Actually, these people are being charged with blackmail. In the Theft Act, 1968:
21 (1) A person is guilty of blackmail if, with a view to gain for himself or another or with intent to cause loss to another, he makes any unwarranted demand with menaces; and for this purpose a demand with menaces is unwarranted unless the person making it does so in the belief:
(a) that he has reasonable grounds for making the demand; and
(b) that the sue of the menaces is a proper means of reinforcing the demand
(2) The nature of the act or omission is immaterial , and it is also immaterial whether the menaces relate to action to be taken by the person making the demand.
(3) A person guilty of blakmail shall on conviction non indictment be liable to imprisonment for a term not exceeding fourteen years.
I live in a college environment (where it takes about 5 minutes to get infected - I've seen computers infected in less than a minute), and we seem to manage fairly well. Whenever a computer gets formatted, we unplug it from the network first, and we have a cd with all necessary windows patches, antivirus program, etc. All of this happens before people are ever plugged in to the network. Out of about 50 room connections I've done there hasn't been one infection of blaster since we started this.
(On my personal computer I use DCombobulator (http://grc.com/dcom/) first, and then get the latest patches.
I live in a college, about 30 people on my floor. All we could really do is go around and knock on everyone's door, see if they were running an affected system, and patch the hole and remove the virus if it was there. We couldn't really find any other way.
Another college did a bit more and made people more aware of it, and then went around to everyone's computer, but that wasn't hugely more succesful. And seeing it infected all labs etc in the uni, and IT support are fairly incompetent (enough not to think to block that port at the routers), our entire network slowed to a crawl.
"Any business running commercial Linux that buys a UnixWare license would be held harmless against any past copyright violations, and for any future use of Linux in a run-only, binary format, McBride said."
But it seems that part of the conditions are that you can only have a 'binary format' of linux, implying that you can't have access to the source.
But if this is the case, then, whether SCO is legally accountable or not (I'm still not a lawyer), would this violate the GPL of the rest of the kernel code?
As I understand it, SCO are willing to grant licences to use 'binary-only' distributions of linux, so as to not violate their alleged IP. But if the agreement is that the source is not to be available, won't that violate the GNU? So in effect that will violate the IP rights of every other contributer to the Linux kernel?
IANAL, but it seems that SCO haven't thought parts of this out too well...
It was a joke, not a religious comment. And I seriosly doubt that many bible prophesys have come true. Either the prophesys would be very vague so they could be applied to many, many situations, or people stretch things all out of shape to try and make them fit.
Bah, now you've got me going off on a rant:)
Although I'm sure my alcohol played it's part:P
I seriously hope this is just flamebait because I hate to think that someone could be this ignorant. I don't have the time at the moment to answer all of your arguments, but there is one big one: You list as one of the reasons to go to war as 'it will help the economy'. Do you realise the selfishness and childishness of that?
But then again, maybe all the steriotypes about americans are right: pushy, ignorant, childishly patriotic...
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Actually, these people are being charged with blackmail. In the Theft Act, 1968: 21 (1) A person is guilty of blackmail if, with a view to gain for himself or another or with intent to cause loss to another, he makes any unwarranted demand with menaces; and for this purpose a demand with menaces is unwarranted unless the person making it does so in the belief: (a) that he has reasonable grounds for making the demand; and (b) that the sue of the menaces is a proper means of reinforcing the demand (2) The nature of the act or omission is immaterial , and it is also immaterial whether the menaces relate to action to be taken by the person making the demand. (3) A person guilty of blakmail shall on conviction non indictment be liable to imprisonment for a term not exceeding fourteen years.
I live in a college environment (where it takes about 5 minutes to get infected - I've seen computers infected in less than a minute), and we seem to manage fairly well. Whenever a computer gets formatted, we unplug it from the network first, and we have a cd with all necessary windows patches, antivirus program, etc. All of this happens before people are ever plugged in to the network. Out of about 50 room connections I've done there hasn't been one infection of blaster since we started this. (On my personal computer I use DCombobulator (http://grc.com/dcom/) first, and then get the latest patches.
I live in a college, about 30 people on my floor. All we could really do is go around and knock on everyone's door, see if they were running an affected system, and patch the hole and remove the virus if it was there. We couldn't really find any other way.
Another college did a bit more and made people more aware of it, and then went around to everyone's computer, but that wasn't hugely more succesful. And seeing it infected all labs etc in the uni, and IT support are fairly incompetent (enough not to think to block that port at the routers), our entire network slowed to a crawl.
"Any business running commercial Linux that buys a UnixWare license would be held harmless against any past copyright violations, and for any future use of Linux in a run-only, binary format, McBride said." But it seems that part of the conditions are that you can only have a 'binary format' of linux, implying that you can't have access to the source. But if this is the case, then, whether SCO is legally accountable or not (I'm still not a lawyer), would this violate the GPL of the rest of the kernel code?
As I understand it, SCO are willing to grant licences to use 'binary-only' distributions of linux, so as to not violate their alleged IP. But if the agreement is that the source is not to be available, won't that violate the GNU? So in effect that will violate the IP rights of every other contributer to the Linux kernel?
IANAL, but it seems that SCO haven't thought parts of this out too well...
Even I know that! It's Dubya :P
It was a joke, not a religious comment. And I seriosly doubt that many bible prophesys have come true. Either the prophesys would be very vague so they could be applied to many, many situations, or people stretch things all out of shape to try and make them fit. Bah, now you've got me going off on a rant :)
Although I'm sure my alcohol played it's part :P
I'll be impressed when they can go the other way. Caffeine for all! :)
I seriously hope this is just flamebait because I hate to think that someone could be this ignorant. I don't have the time at the moment to answer all of your arguments, but there is one big one: You list as one of the reasons to go to war as 'it will help the economy'. Do you realise the selfishness and childishness of that? But then again, maybe all the steriotypes about americans are right: pushy, ignorant, childishly patriotic...