get nothing: nobody would pay SCOs highly overpriced licenses and development would stop effectively killing linux. So no, they won't catch the linux-community cold, they'd get the finger from everyone out there.
And that those bankers made a LOT OF MONEY is no argument either. Stocks always go up on average in the long run so it's no problem to make money there. But it was the same bankers who fell for the dot-com-hype and threw money at it because "if everybody talks about it it must be a good thing".
And the "science" behind their pricing is mostly statistics games. It looks at the stock value to estimate how much hype has been generated and the hype is steering the decision-making. I've really seen enough of this crap: if Intel has a problem with their proceessors it's not only Intel that goes down, it's AMD as well, even if they, as Intels biggest cometitor, stand to gain most. Really competent "science" that is.
Yeah, SCO has generated a lot of hype, but if you look a little closer you'll see that every pro-SCO argument can be traced back to SCO and that they even contradict themselves more often than not. Whenever the shares price dropped they generated some new FUD, but the FUD is slowly coming to an end. Also the SCO-management themselves don't seem too confident. They're selling and selling, so they must think that 15-18$ is the best they can get.
- Opportunities for telecom in Iraq: This has been news
- IBM will not buy SCO. They'd have done that long ago if they wanted to.
- It's really bold to predict that Intel will follow in AMDs footsteps and build a 64bit processor that's x86 compatible. That would mean to shred the Itanium-Business altogether. Let's all hope that the Intel can convince the world that the x86 instruction set has outlived it's usefulness.
- I don't think there can be a security-vulnerability so severe as to force MS into crisis-mode. Security-vulnerabilities in the past were already as severe as it could get (what can be worse than remote exploits that give you admin access?), if that doesn't move MS into "crisis-mode" what can? The forefront of handling Windows security problems has already been delegated to their PR-Department anyway.
- Wal-Mart will do what they like. The publicity-damage has happened and the public is losing interest already.
- Daniel Lyons heard to much MS-propaganda. He can't understand the difference between the Dot-Com-Bubble and the rise of Linux (Yeah, there is some Linux-Hype now, but Linux has built up slowly for more than ten years and has some big backers now, that's something different than a dot-com-business that consists of nothing more than a Web-site). He also can't understand that there's a difference between free-as-in-beer and free-as-in-speech and that there's no contradiction if a business wants to make a living on free software
- He is right though that IBM and SCO might settle (although SCO will be happy to come out of that settlement alive) a lot of "big" cases are settled and once the IBM-SCO-case is generating enough bad news for SCO even they'll want to end the charade. Although some of us would prefer to see SCO crushed to dust it might be better to settle and put an end to all the bad publicity for Linux.
- Security isn't overhyped, maybe Victoria Murphy doesn't want to worry any longer about all that bugs in her Windows-System but as more and more vital information is handled by of-the-shelf computer systems, security is becoming even more of a problem. Maybe she'll think different when someone starts screwing with her online bank-account.
- The (free)-software-revolution wasn't sparked by Linus but by RMS. We should really call it GNU-Linux to make the world aware of the fact that "Linux" and "free-software" isn't identical.
- Yeah, you can make a lot of money from maintainance, but that's no news. Microsoft (to name only one example) worked over the course of the last two years to move their business-model from selling their software to leasing and maintaining it and they made some allowances last year to keep their customers.
- MS already dealt in Open Source by distributing GNU-tools for NT. It isn't well known and probably shut down by now by their PR-Department. I don't think they'll warm up to OS too soon since that'd hurt them PR-wise and aparently MS is run by their PR-Department.
There's already chips in some photocopiers to prevent ppl from copying money and some legal documents. Similar chips would be mandatory for molecular assemblers. Of course the customers would pay the extra necessary to support this scheme, first because the chips make the MA a little bit more expensive and second because the corporations selling the "ferrari-permit" (or whatever) have to license the "don't copy pattern". Come to thik of it you could put the "don't-copy-pattern" on the ferrari itself.
It'd be just the same SNAFU as Macrovision in DVD-players (there's a special chip scrambilng your video if a bit is set on the DVD, and the DVD-Manufacturer pays license-fees to macrovision) and what some Idiots want to do to computers (trusted computing, so the content-sellers can trust our computers since they don't trust us).
Of course there'd be a huge black market for MAs with just that chip ripped out and some corporation would sue Jon Johanson because he posted a description of circumventing the chip on the internet.
It says that there are about 30 such reactors around. The special thing about this one is, that is was made from scrap parts. Please understand that there's really not all that much fusion happening here, definiteley not enough to get any energy output from it, you have to put energy in to heat the stuff up.
It's probably all really simple: every once in a while a deuterium core will tunnel into another deuterium core and cling to it (the actual process to get to He is probably a bit more complicated). That's fusion happening, only the odds are very bad. Create deuterium plasma, cage it with electromagnetic fields to apply some pressure and raise the energy high enough so the odds will get better. Aparently they get it to a few neutrons per minute (they measure 4 per minute).
but that doesn't surprise me, it's really just an experience thing. If you read the words often (i.e. reading another language) then, after a time, you can read a word by just glancing at it and taking it in as a whole (context also helps a lot). But when you learn new words or happen upon some rarely used word you have to read them letter by letter for a few times. When you start with a new language you'll do all words letter by letter at first.
When you look at a kid that's reading letter by letter and compare your own reading style to that you'll also notice the difference. It's harder to "slow down" to letter by letter reading (or at least checking for correct order) as anyone sure noticed who went over a text for spellchecking or trained a kid in reading skills. I also sometimes notice that i'm reading a word "wrong" at first and then have to go back and reread it after i notice that something is out of context. When i stumble over such words i always notice that the word i wrongly "read" and the real one contain roughly the same letters and start with the same letters too (i didn't pay too much attention to see if final letters match but will in the future).
3. lawyers and the likes will go and specifically search for things with which they can nail MS.
Destroying Burst is not in Microsofts interest
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Microsoft vs. Burst.com
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· Score: 2, Insightful
... unless they buy it, that is. I wonder why Microsoft didn't simply buy out Burst when it had shrunk to a two man outfit and things looked bleak indeed. Simply destroying Burst makes no sense for Microsoft, they should have seen to it, that the technology remains proprietary, and to that end they should have either bought Burst (and their patents) or strengthened it (so Burst can maintain a strong position in the Solaris- and (more important) Linux-Market. If there's noone defending Bursts patents, we'd have seen an open source implementation of the technology as soon as the technology becomes important enough, and then it's cross platform again, only in a way that can't be controlled by anyone.
The other thing is, that even if Burst dies someone ends up with the patents (and that'd likely not be Microsoft: since they didn't bother before why bother when Burst goes bonk) and eventually someone will try to make money out of it by litigation (that's the current business-modell in the US: 1. get the rights to some IP 2. sue 3. money), so as long as Microsoft doesn't keep the situation under control there's the constant danger of being sued.
These are two very important reasons to keep some control over the Burst technology, either by choosing them as a business-partner (and i'm sure MS has enough ways to make their "business partners" only do what's in MSs interest) or, even better, by buying them out. It's really strange that they make such a tactical error, especially Microsoft. Since they're all about control (the Borg-pictogram on/. is not by accident) why don't they try to exert control over Burst-technology?
At least this will stop the bullshit ...
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Diamonds & the RIAA
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· Score: 1
... about diamonds being an "investment". The next time some jeweller tries that line on you don't forget to tell him that there's a process to make purer diamonds for less money (and it's no problem to insert a little "dirt" either), and that that process will probably go mainstrem within the next 10-20 years. So he should please stop bullshitting you to sell you something at $X.000 that you can probably draw out of a bubble-gum machine in a few years time.
The only reason you need that diamond now is that your fiancee won't wait another 10 years but that doesn't mean you want to be told a load of lies.
This is not specific to Open-Source or Computercode. You could "sneak" in copyrighted works everywhere without proper attribution or proper licensing. If it comes out it's usually the problem of the person that sneaked the stuff in. So in this case it'd make sense for SCO to publish the alleged "copied" parts so their origins can be traced back and the culprit found.
If i hand you a big box with some illegal contraband in it (that i know of), is it me or you that's at fault and may be target of a legal investigation?
It's really simple: if someone gives out something he has no right to he should know better and he may be targeted by prosecution, but not his customers.
Because all those people can read the text as if it were plain text. Next are russians, since the russian alphabet is derived from greek (actually i could read the text using the hazy bits i remembered from a few russian lections).
Sure, let SCO sue anyone using greek/russian for violation of the DMCA. Their silly shareholders will probably think they really have a case. Man i'd like to get an address list of those shareholders, there's some property on the moon i'd like to sell them.
Caldera might have contributed just that code intentionally (as opposed to unknowingly distributing it under GPL) when they took part in the Trillian project. This is also extensively discussed in an older LWN comment:
Caldera, yes, the same Caldera that acquired the server part of Old SCO in August 2000 and renamed itself The SCO Group in 2003, created an IA-64 distribution.
Interesting that HP is one of the companies SCO is so cozy with (the other one is sun), maybe HP even had the rights to distribute that code. Nevertheles the copyright is SGI. But what probably really happened was that HP submitted a whole bunch of code developed in the Trillian project in cooperation with others (Caldera for example) and the snippet was just part of a huge patch.
What is bad about regulating their own markets? Doesn't a government even have the obligation to protect their countries economy? Why should they lose control over their markets when "free" (=unregulated) trading puts them at a disadvantage?
China is a huge market and controling entry to that market gives them leverage. So they use that leverage to their advantage. Why not? I think that's better than the american way: "export" (via WTO etc.) their laws (especially IP-laws) to other countries to make them play by a set of rules that puts them at a disadvantage.
So they pirate "your" music and whatnot and decide not to embrace american IP law that's more and more perverted to serve just one purpose: keep the big (mostly US-) corporations on top and make it hard for anyone else to enter the market. And why shoud China play by a set of rules that only puts them at a disadvantage? The USA didn't either, if they did they'd probably still be some kind of british colony but definitly not what they are today. Neither did americans respect foreign IP when they reprinted works of foreign authors without paying royalties until 1891.
And yeah, why not send in the troops when economic interests are threatened. Like invading Iraq for example (and no, they didn't find those weapons of mass destruction, or any proof of a connection to al Quaeda, all they found out was that all official reasons for starting that war were bogus and that Bush and Blair even knew they were bogus).
So that means EVERYONE is conditioned to think "Terrorist attack" anytime something unforeseen like this happens? Sounds like some heavy brainwashing has happened to US citizens in the last two years.
Slashdot Mirror
All the time i thought that this was an indication that SCO-stock was massively sold short and that those sellers needed 2.4 million shares (as of Feb. 13) to cover their sales.
So you prefer to buy the toys a little cheaper, and don't mind that the low price can only be achieved by producing in countries without proper regulations to protect employees from being exploited (and often enough it's not even the customer benefiting from the low production costs, it's some shareholders.
At the same time you probably lament that your rights are eroded more and more "so we can compete with those chinese guys" and still you have to fear losing your job.
"It isn't that horrible in the greater scheme of things", Well, that makes me wonder how big you think. I think the future of Linux, especially as an exemplary case for the future of OSS and the philosophy behind that is pretty big. And EV1 paying up to SCO and giving SCOs case some imaginary "legitimacy", let alone more money to pay more lawyers to drag this out even longer is an important piece in this puzzle.
Yeah, maybe it is hard to find a good webhost, and a lot of trouble it is too. But it's a lot less trouble to write them an e-mail telling them what you think about their decision. Aparently EV1 cares about their customers, so maybe you should help them at least to get the complete picture of what you, their customer, is thinking. They can probably piece it together themselves, and maybe refrain from prolonging that licence or letting their name be abused in more SCO FUD.
Don't let them off that easily.
Whoa, wait a moment here, it's now accepted and good behavior of corporations to lie to get at your money. They lie about their products to get money from their customers, they lie about their business perspectives (as much as they are allowed to) to get money from shareholders, and they lie, bitch and whine to politicians (e.g. lobbying) to get laws bend their way and be subsidized. Aparently everyone has accepted that, at least i didn't hear outcries of public rage about it, the people even expect to be lied to and think it's good business style.
I don't like it either but that's how things are now, and unless you think that a few honest scientists can fundamentally change the way the population is thinking you might go a little easier on them. The result of being honest with the future perspective of their research would probably be that funding goes to other projects headed by someone whithout any qualms to tell bold lies. Of course the system is bad and tends to bring the biggest assholes to the top (see politics where the process has worked for a longer time to see the results). I can live with a scientist that doesn't tell the whole truth (maybe by omitting the point that all those fancy products are to be expected at least 20 years from now), it's better than someone blatantly lying and just presenting works of his imagination as experimental results (yeah, that happened, everyone thought the guy was just great unless someone found the same diagram explaining totally different facts, until then there were only a few puzzled scientists who couldn't reproduce any of his research).
We need that basic science and we have to look farther into the future than the next business quarter or even the next two years. It's fine to have industrial funding, but you'll only get that for technologies that go into a marketable product in the next 3 years. We'd never have gotten semiconductor-technology if science were only dependant on such industrial funding, we'd be building better and better relay switches by now and computers would be prohibitively expensive, let alone digital watches.
It's the job of our politicians to secure our future by funding such basic science now, but those politicians fail to see anything that's beyond their term of office (see education systems worldwide). At least it's not politicians who decide which project gets funding and which doesn't, it's usually other scientists who assign parts of the total "science budget" to specific projects. Thos other scientists have quite a good grasp how long this project will take to yield any marketable results, but they know as well, that it'll probably be worth it (you never can say for sure, maybe we all get hit by a huge asteroid and should have put everything into an effort to get a foothold on mars, who can say).
I think these new materials give us a great chance for better understanding of high-temperature superconducting materials, and, hell, they found a totally new form of matter, we don't even know what we could use it for.
... might be to point out to congress how much SCO themselves have profited from the GPL and Open-Source-Software in the past, and how much value it adds to their products even now. The best example is probably gcc and other development tools for UnixWare, even SCO admits that gcc is the compiler of choice if you want portability.
If some world-wide company answered their extortion-letters with something along the lines of: "Please contact our german office about that, they're handling all software our company licenses."
I also wonder why it's aparently impossible to get a similar injunction in the US. I mean there should be a way to say "put up or shut up" in legalese in the US of A too.
So the only thing that is "validated" here is, that SCO might (threaten to) sue you if you use Linux. We know that already, nothing new there. It's in IBMs (and other Linux-Distributors) best interest to put up a good defense in the first SCO vs. Linux-end-user case since the outcome of such a case will have high publicity value.
SCO might be a bubble, but with the attention it draws, it also has a very solid chance of not being a bubble.
.5 to 1$, about 5%. So in this case they won't be able to sell it all before the price drops, and once it starts falling and bad news keeps coming because they lose their case it'll go down fast.
Huh, what kind of argument is that? If they're loud there's a good chance that they're right? Note that IBM simply ignored them at first, only when SCO went so far they couldn't be ignored any longer IBM went into action. Most pro SCO output comes from SCO and a few select analysts (most notably Laura DiDio who probably has some interest in the scheme).
Maybe you "pull EVERY source" but that doesn't mean you really get the picture. Some articles in Forbes make it quite clear that most investment types think that techies and nerds shouldn't meddle in their business. Only those techies know a lot about what's really going on, and it will be techies and nerds who have to answer the question which code went from where to where. It'll also be techies who will take part in the decision-making which OSes will be used.
The larger investors will know first when to dump because it's their dumping that makes the course drop and they talk to each other. So yeah, they know a lot about stocks and they get the information first. Only in the case of SCO that won't help them much. Look what happens when someone pushes 10-20,000 shares into the market: the price drops
Aparently all those fancy investment bankers don't even look too closely on the money side of this either. SCO can give out a huge chunk of new shares to their management for dirt cheap watering down the price.
The GPL has never been tested in court...
So you're betting on the small chance that the GPL will be declared invalid and all GPLd code will fall into public domain. And even then SCO won't win, because then Linux would effectively be dead with all key developers stopping to work at it (or do you think they want to work for greedy SCO?).
SCO would even hurt their own UnixWare because they rely heavily on the gcc-compiler, which is also GPLd. And SCO has nothing to win even if their Linux-Competition goes away. There's tons of better and cheaper alternatives out there, Sun will probably win most and IBM will simply sell AIX instead of Linux.
The case that SCO is granted the right to collect license fees for infringing code that they refuse to identify is also very unlikely. And also in that case they'd get nothing: nobody would pay SCOs highly overpriced licenses and development would stop effectively killing linux. So no, they won't catch the linux-community cold, they'd get the finger from everyone out there.
And that those bankers made a LOT OF MONEY is no argument either. Stocks always go up on average in the long run so it's no problem to make money there. But it was the same bankers who fell for the dot-com-hype and threw money at it because "if everybody talks about it it must be a good thing".
And the "science" behind their pricing is mostly statistics games. It looks at the stock value to estimate how much hype has been generated and the hype is steering the decision-making. I've really seen enough of this crap: if Intel has a problem with their proceessors it's not only Intel that goes down, it's AMD as well, even if they, as Intels biggest cometitor, stand to gain most. Really competent "science" that is.
Yeah, SCO has generated a lot of hype, but if you look a little closer you'll see that every pro-SCO argument can be traced back to SCO and that they even contradict themselves more often than not. Whenever the shares price dropped they generated some new FUD, but the FUD is slowly coming to an end. Also the SCO-management themselves don't seem too confident. They're selling and selling, so they must think that 15-18$ is the best they can get.
To me it's all very simple: Sun and Microsoft
- Opportunities for telecom in Iraq:
This has been news
- IBM will not buy SCO. They'd have done that long ago if they wanted to.
- It's really bold to predict that Intel will follow in AMDs footsteps and build a 64bit processor that's x86 compatible. That would mean to shred the Itanium-Business altogether. Let's all hope that the Intel can convince the world that the x86 instruction set has outlived it's usefulness.
- I don't think there can be a security-vulnerability so severe as to force MS into crisis-mode. Security-vulnerabilities in the past were already as severe as it could get (what can be worse than remote exploits that give you admin access?), if that doesn't move MS into "crisis-mode" what can? The forefront of handling Windows security problems has already been delegated to their PR-Department anyway.
- Wal-Mart will do what they like. The publicity-damage has happened and the public is losing interest already.
- Daniel Lyons heard to much MS-propaganda. He can't understand the difference between the Dot-Com-Bubble and the rise of Linux (Yeah, there is some Linux-Hype now, but Linux has built up slowly for more than ten years and has some big backers now, that's something different than a dot-com-business that consists of nothing more than a Web-site). He also can't understand that there's a difference between free-as-in-beer and free-as-in-speech and that there's no contradiction if a business wants to make a living on free software
- He is right though that IBM and SCO might settle (although SCO will be happy to come out of that settlement alive) a lot of "big" cases are settled and once the IBM-SCO-case is generating enough bad news for SCO even they'll want to end the charade. Although some of us would prefer to see SCO crushed to dust it might be better to settle and put an end to all the bad publicity for Linux.
- Security isn't overhyped, maybe Victoria Murphy doesn't want to worry any longer about all that bugs in her Windows-System but as more and more vital information is handled by of-the-shelf computer systems, security is becoming even more of a problem. Maybe she'll think different when someone starts screwing with her online bank-account.
- The (free)-software-revolution wasn't sparked by Linus but by RMS. We should really call it GNU-Linux to make the world aware of the fact that "Linux" and "free-software" isn't identical.
- Yeah, you can make a lot of money from maintainance, but that's no news. Microsoft (to name only one example) worked over the course of the last two years to move their business-model from selling their software to leasing and maintaining it and they made some allowances last year to keep their customers.
- MS already dealt in Open Source by distributing GNU-tools for NT. It isn't well known and probably shut down by now by their PR-Department. I don't think they'll warm up to OS too soon since that'd hurt them PR-wise and aparently MS is run by their PR-Department.
There's already chips in some photocopiers to prevent ppl from copying money and some legal documents. Similar chips would be mandatory for molecular assemblers. Of course the customers would pay the extra necessary to support this scheme, first because the chips make the MA a little bit more expensive and second because the corporations selling the "ferrari-permit" (or whatever) have to license the "don't copy pattern". Come to thik of it you could put the "don't-copy-pattern" on the ferrari itself.
It'd be just the same SNAFU as Macrovision in DVD-players (there's a special chip scrambilng your video if a bit is set on the DVD, and the DVD-Manufacturer pays license-fees to macrovision) and what some Idiots want to do to computers (trusted computing, so the content-sellers can trust our computers since they don't trust us).
Of course there'd be a huge black market for MAs with just that chip ripped out and some corporation would sue Jon Johanson because he posted a description of circumventing the chip on the internet.
... if i specify that it has to be put in a yellow envelope?
It says that there are about 30 such reactors around. The special thing about this one is, that is was made from scrap parts. Please understand that there's really not all that much fusion happening here, definiteley not enough to get any energy output from it, you have to put energy in to heat the stuff up.
It's probably all really simple: every once in a while a deuterium core will tunnel into another deuterium core and cling to it (the actual process to get to He is probably a bit more complicated). That's fusion happening, only the odds are very bad. Create deuterium plasma, cage it with electromagnetic fields to apply some pressure and raise the energy high enough so the odds will get better. Aparently they get it to a few neutrons per minute (they measure 4 per minute).
but that doesn't surprise me, it's really just an experience thing. If you read the words often (i.e. reading another language) then, after a time, you can read a word by just glancing at it and taking it in as a whole (context also helps a lot). But when you learn new words or happen upon some rarely used word you have to read them letter by letter for a few times. When you start with a new language you'll do all words letter by letter at first.
When you look at a kid that's reading letter by letter and compare your own reading style to that you'll also notice the difference. It's harder to "slow down" to letter by letter reading (or at least checking for correct order) as anyone sure noticed who went over a text for spellchecking or trained a kid in reading skills. I also sometimes notice that i'm reading a word "wrong" at first and then have to go back and reread it after i notice that something is out of context. When i stumble over such words i always notice that the word i wrongly "read" and the real one contain roughly the same letters and start with the same letters too (i didn't pay too much attention to see if final letters match but will in the future).
3. lawyers and the likes will go and specifically search for things with which they can nail MS.
... unless they buy it, that is. I wonder why Microsoft didn't simply buy out Burst when it had shrunk to a two man outfit and things looked bleak indeed. Simply destroying Burst makes no sense for Microsoft, they should have seen to it, that the technology remains proprietary, and to that end they should have either bought Burst (and their patents) or strengthened it (so Burst can maintain a strong position in the Solaris- and (more important) Linux-Market. If there's noone defending Bursts patents, we'd have seen an open source implementation of the technology as soon as the technology becomes important enough, and then it's cross platform again, only in a way that can't be controlled by anyone.
/. is not by accident) why don't they try to exert control over Burst-technology?
The other thing is, that even if Burst dies someone ends up with the patents (and that'd likely not be Microsoft: since they didn't bother before why bother when Burst goes bonk) and eventually someone will try to make money out of it by litigation (that's the current business-modell in the US: 1. get the rights to some IP 2. sue 3. money), so as long as Microsoft doesn't keep the situation under control there's the constant danger of being sued.
These are two very important reasons to keep some control over the Burst technology, either by choosing them as a business-partner (and i'm sure MS has enough ways to make their "business partners" only do what's in MSs interest) or, even better, by buying them out. It's really strange that they make such a tactical error, especially Microsoft. Since they're all about control (the Borg-pictogram on
... about diamonds being an "investment". The next time some jeweller tries that line on you don't forget to tell him that there's a process to make purer diamonds for less money (and it's no problem to insert a little "dirt" either), and that that process will probably go mainstrem within the next 10-20 years. So he should please stop bullshitting you to sell you something at $X.000 that you can probably draw out of a bubble-gum machine in a few years time.
The only reason you need that diamond now is that your fiancee won't wait another 10 years but that doesn't mean you want to be told a load of lies.
This is not specific to Open-Source or Computercode. You could "sneak" in copyrighted works everywhere without proper attribution or proper licensing. If it comes out it's usually the problem of the person that sneaked the stuff in. So in this case it'd make sense for SCO to publish the alleged "copied" parts so their origins can be traced back and the culprit found.
If i hand you a big box with some illegal contraband in it (that i know of), is it me or you that's at fault and may be target of a legal investigation?
It's really simple: if someone gives out something he has no right to he should know better and he may be targeted by prosecution, but not his customers.
Because all those people can read the text as if it were plain text. Next are russians, since the russian alphabet is derived from greek (actually i could read the text using the hazy bits i remembered from a few russian lections).
Sure, let SCO sue anyone using greek/russian for violation of the DMCA. Their silly shareholders will probably think they really have a case. Man i'd like to get an address list of those shareholders, there's some property on the moon i'd like to sell them.
But they were listed as premier sponsor until that list was pulled (probably due to the fact that HP (and some others) flipped them the bird).
Interesting that HP is one of the companies SCO is so cozy with (the other one is sun), maybe HP even had the rights to distribute that code. Nevertheles the copyright is SGI. But what probably really happened was that HP submitted a whole bunch of code developed in the Trillian project in cooperation with others (Caldera for example) and the snippet was just part of a huge patch.
The relevant histories of ate_utils.c for 2.4 and 2.5.
Apparently the code was removed because it was "ugly as hell" (or worse).
There's also a very informative lkml thread about this and it's already been removed from the source tree, but apparently not because of copyright issues but because it was just "ugly as hell".
What is bad about regulating their own markets? Doesn't a government even have the obligation to protect their countries economy? Why should they lose control over their markets when "free" (=unregulated) trading puts them at a disadvantage?
China is a huge market and controling entry to that market gives them leverage. So they use that leverage to their advantage. Why not? I think that's better than the american way: "export" (via WTO etc.) their laws (especially IP-laws) to other countries to make them play by a set of rules that puts them at a disadvantage.
So they pirate "your" music and whatnot and decide not to embrace american IP law that's more and more perverted to serve just one purpose: keep the big (mostly US-) corporations on top and make it hard for anyone else to enter the market. And why shoud China play by a set of rules that only puts them at a disadvantage? The USA didn't either, if they did they'd probably still be some kind of british colony but definitly not what they are today. Neither did americans respect foreign IP when they reprinted works of foreign authors without paying royalties until 1891.
And yeah, why not send in the troops when economic interests are threatened. Like invading Iraq for example (and no, they didn't find those weapons of mass destruction, or any proof of a connection to al Quaeda, all they found out was that all official reasons for starting that war were bogus and that Bush and Blair even knew they were bogus).
So that means EVERYONE is conditioned to think "Terrorist attack" anytime something unforeseen like this happens? Sounds like some heavy brainwashing has happened to US citizens in the last two years.